Horse

Well we have adopted a horse. His name is Dusty, which is going to be confusing since we already have a dog named Duster. He is 11 years old and about 15 hands high or so. Seems nice although I haven't met him yet, but Debbie knows about these things. Anyway. His job will be to keep the grass in the fields cut down and help fertilize the garden and other crops.

More on Dusty, and the other animals in a later post.

-dale

Here is a Sketchup drawing of the bucket hanger for the watering system. It is 4 feet high and the legs are each two feet long. It can be made from one 8 foot 2 X 4 and a small hook at the top.

I did all the water pressure testing and found that if the bottom of a 3 gallon bucket is at about 32 inches high everything works just fine. It puts the top of the bucket at about 4 feet which is low enough to pour water into with another bucket.

When I have time I will add construction plans for the stand with photos.

-dale

Watering systems

Today I will be experimenting with different types of watering systems.

In the past we have used a gravity feed system that has worked in varying degrees. The first year we took 5 gallon buckets and punched holes in their bottoms, added some PVC pipe and a soaker hose. We set the buckets on a stand that was about 18 inches high and just poured water into the buckets. I worked well enough. The buckets drained in a few hours and the soaker hoses concentrated the water right along the base of the plants. All in all, it was a success. But because it was cobbled together and not properly designed it was a bit clunky and had some maintenance issues.

Last year I built much better support stands for the buckets that could be moved around as needed, and I used better connecting hardware for the soaker hoses and PVC, but the system didn't work at all. I believe the stands were too short as I really can not think of any other reason for the failure.

Water has a base pressure of 0.433psi per column foot. What that means is if you have a bucket with one foot of water in it, the pressure at the bottom of the bucket is 0.433psi (pound per square inch). If you raise that bucket off the ground one more foot and add a pipe to the bottom (1 foot long) the pressure at the bottom of the pipe will be 0.866psi. This is how hydraulic pressure works. It does not matter how manny gallons of water you have, just how tall it is.

For example, if you have a swimming pool that is 10 feet deep and dive to the bottom you will experience a pressure of  about 43psi whether the pool holds 1000 gallons or 50,000 gallons. It doesn't matter as long as you are only covered with 10 feet of water.

All that being said. What I need to do is figure out how much pressure it takes for the soaker hoses to release water, and make sure the buckets are high enough to supply that much pressure. I'm guessing that it's going to be about 0.6psi based on the success of two years ago with the buckets at 18 inches. The question is what is absolute minimum. If I put the buckets too low they won't work. If they are too high I won't be able to fill them without lifting water above my head. So I'm looking for a happy medium.

That is todays project. Wish me luck.

Calendar

Alright. So I am actually doing this blog thing so far.Today I added a Calendar to the bottom of the page. I will populate it with important stuff like when to plant things and when to harvest stuff and when we get chickens for butchering and so on.

If we decide to sell any of our produce I will be sure to put the dates that the stand will be open on the calendar so everyone can come buy really good fresh "better then organic" food from us.

take care.

Starting the Farm Year off

Debbie and I just sat down and filled out the planting part of our farm calendar. If you have never used a farm calendar before I recommend it. We haven't had an official farm calendar in the past but we have used some form of calendars in the past to map out the year for us to some extent.

This year we hope to do a lot of planning instead of running around in a rush. Here is an example.

We know the average last frost (ALF for short) in our area is June 1st. Last year we think it was June 15th. but we can't remember for sure. This year it will be put on the calendar for next years reference. From the ALF this year we count back by weeks and that will let us know when we need to start some plants indoors. Like tomatoes need to start 6 weeks before the ALF, and be transplanted into the garden 2 weeks after the ALF.

WE also know the average first frost (AFF) is October 1st. That gives us a 122 day growing season (on average) So we count backwards form the AFF to the ALF and we can see how late we can plant something. A 90 day corn needs to be in by July 3rd or we have a good chance of losing most of the crop. Better to plant earlier of course but planting later will be a waste of time.

The Farm Calendar will also have all the ordering, moving and butchering information for our meat chickens. When to harvest crops, move the laying hens into a new part of the garden and so forth. Basically anything we need to remember to do needs to end up on the calendar. That way we can look and say, "Oh next week we need to get the ______ in the ground"

We are using a large desk calendar and putting it up on a central wall in the house where we can see it and add to is as necessary. I don't recommend a regular wall calendar. the boxes are too small to write everything down that needs to be there.

I'll let you know how the calendar works for us. This type of organization is new to us. Hopefully we keep up with it.

This is one more attempt at setting up a Web presence for our farm. In the past I've tried MySpace and other social and blogging sites, but I have just been too busy (or lazy) to keep up with it all so I just forget about it and after about 6 months try to add something but then realize I've forgotten my password or whatever and just give up on it.

I intend to do better this time.

So read the next post to see what this blog is all about and if you find it interesting, Please come back (or not) and don't be too surprised if I never post another thing