There's a Hole in the Yurt Roof, Dear Liza, Dear Liza

Anyone else know that song?

  As a follow-up to the euphoric yurt-raising post, I though I might take this opportunity to solicit ideas for patching holes in vinyl roofs.  There are plenty of products out there for vinyl seats, pools, and decorative Cadillac roofs, but none specifically for this kind of application.

  As you may have read, I did try a pool repair kit.  The recent rain showed it to be less than effective, and it was only a .2" drizzle.

  There are some other kits out there that may work, but I'd have to buy multiple sets for all the long holes and areas with lots of small holes. 

 Anyway, I would love to hear your creative, functional solutions.

At Long Last - The Yurt!

Those in the know are aware that we have desired to live over at the site ever since starting our garden project.  It would make everything easier - from watering, to scaring deer away, to getting little things done here and there at odd moments throughout the day.  All things that a distance of a half a mile makes either more difficult or impossible.  Many were the suggestions:  Get a cheap old trailer.  Fix up the house or the block garage.  Use a tent.  And all were good ideas, but we didn't have the energy to make them happen for one reason or another.

  Then we thought about our friends Brian and Luann (aka Yurtfolk), who have a beautiful and inspiring home in northern Indiana.  It's a 30' diameter yurt. We figured a yurt would fit into our lifestyle well as a seasonal home; we could put it up over at the garden, move in around April or May when the garden really starts picking up, then move back to the house in October or so when the weather turns cold.

  Dovetailing well into our plans, craigslist.org listed a place selling three used yurts in our area just days after we decided to actively search for one.  We took it as a sign, and followed up.

  The sellers had bought their yurts from Spirit Mountain Yurts a couple of years before, and they had all collapsed in a freak windstorm.  The company is not a good one, and if I had done a bit more research on SMY before buying ours second-hand I would have either talked the sellers way down or passed altogether.  We would have saved a lot of trouble that way, but it is likely that we've ended up with a passable yurt at a good price despite all the teeth-gnashing and replacing of parts I've had to do.

  The bottom line is this: the sellers sold us one of their 20' yurts, and were not exactly honest about the damage or the inventory of parts.  The lattice wall was broken in two, and the two pieces of wall didn't match up to make an entire 20' diameter.  It was missing 11 of the 30 rafters, the dome was seriously cracked, and there were holes in the roof vinyl.  Bedsides these points, the sellers did not pass us the packet of instructions on assembly, or answer any subsequent emails or phone calls.

  Spirit Mountain Yurts was not only unhelpful, but completely non-communicative. I found out (by testing a hunch) that they only respond to emails expressing interest in buying a yurt.  They have a very bad reputation across the board, it turns out.

  In spite of this I did attack the project with gusto, at least initially.  I decided to set up our new yurt inside one of our barns, so that weather would be no issue, and so that I could hang a pulley from a beam to help raise the yurt's roof.  I repaired the lattice wall, then secured it with the door in place.  When it came to lifting the compression ring in place, though, I found that one person with a pulley wasn't enough.  After a few attempts and some damaged materials (and morale), I threw in the towel for about ten months.

  Eventually Margo suggested that more hands might make it easier, and a party might make it more fun.  So I held a gathering of men from the Dayton Mennonite Fellowship that we attend, and victory was achieved.  It turned out that putting up the roof, manufacturing the remaining 11 rafters, and pulling out and checking the canvas wall and vinyl roof was a simple and light-hearted task for 12 people.  There was a great deal of joking around the image of me trying to do it all myself.

 I was finally convinced that this yurt might be a good idea after all, so we went ahead and planned a date for the yurt-raising.  In the few days prior to that we would build a platform for it to sit on and patch the roof as well as we could.

  It is at this point that I'd like to plug a company with an appropriately stellar reputation. Pacific Yurts designs and builds exceptionally strong, durable, and versatile structures.  What's more, they have plenty of helpful information on their website, and they answer phone calls and emails.  And, to top it off, they give detailed specifications and instructions on building platforms for yurts of various dimensions, which was especially helpful.  A stark contrast to Spirit Mountain Yurts.

  After gathering the materials Margo's dad and I went through the excruciating process of leveling the 16 concrete piers, put up and leveled the beams, and then screwed down the deck.  The platform took two days, and overlapped with what was supposed to be the actual yurt-raising.  Our friend Knoll came over to help finish the decking and drip-edge that Saturday, and by the time we called it quits that night the three of us had put up the lattice wall, the door, and the rafters and compression ring.

  Knoll came back over the following Monday to help me muddle through the installation of the canvas wall, vinyl roof, and dome.  This was one step that filled me with trepidation, because I had no idea how it would all fit together.  The grommets on the wall canvas looked nothing like the descriptions any other yurt companies gave in their own assembly instructions, and Spirit Mountain Yurts remained, of course, eerily silent.  But we succeeded against all odds, and the first rain showed it to be mostly water-proof (my roof patching was not quite thorough enough).

  So now we are yurt dwellers!  At least, we will be when we move in next week.  We have already spent a good deal of daytime in it between garden tasks, and Alten can vouch for its excellent nappability. 

  There is a long list of people who made this yurt possible - Chris W.,  Zach, Ben, Brian, Jeff, Kevin, Kevin's dad, Tim, Mike, Jason, Dave, and Will all lent a hand in the barn putting up rafters and giving me a strong dose of optimism and creativity.  Chris R. helped out caulking the drip-edge plywood and persuading it into place.  And without Rex and Knoll, to whom I give endless thanks, the platform and raising would have taken three weeks instead of three days. That is no exaggeration.  Margo gets credit for keeping the thing on track, and Alten gets credit for looking cute all the time.

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The Buzz

Whew!  Has it already been a month and a half?  Please excuse my delinquency, and take my word for it that we've been busy.  Hopefully I'll get the chance to post about a number of our April adventures.

  But for now, our new livestock: A few thousand head of bees!

I'm the kind of guy who does not jump right into an activity with both feet.  I read about it, I ask questions, I watch, and then I hesitate.  Beekeeping has been on my "I think it would be so cool to do that" list for years, but it took a confluence of events to finally get me past the hesitation phase.

  Step one was that my sister and brother-in-law got an IOU wedding present for a bee hive, and didn't foresee themselves keeping bees any time soon.  They offered it to us, and I enthusiastically accepted.

  Step two was that a farming friend and mentor down the road, Steve, keeps a few colonies and encourages anyone interested to start keeping bees.  He told me the best time to start was right now (that was three years ago), and that he'd give me a swarm.

  Step three happened last spring, when he invited me over to go through his hives with him on the first warm enough day of the year.  This was the closest I could get to going on a beekeeping test drive, and I was pleased with the results.  As someone who got stung a number of times as a child, I was unsure whether or not I could handle (literally) managing and eventually robbing thousands of stinging insects.  And Steve encouraged me to follow his example, going without gloves.  It was a great experience, and reassured me in a way the books couldn't that they aren't out to get you most of the time, even if you are messing around with their home in a very invasive way.

  Steps four through, say, twenty, involved ordering equipment, searching thrift shops for some likely white pants and shirts, preparing equipment, re-reading all the books I'd read, finding new online resources, and readying the bees' area.

  Finally, I waited eagerly by the phone for a few weeks for Steve's call that the bees had swarmed. When that happened I woke up eeeearly the next morning, went to pick them up, and drove a gently buzzing box home in the back of the car.  In the photo at left you can see them coming out of their new hive for the first time.  It was quite cold, so they were tentative. At that point I had begun keeping bees and, though I hadn't done anything to or with them yet, I was quite excited, proud, and content.

  It's only gotten better since then, too.  Here are some of the details:

  The original gift was a bottom-board, inner-cover and telescoping outer-cover, and one hive body with frames.  They came from Brushy Mountain Bee Farm, and since equipment can vary between companies it is conventional wisdom that one use components from the same one.  (Since ordering from them I have received four identical catalogs at different points - a subtle hint that they'd like me to get others hooked on their product).  So I went back to Brushy Mountain to get the rest of the equipment I'd need, since one hive body isn't enough.

  Mine is an 8-frame hive as opposed to 10-frame, which describes how many frames each super holds.  This, too, was a decision made by the giver of the gift.  Since it's good to be able to interchange equipment between your hives, any hives I get in the near future will likely be 8-frame as well.  That's fine, though.  An 8-frame super is, of course, easier to lift than a 10-frame super.

  You can finish the exteriors of your hives with many coatings, or even no coating at all.  I went with linseed oil, because I like the idea of some weather protection, but would prefer a more natural choice (in look and ingredients) than paint.  And, of course, they do look beautiful.  The photo at top right shows three finished supers, three without coating, one that hasn't been assembled, and a couple of empty frames.

  The spot I settled on for placement was our prairie, because it is as far as I can get from any chemically-cultivated field.  There's disagreement on the cause behind colony-collapse disorder, but the presence of chemical pesticides, not to mention herbicides and fungicides, can't have a positive effect on colony health.  And the genetically modified corn plants engineered to produce the soil-borne insecticidal bacteria BT do manufacture it in every cell of their structure, including the pollen grains.  When bees collect these (and, believe it or not, they do visit corn tassels) to take back to the hive as food for brood-raising, there are negative consequences.

  I've visited the hive and opened it up twice since taking ownership, and am becoming more comfortable bit by bit (that's me at right).  That's not to say that I haven't come up with perplexing questions from each observation, but I take comfort in knowing that there is a great deal to learn.  I might as well start now!

  I'm also lucky to have the beekeeping contacts that I have.  I already knew I had a few friends and relatives with experience, but since embarking on this adventure I've come across multitudes of others who are either recent beginners or old hands.  It is reassuring that at every turn I seem to find some great knowledge and ideas.

  So here's to home-grown honey and wax, heaps of pollinators, and the great humming unknown!

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Rockin' the Triangle

On Saturday we held our first volunteer workday in 2012!

The target was a little 900 ft corner of a conventionally-farmed field directly to the east of our garden. We carved it out of the the rest in 2010 with plans to expand in that direction as needed. (At right is the google-eye view).

The farmer who leases the fields on the property is a great guy, very amiable and knowledgeable about chemical farming, and curious about what it is we're doing. So when we asked if we could take a titch of the field for our own uses he told us to mark out whatever we wanted, and that it wouldn't be a problem. That was April of 2010, about a month before he would spray and put in soybeans.

Two months later we had a real appreciation for what round-up and whatever else he sprays is capable of doing. Except for a few resistant (or persistent) weeds, the field was devoid of anything but soybeans. Our triangle, however, had erupted in every weed whose seed had ever landed there, and had jumped to a height of 5+ feet. It was almost funny. But there were some serious thistles and heavy-duty dock plants, besides the sheer mass. Over the past two years we laid down cardboard and chicken feed bags across the whole thing, then put branches and whatnot to keep them down, all in the interests of preventing any more weed insurrections. We also put in two Elderberry bushes, which are native here.

Since we are beginning to get a handle on our Biointensive garden, we have started setting goals and taking steps toward management of the rest of the land, including the ~4.5 acre field to the East and the ~7 acre field to the West. We won't be able to put cardboard, chicken feed bags, and windfall branches on all of that, and so we've been brainstorming what is possible. Every pass of the chemical sprayer makes our next move feel more urgent. While we've toyed with using a disc for our little Ford 2000, the current state of the soil means any cultivation at all will contribute significantly to the erosion already taking place.

So we decided on the strategy of broadcasting grains and legumes in a Fukuoka-style kind of way. For those unfamiliar with Masanobu Fukuoka, I recommend his book One Straw Revolution. Essentially, over the course of decades, Fukuoka developed a technique of growing grains that meant he walked his fields only five times a year - once to broadcast seed, once to harvest barley and again to spread its straw, and once to harvest rice and again to spread its straw. The result was a constant returning of biomass to the fields, with little compaction and no disturbance of the soil other than root action. The straw also cut down on evaporation and weed growth.

In our case, we broadcast wheat and field pea seeds and mulched them with grass clippings (experimenting with technique at left), in the hope that we can cover the soil with something that will cut down on weed growth, build the soil through root action, and possibly give us food in addition to straw. We will see what we can to to develop a Fukuoka process for ourselves.

For a mere 900 ft, not all that much work is involved, unless you take into consideration the cardboard and paper that were covering the soil, and the branches piled willy-nilly all over the place. It would have taken us a couple of days to make the transition happen. So we sent out a general email to friends all over the place, and invited them out for a work day. In the end we had four friends stop on their way home from Pennsylvania to northern Indiana, four friends from much closer to home, and my brother. Many thanks to Brian, Chris, Harley, Luann, Miriam, Owen, Tracy, Will, and Zach!

We pulled up paper, piled up wood, sickled and raked grass, broadcast seed and clippings, had a fire, and ate good food before we called it a night. It took less than two hours, though, to complete the task at hand.


As usual, we count it a great blessing to have the community we do. Many hands make light work, as they say, and so we try to trade around who gets the benefit of that. In the next few years I think it will often be us, though, since the land work we need to do doesn't involve any particular skill or training. A simple willingness to get dirty, and be able to laugh while you're doing it, is enough.

Our next work days will be tree planting and path building.

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OEFFA Conference and Earthineer

A big part of settling in a new place is gathering a community for support, encouragement, and inspiration. For agriculturalists, or agrarians, that community is especially important. It means the difference between floundering on one's own and flourishing with others. While we knew a number of farmers in our area before and soon after alighting here, we soon learned that Ohio has an extended and ready-made network of organic (and beyond-organic) growers, marketers, and activists. It is OEFFA, the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association.

To learn all about what OEFFA does you can look at their "About OEFFA" page. In a nutshell, though, they are an organic certification agency, an education and support network for farmers throughout Ohio and the US (there are many members outside Ohio), and a well-organized advocate for farmers and consumers in the realm of state and national legislation. They publish a newsletter, hold farm tours and workshops across the state, and have a bumpin' annual conference featuring far too many workshops to choose from, inspiring top-notch keynote presenters, a trade show, meals from local and organic sources, and an opportunity to meet peers face-to-face.

Last year Margo went with Alten, had a great time, and made useful connections. This year it was my turn. I rode with a friend, Ben, who farms nearby at Mile Creek Farm, and that ride gave us an opportunity seldom afforded to folks in our situation (farmers with young children) to sit and have a focused conversation for hours. Soon after arriving at the site he introduced me to friends of his from our area, among them Doug and Kat of Smaller Footprint Farm and Isaac, the Food Service Coordinator at Antioch College.

I attended workshops on food preservation, defining one's vision, NRCS funding opportunities, using mushrooms in your woods and garden, companion planting, creating and maintaining native gardens to capture rainfall runoff, and what to do when you've got lead in your soil. I would have loved to attend the workshops on moving old barns, the risks of "fracking", cultivating edible mushrooms on logs, raising and selling fiber, and a number of others. I attended Woody Tasch's keynote on the Slow Money investment movement and Andrew Kimbrell's on the progress being made to keep Monsanto's (and others') aggression towards small farmers at bay.

Then, of course, there was the Saturday evening contra dance, which needs no explanation to those who know contra dancing, and of which no explanation of mine can do justice for those of you who aren't familiar with the past-time. Suffice it to say, I think you should try it if you never have before.

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I did come out of the OEFFA conference with one more potential internet habit. The one booth in the trade show that I could not resist was that with the two computers, a large flat panel tv, and a flashy red GrainMaker mill. It was the display for a new social networking site, Earthineer. The two founders, Dan and Leah, were there making their pitch, which was this: Facebook is all well and good, but for those of us who are pursuing a sustainable lifstyle a world-wide community could be an incredible asset. For any question that one might have, many are steps away from the same problem and many have already found various wonderful, creative solutions they want to share. That's the gist of it, anyway.

Leah and Dan's background is similar to many of the rest of us: they had a formative experience that sat with them for a while, and when a transition came in their lives they made some big changes based on the vision that experience left them with, and Earthineer.com is the product of those changes. I can identify with those motivations, and knowing that two of my favorite companies (GrainMaker and Countryside & Small Stock Journal) support the project makes it even more appealing. How useful I find it remains to be seen. I don't really understand how Facebook works, and for all my blogging the internet still leaves me, ironically, feeling dazed and disconnected. But I expect, as the Earthineer community grows, that I am going to find conversation and answers through a single website which would previously have taken me days of searching and many wild-goose-chases to find otherwise.

So if you have the inclination, join Earthineer and be my friend. 'Cause I only have two right now, and one was the default.

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The Haiku Game

We go for the cheap thrills. When we are looking for entertainment, we don't go to the cinema, the races, or skiing in the Alps. Usually not even to the bowling alley. We're game-playing people. There may be later posts dedicated to Settlers, Ticket to Ride, St. Petersburg, Scrabble, Chinese checkers, and the host of other games we love to play, but this one will sing the praises of The Haiku Game.

Haiku, as you may have learned in elementary school, is a form of poetry from the Japanese culture. It is the simplest kind I know in terms of rules, classically consisting of three lines with a reference to the natural world. The first line holds 5 syllables, the second holds 7, and the third concludes with 5 more. That's a simplified and strict definition - modern forms infrequently stick to the 17 syllables or images of nature. For example, here's one I wrote in the back of class during the poetry unit in my Elementary Education courses:

Half of my classmates
Talk too much, saying nothing.
The other half doze...

More recently we spent four years in Willits just a few miles up the 101 from Ukiah, which holds a grand Haiku festival every year. They take it pretty seriously, with judges, awards, and submissions from around the world.

Enough with the background. Now for the game. I have, sadly, not been able to figure out from whom we learned it initially; none of the people present the first time I recall playing it even remember the occasion. But since learning we have introduced it to many friends and acquaintances. It goes like this:

Each person sits with a piece of paper and writing utensil in front of them. Each person writes the first line of a haiku (5 syllables) and passes the paper to their right. Each person then takes the paper passed from their left, and writes the second line of haiku (7 syllables) to match the first line in front of them, and passes the paper to the right once more. On the sheet now in front of each person, they write the final line (5 syllables) to complete the poem, and pass it to the right once more. When all poems are complete, each persons takes a turn reading the haiku that the three people to their left wrote.

Depending on the group and the time of day, poems can be entertaining, deep, foolish, or completely unintelligible. And if the young (or syllablically-challenged) are participating, the 5-7-5 rule might end up as more of a suggestion. But it remains good wholesome fun, encourages community, and creates art.

So in honor of the past participants of Haiku Games that Margo and I have facilitated, and in honor of the 10,000-view-mark that the blog passed recently, I am instituting a "Haiku of the Week" to be featured in the sidebar. Each one will be taken from the sheets of Haiku Games past that I've kept.

Happy reading!

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How to Grow More Vegetables, 8th Edition

How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons, was initially published in 1974 by John and Ecology Action with the help of copying machines. While that happened before I was even born, I have heard the claim substantiated by folks who bought the first edition long ago, and 35 years later made it to their first tour of Ecology Action's gardens. A few editions down the line it was picked up by Ten Speed Press, of Berkeley, which also publishes a number of other great books (and which has been recently bought by Random House).

It became thicker, edition by edition, as EA's work progressed and the concept of biointensive, and then GROW BIOINTENSIVE, mini-farming was further developed. And, as those of us who have owned recent copies know, it contained nearly sixty pages at the back known as The Bibliography that listed thousands of resources that pertained to sustainability, agriculture, simple living, solar cooking, and the like.

When Margo and I began our agricultural life we had the 6th edition, and soon after coming to EA the 7th edition was published.

Some folks, depending on their philosophy of sustainability, count it as the Bible of sustainable agriculture. We found it as a combination of three sections: a great introduction to principles of successful gardening (in general) and biointensive gardening (specifically), a constant reference for crop-specific flatting, transplanting, and diet information, and a collection of sample garden plans modeling true sustainability.

The first section, once read and understood, I seldom returned to except as a teaching aid. After practicing it the information has been internalized. The second section is known, infamously to some, as the Master Charts. Before attending a workshop at EA they were a mystery of numbers and lists, and now they are a constant companion in our planning. I never took much time with the third section, because it came across as too technical, and I didn't have the attention span for that kind of reading.

For the Master Charts, though, our book has accompanied us everywhere from dining room table to garden bed, California to North Carolina.

The 8th Edition has been published and is now on sale. Small and medium changes have been made throughout, with three large ones I've noticed so far: the technical "sample garden plan" section I talked about above has been boiled down from 20 pages in the earlier edition to 9 pages in the new one, and presents itself in a more approachable way. The Bibliography has been cut out entirely, and is now available online at EA's website on this page. In its place is a list of helpful tools and plans on how to build them. And, most pertinent in our long-term use of the book, the Master Charts have undergone a transformation. In previous editions each set of 20 crops would span four pages, requiring the planner to flip back and forth to get all the information. In the new edition crops are in sets of 10, and span two facing pages. Those who own a copy and have used the Master Charts will know what I mean; it will require some adjustment for us, but will likely be a big improvement.

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In other news, we have flatted our alfalfa, clover, onions, and leeks, and will flat our green onions next week. Our pseudo-greenhouse has maintained temperatures above freezing for the last few weeks, which is good. I finished processing the last of our crops from 2011 and now have the yields for all of them calculated and logged, and plan to add a page to the blog that lists our high yields. So our sights are set on 2012 now, with EA's March Three-Day Workshop in Willits coming right up, classes at our local Audubon center on seedling propagation, compost, and bed preparation soon after, and then planting!

Winter, for all practical purposes, seems to be over...

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