Monthly Archives: February 2012

DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )

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I painted it.

Super fast.

Our neighbors had old paint they donated and I had some cheap brushes left over from past projects.  Actually, this entire project got me digging through my project supply stash.  I have leftovers from projects I completed long ago don’t even remember doing.

Spring cold frame = spring cleaning.

Post Publishing Note:

This is 4 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )

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Last Saturday I gathered all the cut pieces I had hastily cut and proceeded to hastily put them together.

This whole thing is based on me looking at a few online plans and sketching it out super quick.

Because I have a toddler.

It went well considering I used screws that were too long to put it together too fast from plans not well planned out.

 

Post Publishing Note:

This is 3 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )

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A few days ago I gathered my cold frame materials and got down to business.

Having a toddler at home full-time means afternoon-sized projects get stretched out over multiple sessions over multiple days.  Having already planned and cut the front and back of the cold frame, today I cut the two ends.

Had I gotten more upcycled wood from Community Forklift, this would not have taken so long today.  It worked out but I could have picked up plenty more wood for $2 or $3 had I actually used the tape measure I brought with me.

B was super eager to “work on our project” and was even more excited to wear safety goggles while I ran the jig saw.  She was seated a good ten feet from me during saw operations but the ceremony of it all made it super fun for her (us both, actually).

Donning her safety glasses in the designated "safety seat" in the wagon - her spot for when I run the saw.

Everything was already measured and marked before even getting the saw out.  I checked in with her at the beginning and end of each cut, “Glasses on?” “On!” “Ready?” “Ready!” cut – cut – cut “You good?” “Guud!”  Things went smooth as pie.

I laid the two ends out before putting everything away (which is an operation unto itself with the shared back yard, unlocked gate and shared basement/storage space with a forgetful careless handyman).

A quick sanity check that my oft-interupted measuring ended up as proper cold frame ends.

A toddler’s need to step on anything newly laid out on the ground is as strong as splashing in puddles.

 

Post Publishing Note:

This is 2 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )

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I started on the cold frame a few days ago.  With only an hour to work before poppa brought the toddler back home, I sketched out a plan and cut all the wood for the front and back walls.

It looks like our first trip to Community Forklift was sufficient for materials but we have a trip coming in a few weeks that is forcing me to get an automatic opener.  My aim was to build this for under $30 but this will more than double the cost.  Since frying the seedlings in an un-vented cold frame would make this all a giant waste of time, it suddenly seems worth it.

Post Publishing Note:

This is 1 of a 6-part series -

DIY – The Beginnings of a Cold Frame (Part 1 of __ )
DIY – The Ends of a Cold Frame (Part 2 of __ )
DIY – The Assembly of a Coldframe (Part 3 of __ )
DIY – Painting the Cold Frame (Part 4 of __ )
DIY – Window Hacker (5 of __ )
DIY – Cold Frame – Fixing the Flaws (Part 6 of 6!)

 

DIY Reclaimed Oasis – A Trip to Community Forklift

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After considering starting seeds indoors this year, and looking at the amount of space we don’t have in our apartment for the quantity of seeds I’d like to start, a cold frame might be the way to go.

Here in DC we have the amazing Community Forklift — a huge warehouse full of salvaged and surplus building materials.  Ever wonder where you can get a used door, 10-year-old window sash, an old radiator or pretty much any length of perfectly good salvaged lumber?  This is your dream spot.

It’s a dream spot to all levels of DIYers, artists, contractors and gardeners.

And I got just about everything I need to build our cold frame, plus extra wood for other projects, for $21.  More on that in a few days when I actually build it.

Pictures are worth more than anything I could write about visiting Community Forklift, we’ll be back soon.  Click on the pics below for a larger view.

Into the Green

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The dopey sentimentality of gardening does not speak to me or my gardening friends.  The little “I’m in the Garden!” sign hanging near the front door is nothing I would ever hang by my front door.  And that’s OK.

I’m not sure where in the twentieth century gardens turned from a place to be connected (either through laboring for food or reclining among evening jasmine) to a place to fill with wooden cutouts of cat posteriors.

Gardening in the Lines shares a lovely find: ‘the Armchair Book of Gardens’ by Jane Billinghurst.

As winter keeps coming and going this season like a bad boyfriend (on his way here right now with a keg for this weekend), Erin’s post captures the it of the toil:

They are places where life can be lived – secret spaces explored, romances started, books read, friends entertained. Those with patience and an artistic turn of mind can absorb themselves in the task of beautifying their gardens.

Indeed.

Starting from Scratch – What’s in a Gardening Bag

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You don’t need a lot of special tools for container gardening and light in-ground gardening.  Last year my small daily gardening bag had what I needed for nearly every job.  I had a second small bag for fertilizer (fish emulsion) and Bt powder (caterpillar control) which only gets used every few weeks.

When you live in the city and your balcony is exposed to the elements (aren’t they all?) or your backyard gate can’t be locked, keep your gardening tools inside so they are protected from the weather (they last longer) and don’t get stolen.  A gardening bag keeps them in one place, reduces clutter, and keeps any dirt from your toils inside the bag and not loose in your home.

If it’s an attractive gardening bag, then you can hang it from a hook or set on an open shelf and have one less thing taking up valuable real estate in your limited storage space!  Bonus.

I was cleaning out my daily gardening bag and thought I should pick a few up as gifts to friends since they were $2/pair when I got mine.  Looking online, sadly, IKEA no longer sells them.  Bummer.  Seeing what IKEA Hacker has done with them made this news even worse.

So much for “DIY – The Perfect Gardening Bag for Starting Your Container Garden.”  This is more of a “Winging It – Navigating Home Depot” for buying as little as possible.  Here is what’s in my bag and perhaps should be in yours, especially if your local garden center both excites and frightens you with large displays of specialty tools:

The Lineup - Daily Use

If your container roster is all herbs and flowers -

1.  Gardening shears/scissors (harvesting herbs/flowers and trimming plants)

2.  Trowel* (mine is technically a transplant trowel which is narrower with a pointier nose – I only wanted one and this has proved to be multi-purpose)

3.  Close-fitting gardening gloves (it is so much easier to get the dirt out from under your fingernails when it never gets there in the first place, plus you can just pull them off to quickly answer your phone or tend to a small child)

If your garden roster includes veggies or other plants that need caging/staking/trellising, add the following –

4.  Plant ties or Velcro gardening tape (you can buy long gardening twist-ties  but the Velcro gardening tape is pure magic, you cut what you need, re-use it for years and it is very multipurpose)

5.  Gardening wire (I trained some vines with this but could do without it, actually)

6.  Wire snips if you need the wire

If you garden in the ground (yard/tree box along the sidewalk/raised beds), consider adding -

7.  A weed tool (these come in a variety of formats but it’s basically a little crowbar for pulling weeds – this thing makes your weed pulling every effective and efficient since it gets down and gets the roots up with an easy motion)

8.  Sturdy gloves (perfect for spreading mulch, setting pavers, laying gravel, moving lumber, and preventing blisters from prolonged shovel/hoe/pick axe/rake use)

Miscellaneous but  very handy -

9.  Insect repellent (Herbal Armor works well for being inexpensive and widely available)

10.  Gorilla Glue and/or super glue for repairing pots (generic dental floss works perfectly for tying a pot together while the glue sets)

11.  Sidewalk chalk (I garden with a two-year-old, bubbles are a mess compared to sidewalk chalk)

12.  (Not pictured) An old hand towel (not only for wiping your hands but also for wiping down your tools when done for the day)

*A note on hand tools: If you buy a tool brand new, spend a few extra bucks for the stainless steel tool.  Period.  The plastic ones break and the metal non-stainless ones rust immediately.  The packaging will clearly state “stainless steel.”

Garage sales, craigslist, freecycle and thrift stores are all excellent sources for all manor of garden tools (and containers).  Sometimes you just want to go to the store, get what you need and come home.  If you’re on a budget or live in a small place, buy garden items as you need them, not as you see them.

Social – Washington Gardener Seed Exchange 2012

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Today I attended the Washington Gardener Seed Exchange held at Green Springs Gardens Park.

I had our toddler with me and it became obvious once I arrived that (a) it would be impossible for me to sit through any of the talks and (b) no one was milling about during the talks.

This meant I had about two-and-a-half hours to kill with the two-year-old.  This was all laid out in the registration but I didn’t realize how strict the format:

1.  Show up, check in and hand your seeds over.

2.  Attend the two talks behind closed doors while volunteers divide seeds into categories on the tables.

3.  Have a brief snack (crackers, fruit and baked goods provided), look at all the seeds on the tables and make notes as to what you want.

4.  Attend Name Tag Contest and Show and Tell.

5.  Calmly go make your seed selections when your group is called.  There are multiple rounds so everyone gets a fair selection.

This is how the seed exchange was experienced by me:

1.  Same as above - Check in and hand seeds over.

2.  Notice no attendees are milling about outside the conference room.  You are half an hour late.  Someone eyes you and the child, shushes you as you quietly approach the seed tables and conference room.

3.  Go walk the garden grounds for an hour with your small child you now realize you perhaps should not have brought.

4.  Thoroughly enjoy walking the garden grounds with small child as she says “Hi, pansies!” to all the pansies and drives her Hot Wheels on every bench.

5.  Come back in during break time.

6.  Go back outside during Name Tag and Show and Tell time.  Keep an eye through the windows for when the seed selection begins.  It’s raining a little but you and the child are having a great time.

7.  Come in during seed selection, choose two common flowers and realize you’re doing it all wrong because you weren’t in the conference room to get assigned a group.

8.  Decide it’s best just to leave since small child is losing interest in staying by your side after three hours of hanging out.

9.  Say bye to the awesome gardener you chatted with during the break.

I am so glad we went, this was my first seed exchange.  I seemed to have broken a major code by bringing our child, but that said, I knew signing up that wandering the gardens was our backup plan.  B, the small child, helped me prep the seeds for the “seed party” and, as far as she is concerned, things went exactly it they should.  It was a great to be out in chilly weather.

Rooting DC is in two weeks – has anyone been?

DIY – Preparing for An Official Seed Exchange

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Letting veggies that didn't go that well for me go to other gardeners.

I’m going to the Washington Gardener Seed Exchange this Saturday!!!

I can’t wait, and it’s mostly out of curiosity of who else will be there.  I have more seeds than I know what to do with this season, and that’s after I divvied them up with friends.  The registration form assures you don’t need to bring seeds to participate but this is the perfect excuse to let some older seeds go.

I tried a bunch of seeds in the fall of 2010 and, while I chalked my lack of success up to squirrels and loosing the sun behind the neighbor’s house, I also realized bush beans in my containers aren’t worth it and cabbage worms are more voracious than my diligence to fight them.

Sack-O-Seeds for Saturday

I’ve never been to a seed exchange.  I’ve never been to Green Spring Gardens Park, the host site.  I’ve never tried to keep our two-year-old entertained at an organized event for more than two hours.  It’ll be great.  Worst case we get to roam the nature trail down to the two ponds and hang out with the waterfowl.  I’m excited.

 

DIY – Seed Sharing with Friends

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Prepping to Sort Seeds for Sharing

I launched myself headlong into garden prep a few weeks ago, a full four months prior to my usual late-spring start.  Feeling a little indulgent ordering piles of seeds for my container garden and small in-ground area, I sent out the all-call to friends to see who wanted to split the seed order.

With friends scattered across town and two a few states away, trying to get us all together to divvy up seeds is not happening.  Today was the day.

Used mail envlopes made a compact little bag-holding file.

I set up a little system of used envelopes with friends’ names and requests into which I put the sandwich bags of seeds.  This was key since I would otherwise have five piles of slippery sandwich bags and no space to work.  Two friends were just looking for extras with no specific requests other than being container friendly.  This vague enthusiasm made for sharing ease, no one got shorted.

Box Full of Baggies

Everyone got a decent mix of veggies, herbs and flowers and hopefully the extras will find their way into eager hands across DC.  I straightened the whole lot and set the baggie-filled envelops in my high-tech Adidas shoe seed box that lives on our kitchen table as a reminder I have a lot of work to do these next few weeks.

I hope to have them all delivered/picked-up/mailed by Monday.

Reading Today: Fresh Food from Small Spaces

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On Loan from a Neighbor

One of our neighbors sent two books home with me a few days ago.  I started one today, Fresh Food from Small Spaces, and added a few items to my Top 10 list of new projects for this season:

1.  Build a small cold frame for cheap.

2.  Make yogurt at home (a college boyfriend did this, it’s not hard once you do it).

3.  Have a worm bin – made for cheap.

4.  Grow root vegetables.

5.  Grow potatoes in a bag, as demonstrated by You Grow Girl.

6.  Make some little garden bird houses from items from our recycling bin (hoping birds will help with pests).

7.  Start a berry bush in a large container (found for… cheap).

8.  Dig up our nasty/weedy patch between our fence and sidewalk and grow flowers from seed, some of which have edible flowers or leaves.

9.  Get hip to adding cornmeal to potting mix (Fresh Food from Small Spaces says this is magic against plant pathogens due to supporting beneficial bacteria).

10.  Replant the daughters of our 2011 strawberries so we have more strawberries than we know what to do with.

Fresh Food from Small Spaces is all about self-watering containers, made cheap from Rubbermaid bins or contractor buckets, and I just can’t commit.  They aren’t difficult to make.  They grow more of everything for less effort and less space.  They make you look younger.  Well, you’ll feel younger from eating all those tasty items grown inside.  The hitch is we and the neighbors in our building share the back yard for hosting friends for brunches and BBQs and I just can’t don’t want to clutter it up with a bunch of science-fair-looking contraptions.

We’ll see.  I might build one and see what the buzz is all about.

 

DIY – Preserving Lemons! Part Two – Make it Moroccan!

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This was a fantastic project, especially since I had never heard of Moroccan lemons or knew anything of how to make them.  Our downstairs neighbor suggested over dinner that we make them and I immediately thought of my mother-in-law, Betsy, and her Meyer lemon tree.  Betsy packed up a box of Meyer lemons, limequats and tangerines for us to have our way with and suggested using the limequats since she has so many (and thus receive a jar of our efforts in return).

Note that two of the three varieties of limequat are named after Florida towns near my own hometown.

Also note that Betsy is a master gardener, runs her kitchen-of-projects with style and grace, and gifts me amazingly useful kitchen tools.

A quick search on epicurious pulled up Moroccan-Style Preserved Lemons.  I called it good with no further research, the recipe was so simple and straight forward and we had all the ingredients on hand:

(As presented at epicurious.com, originally from Gourmet, 2008)
10 to 12 lemons (2 1/2 to 3 lb)
2/3 cup kosher salt
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Equipment:
a 4- to 6-cup jar with a tight-fitting lid

Blanch 6 lemons in boiling water 5 minutes, then drain. Cut each lemon into 8 wedges and discard seeds. Toss with kosher salt in a bowl, then firmly pack with salt into jar.
Squeeze enough juice from remaining lemons to measure 1 cup. Add enough juice to cover lemons and screw on lid. Let stand at room temperature, shaking jar gently once a day, 5 days. Add oil to lemons and chill, covered.


Cooks’ note: Lemons keep, chilled, 1 year.

We used jars given to us from a Betsy and another friend then followed the gist of the recipe.  Instead of 10 – 12 lemons we had 5 large Meyer lemons and 12 small limequats.  We reduced the salt by a guessed amount.  We cut the limequats into wedges as though they were lemons for the three taller, slender jars.  I sliced two Meyer lemons (instead of cutting wedges) to fit the two squat jars.  Juice for the whole project came from three Meyer lemons.

Cooking in the kitchen with a friend is a special treat.  Jumping into a little preserving project on a Saturday night where neither has done it before is downright thrilling.  So much so that we forgot to document the real action of blanching the limequats and slicing.  I did document the Meyer lemons, though.

The recipe calls for blanching the lemons prior to slicing, which we did.  My neighbor read that blanching lemons prior to squeezing yeilds more juice – we blanched our juice Meyer lemons for about two minutes and they juiced incredibly well.  However, we did come up a little short on juice to cover what we packed into the jars.  David Lebovitz really presses his Moroccan preserved lemons into their jars, which we haven’t done yet but it should remedy the limequats poking just above the juice line.

I’m not sure exactly how gently we should be shaking our jars of lemons every day but they look great at the close of Day Three.  I have some incredibly fancy olive oil I scored from the Fancy Food Show over the summer, we’ll pack the limequats and Meyers down firmly and seal their fate with it on Day Five.