The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

What farm would be complete without an old rusty Ford pickup, or even better, a tractor? Well, we have a micro-farm, so the farther our rust extends is to the hand-me-down wheelbarrow that my dad gave me earlier this year. They don’t write country songs about wheelbarrows, but I would contend that there is untapped potential there.

This thing was in pretty sad shape when I first got it. The base struts had collapsed, so someone put some plywood down there as a support. Plus one of the handles had broken off, and my little brother Alex had repaired it by attaching a 2×4 to that side. So one handle was normal, and the other was grotesquely large. After a little while dealing with it, I had the bright idea to take a jigsaw and router to it, and I have to say, it was a whole new experience with handles that actually fit in your hand.

Well, at some point this winter, the wheelbarrow fell over and the other original handle broke off. I thought I was going to have to take the whole thing apart and replace all kinds of parts to get it back up and running, so I was doing the mental calculations to decide if it was worth it. It was sunny this weekend and I felt like doing an outside project, so I took a look at it and realized that it wasn’t too hard to do what Alex had done on the other side. I basically just needed to make another handle and screw it onto the remaining wood frame.

This baby’s only got another year or so left, but every year I keep it out of the landfill is one more year before it eventually decomposes into compost in said landfill. Which I think it a good thing, but I’m not sure.

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Last year we let a few of our plants keep on growing until they went to seed, and then saved them. They sat in boxed and old planting buckets for a few months, until one recent snowy day when I needed a project. I went through and pulled off the seeds, and I think they look pretty good. We have peas, beans, spinach, swiss chard, sunflowers, lupines, tomatoes, green peppers, anaheim peppers, and some volunteer leeks that showed up in the corner of the yard. I think that’s it.

We can’t tell apart the anaheim peppers and the green peppers, so that will be a surprise as to what we’re getting there. Alicia is sure that none of them will in fact grow, so we’ll just have to see. It will be time to start the seeds inside in the next couple months. In the meantime, if anyone wants swiss chard seeds, let me know.

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We started thinking about rain barrels as soon as we moved in, and it’s a project that I’ve put considerable effort and thought into. The goal is to have a self-sufficient, self-replenishing, gravity fed watering system that will feed to soaker hoses and minimize our water use this summer for the garden. As we speak we have four 55-gallon food grade barrels (two from craigslist and two from a parking lot down the street) set up. That’s 220 gallons of capacity for you math majors, and at 8.35 lbs. per gallon, that’s almost literally a ton of water that we can store. And the nice thing is, they fill up really quickly. We found that out the first big rain we got after hooking them up to the gutters (or “eavesdrops,” as our Canadian neighbors to the north call them) — it took about an hour to get 55 gallons! I am hoping that with summer rains, we won’t run out of water in the barrels, but we’ll see.

Here are a few pictures of one side of the house; the other one is almost done, and it’s going to be two barrels stacked vertically. Crazy, I know. Note the dollar store strainer used as a filter, and a shot of the system in slow motion during our latest blizzard conditions. Updates on how the system works will come when we start needing to water the garden this spring (or maybe July if this year is like last year.)

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