Bees

Siting the First Beehive

An unintended use for the LiDAR data has been made apparent. During my research for beginning beekeeping, I found the consensus among beekeepers was to locate hives where they receive morning sun and afternoon shade. I have not found a scientific source for this so I won’t go into the justifications just yet.

Using the LiDAR data in GIS software, I can create hillshades that show where sun reaches the ground at various points in the day as well as aspect maps. Aspect is the direction the land faces. Using hillshades and verifying with aspect, I found a good spot for the first hive plus solid locations for other hives!

Morning Sun:

HillShadeMorning

Afternoon Sun:

HillshadeAfternoon

Aspect Map with 3D Trees

3dTreesAndAspect

Note that the trees will cast shadows to the NorthEast in the afternoons!

For the initial hive, I chose a small, SouthEast facing clearing in the woods. The sun exposure factors are correct and they will have peace from livestock, laboring farmer and equipment back in the forest. My plan is to grow a perennial, spring food plot in the clearing to give nursing Doe nutrition for their fawns. Clover and Chicory will be the most likely seed (and the only seed I will plant outside of gardens) so hopefully the bees can find enough food year-round with the forest, pasture, vegetable gardens and food plots!

Decision is made!

BeeHiveSite

Standard
Chicks

Modelling the HenMobile

Eggs will be a useful and economical byproduct of pasture sanitation. The chickens will follow the cow rotation on a 5 day delay to allow fly eggs to be laid and hatched in the cow manure. In order to get to their nutritious meal, the chickens will scratch and fling the manure. First this process distributes the manure so the cows can re-graze the entire paddock upon pasture regeneration. The nutrients in the manure are broadcast so they build soil more evenly opposed to inundating patches with the acute manure piles. Lastly, the scattering of manure helps to break and prevent pathogen growth cycles.

My mobile chicken house will provide water, shade during the day and predator protection at night when the chickens are enclosed within. Half inch, 19 gauge hardware cloth will let excrement fall through further fertilizing the pasture while keeping snakes and predators out. Water will be provided via an old 6.5 gallon bottling bucket retired from brewing beer. Via gravity, a short length of hose will feed water to nipples on a pvc pipe. The nesting boxes will be accessible from the outside for easy egg retrieval.

I have not decided on a trailer base for the henmobile, so I put it on a generic 4×8 utility trailer for reference. There are no structural considerations in my model yet. Without further ado, here is the hen mobile modelled in Sketchup!

Standard
Garden

Siting Vegtable Garden

To get the most from the relatively small farm, a greenhouse will be built for season extension and to winter the laying chickens while they fertilize the garden (more on this later!). Ideally this will be in a South or Southeast facing location in the barnyard. Unfortunately, the only south facing slop in my pasture is covered in trees. Good news for the wild deer and my goats, but bad news for veggies. So I will work with what I have!

Aspect Map of Barnyard Created from LiDAR Data

AspectGarden

The east facing exterior of the barn looks like a great location. The downward slope to the road in the pasture provides a good location to build a raised bed that will slowly accumulate soil as the farm builds it.

Garden Location:

gardenLocation

The next step is to plan the rows. Avoiding soil compaction when tending to the plants limits the row width to four feet. Incorporating the 2-foot aisles for foot traffic resulted in parallel lines spaced 6 feet apart. The result is shown below

Garden Rows Mapped

GardenRows

Now to plan the vegtables themselves!

Standard
Uncategorized

Back in the Middle East, Back to Posting

I have returned for a few more weeks on my current work project. I figured that there was not much I could do in December on the farmstead so I might as well earn enough to get some more animals, gutters, etc debt-free.

Over thanksgiving break I was able to top up my freezer by harvesting a whitetail off of the farm land. Now protein needs are taken care of for 6-7 months while I don’t have an income. The liver will serve as a multivitamin to supplement my diet!

In between the morning and evening hunts, I started laying out the vegetable garden. I used some nice scrap lumber milled right on the farm to level the beds. I covered the turf I want to kill with wet cardboard then backfilled with mature horse manure/bedding compost sourced from a farm I worked on all through high school and college. This is a shortcut I will not take in the future as my goal is to not import any biomass. But the barren soil needed help if I want to produce produce (how is that for confusing english wording?). Unfortunately, the snowstorm beat me to taking pictures! Vegetable garden siting and planning will be in a series of future posts.

Interestingly, I found myself in a totally different mindset that I have ever been while hunting. Due to my forestry minor, I kept mentally noting diseases, dead or otherwise harvestable trees. I’ll touch more on this in a future posts regarding the goals to build soil.

There are lots of stands of Persimmon Trees (Diospyros virginiana). Additionally, there is one massive lone-wolf white oak tree on the property that has a crown with of almost 100 feet and is still abundantly producing fruit. Both tree species are historically excellent feed stocks for pigs and turkeys. I will rearrange my paddock mapping to account for this.

For now, back to this:

PANO_20141009_211354

Standard
Cattle, Garden

Wintering Animals = Backbone of Soil Building

Pulling directly from Joel Salatin’s model at Polyface Farm located in the same valley as my own farmstead, the key to building soil will be through compost.

Have you ever turned onto a country road to be immediately hit by the stench of a chicken house or cow operation? What about seeing a huge manure lagoon, no matter how pretty the tank is dressed up?

Farms that smell are polluting by leaching nutrient-rich animal waste into the atmosphere or ground water. My main issue with industrial farming is that carbon is being pulled from the soil and not replenished whether it is by crop production or animal grazing. The agricultural world is slowly realizing that healthy soil and all of its micro/macro organisms need more than periodic injections of Petroleum-based Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK) fertilizers. Most of all, soil requires organic matter, not to mention multiple other elements beyond the three provided by surplus explosives after World War I. Did I mention the inventor’s role in producing chemical weapons caused his perfectionist-chemist wife to commit suicide?

Back to my farm operation. The backbone of building soil on my farm is going to be the composting of animal wastes captured during winter in a carbon medium. Joel Salatin accurately refers to it as “A Carbonaceous Diaper”. Each cow will produce up to 100 pounds of nutrient rich waste a day. Thats a lot to capture and I will have to lay down fresh, dry carbon bedding pretty frequently! I will discuss the sourcing of carbon in a future post.

Every time I lay down additional bedding, I will toss in some goodies. Local corn, spent grains from brewing beer, old hay, etc. The cows will tromp down the manure/bedding into a pretty solid manure pack. The anaerobic decomposition process will start building soil while also providing heat for the barn and animals. After the cows head back to the pasture in the late spring, it will be time for the pigs to shine! They will be brought in to root up the compost to find the treats I left them. This process will turn the compost as well as aerate it which turns the decomposition aerobic, completing the process of turning the waste into the highest quality soil possible!

Stay tuned for a post on sourcing the carbon for bedding!

Standard
Cattle, Forestry

Carbon Medium for Nutrient Absorbtion in Compost while Wintering Animals

Follow up to Wintering Animals = Backbone of Soil Building

Capturing all of the nutrient rich excrement from the wintering of animals is going to require a huge amount of carbon. Skills I have gained while studying forestry and the associated graduate projects I assisted will be called upon in order to accumulate the carbon biomass I will require. I’ll write a well-cited post on my sustainable forest management plans once I have finished collecting and amassing my research. The gists of my strategy will be to provide the canopy disturbance necessary to have a healthy, sustainable forest.

Good points were made in Joel Salatin’s book, Folks, This Ain’t Normal. Starting around page 182, Salatin asserts that soil is built and carbon sequestered more efficiently via grasslands opposed to forests. Trees grow very slowly, then die. As they decompose, much of that sequestered carbon is released right back to the atmosphere. Grasslands grow, die and decompose every year; multiple times a year if serviced by grazers and herbivores. However the sequestered carbon in the grasslands us more fully absorbed by the soil and stored in the animal tissue of grazers. Salatin’s assertions seem to be backed up by this study I found.

To minimize the negative impact of forest land on the atmosphere, I plan to eventually harvest the dead, diseased, crooked or otherwise undesirable trees from the forest to make room for subsequent generations of oak and hopefully someday soon, American Chestnut. Despite my minor in forestry, I have a lot more to learn about sustainable harvesting. Fortunately, there are many pioneer trees in the pasture that need removed, and the unmaintained forest has many dead trees that should sustain me for at least a year while I broaden my forestry knowledge.

I will likely invest in a wood chipper to process the farms own biomass to provide the winter bedding. I may also seek out locally discarded christmas trees, shredded paper/cardboard, peanut hulls (suggested by Mr. Salatin in our correspondence) or any other source of easily attainable carbon material.

Note: If you plan to store wood chips on your farm, please be sure to do so in a manner that accounts for the heat generated as they naturally decompose. Limit the height of piles to prevent a fire hazard in your structures and to ensure that the chips dry fully.

 

Standard
Garden

Sustainable, Efficient and Symbiotic Approach to Vegetable Selection (part 1)

My main goal beyond building soil quality is to be self-sufficient. Therefore I am going to focus on growing the staples in my diet and filling out the rest of the garden with vegetables that I enjoy. Maybe I will produce excess to sell but I am not planning on it in the first year. I would like to build an aquaponics system to further stretch waste products, have some fish protein on the menu and further promote soil fertility. Additionally, red wigler worms will be an integral part of composting and will provide winter protein for chickens as well as fish if the aquaponics plans are realized.

In terms of staples, sweet potatoes make up most of my carbohydrate intake so they will be the largest portion of my garden. According to the study “Effect of intercropping varieties of sweet potato and
okra in an ultisol of southeastern Nigeria”, Okra and sweet potato planted together potentially increases yields of both plants. I’m not much of an Okra eater, but they pickle well for preservation so I’m willing to give them a shot. I am going to space each plant out 18″ from its nearest neighbor of the same species which means each plant will alternate every 9 inches. Low vines of the sweet potatoes will act as a living mulch for the erect-growing okra.

Granted, 45 specimens of each plant shown below is more that I need. I will build the garden to its full extent as composting on the farm yields new soil. The plant locations were determined by the same “Construct Points” that I used in mapping fence posts.

Sweet Potato/Okra Symbiotic Planting

Okra_SweetPot_Plants

Next on my list is to get a perennial asparagus bed started. Asparagus will get the fresh veggies going early and are freezable post-harvest. For now I am planning to plant it on the rows closest to the barn where it can be left undisturbed year after year. Basil seems to drive away common pests of asparagus and also is an all around good companion plant in the garden. If basil attracts slugs or snails, I can capture them in a beer trap to give the chickens a treat!

Asparagus/Basil Symbiotic Planting

AsparagusBasilPlants

Thats it for tonight! Any recommendations for the rest of the garden?

Note: When beginning construction of the garden beds, I switched my plan by siting the beds parallel to the west boundary of the garden rather than the east. When I was on location It was easier to determine the best way to work with the gentle hill. I will update the maps soon!

Standard
Garden

Sustainable, Efficient and Symbiotic Approach to Vegetable Selection (part 2)

I won’t bore you with justification every single companion I am selecting, but I will provide a list and highlight some of the major players. Wikipedia has the most extensive and well-cited collection of companion plant knowledge and is the tool for formulation of my decisions.

Trapping Plants are species used to lure potential pests away from the important crops.

Sunflower: In addition to being grown to provide winter feed for the chickens, Sunflowers have been used in North America far before europeans arrived to increase the yield of maize. They have been proven to act as sinks for both pest insects and their predators when intercropped with peppers (Source 1, Source 2). Peppers, cucumber, tomato, corn and soybean all benefit from sunflower. I am adamantly against corn and soybean monoculture, but both have potential to be grown in my garden for winter chicken feed.

Marigold: helps just about any garden vegetable imaginable. The wikipedia entry lists that marigold especially help tomatoes and peppers, cucurbits (cucumbers, gourds, squash), potatoes, roses, alliums, brassicas, zucchini while deterring or trapping many pest bugs and potentially suppressing perennial weed species. The studies listed are vast and needless to say, these will be going into any open crevasse in the garden.

Nasturtium: another powerhouse of companionship for garden vegetables and one of the best for encouraging predatory insects. The list of bugs that this plant repels is huge and it will be planted with all squash with consideration given to other plants.

 

Three Sisters Technique is a traditional method developed by the native americans over a period of 5,000-6,500 years. Corn is planted first to provide a structure for climbing beans. Squash or pumpkin is planted as well to shade the ground and provide a living mulch. The corn will be used as a winter feed for chickens.

 

Other general companions:

Broccoli and spinach will be companion planted in the early and late season as they are cold hardy. Phacelia flowers will be planted as well if aphids prove to be an issue for the spinach.

Peas to climb on tomato cages will be physical companions. Further companionship between tomatoes and asparagus or peppers will be considered.

Campeche squash for winter chicken feed and spaghetti squashes for human consumption. In addition to experiments in the three sisters method, they will be grown with Marigold Flower for pest repelling.

Onions and carrots are mutually beneficial for cold hardy planting in late season.

Standard
Chicks, Garden

Wintering Chickens: Shelter, feed, minerals

Wintering chickens actually seems like the least intimidating part of starting the farmstead.

Shelter- Hoop greenhouse over garden. One example is $100-$150 for a 9’x8′ structure. I can easily predator-proof it, provide deep bedding and lock the chickens in at night while letting them wander the garden by day fertilizing everything.

Feed – I am a big advocate of letting animals express their genes thus allowing them to alter their own diets to make up for deficiencies. I will provide them with basics. Carbohydrates will come from spent brewing grains and garden produce. Squash, sunflowers and Corn will be grown specifically as winter chicken feed as they both store well when harvested and handled correctly. Soil in the garden is rich with earthworms to provide protein (28% by composition) and fats while the worms are active. Additionally, red wiggler worms will be an integral part of the composting system and can be fed to the chickens. Honey locust pods are easily collected from the many trees in the pasture. The pods could also be collected for the goats winter feed. Persimmon trees are numerous and heavy producing, but are not as easily harvested.

Supplements- Keeping as much feed on-farm as possible, yeast will also be an abundant byproduct of my brewing operations. Enough yeast for subsequent batches of fermentation can be harvested when the current batch is complete leaving about 95% of it to go to waste. That wasted yeast is a great source of vitamins and minerals including calcium, the most important consideration for laying hens. To ensure all nutrient needs are met, I will provide some off farm sources to see if the chickens utilize them. These will most likely be kelp, oyster shell or other conventional sources.

Future considerations: Aquaponics to recycle processed chicken innards and waste as fish food as well as worms that feed on chicken droppings.

Standard