Garden Expansion

I spent a few hours over the mixed weather false-spring weekend expanding the garden from 40 feet x 40 feet to about 40x50. I'm sheet mulching the new section with cardboard and straw and also throwing in some old rotten logs. One of the logs is hollow, so hopefully some predators can hide out in there. I will probably add some other features to the garden this year--like a tiny pond and bird bath and more bird perches and boxes.

The sheet mulching is a good alternative to tilling the soil. It's much less work, and presumably will produce similar results over time. The main problem with the soil in the new section is it's pretty compacted and clay-ey. I'm planning to throw down some gypsum and see how well that works to drain the area.

Permaculture Videos

This is one of a really informative and well produced video series on permaculture. It features Geoff Lawton.

Ruth Stout Garden Method

The video, above, is an interview with Ruth Stout who developed a deep mulch gardening method that's really similar to Paul Gautschi's "Back to Eden" method. She used straw or hay instead of wood chips. She fed two people all year with the produce from a 45x50' garden with very little work.

Many youtubers apply deep mulch garden methods with success. It seems like the key component is access to cheap or free mulch of basically any kind. One of the better recommendations I've seen is to use a variety of materials to provide a broad spectrum of nutrients to the soil.

In the fall of 2016, I put a load of woodchips on our 40x40' garden. So far, over the winter the woodchips haven't decomposed much. By contrast, last summer we had a pile of wood bark mulch delivered, and that's already become soil, more or less. It's totally laced with fungus and breaking down. Similarly, other material I started composting in the fall has already become soil, so it seems like this load of chips will serve as a matrix for other compost rather than providing much nutrients itself.

 I think the key point of Ruth Stout's method or Gautschi's method is the same--the traditional way we conceive of gardening or farming is just incorrect. Gardening is really all about soil building, and soil building is not really difficult. It's the natural course of things. The idea that the complexity of the woods needs to be reduced to a sort of mathematical form--stripped bare soil tilled into uniform texture is just a delusion.

The first principles approach on the problem is to come up with an in-garden compost scheme that works for your area, your property, and the materials you have readily available. Our property is mostly wooded. The forest builds the soil with leaves and twigs and animal waste and tree roots.

There are places in our woods where the leaves completely smother the soil, but in 99% of the woods, the leaves and trees form a hummus producing mixture. It seem like a mix of twigs, sticks, and leaves leads to decomposition to nice soil, where a mat of leaves with no routes for air produces something like a tarp that kills plants. So basically, we just have to reproduce that mixture and avoid that tarp-like-mat composting and it should be successful.

Squirrel Net Solar Wifi Network

original concept

I've wanted to do a hands-on solar project for several years and finally got around to it. My original concept was to mount a small panel on an enclosure that also serves as a squirrel or bird house. I built the enclosure and powered it with a small solar panel (25 watts) and a 7 Amp*Hour battery.

With winter weather and sun conditions, the battery and panel were not able to last through a couple of overcast days, so I quadrupled the panel capacity to 100 Watts and jumped to a 100 Amp*Hour battery. The larger panel seems to be a necessity. On a cloudy, snowy day where the sun isn't visible through the clouds, the panel can collect 8-10 Watts.

The Raspberry Pi is only drawing 4-10 Watts, so the system is able to top the battery off every day during peak sun hours.

The concept of attaching the panel and battery to a birdhouse or squirrel house is not practical. The battery weighs too much (70 pounds for a lead acid 100 Ah battery) and the panel is 2 feet x 4 feet, more or less.

current concept

The smaller battery and panel would work for a load that's not running 24/7. However, I wanted to use the Raspberry Pi as a wildlife/security cam system too, which will run 24/7, so the overcapacity is necessary.

From the cost perspective, it probably would make sense to basically have a solar power station back in the woods and power cables running around... but that's also pretty bad aesthetically.

After a trial run of a couple of months with the current design (at right), I'll do another iteration that's back farther in the woods. I think I need four additional hotspots to cover the entire property.

Chair Factory Falls

Jordan Creek is a tributary of Big Creek that drains the area around Girdled Road between 608 and just west of Ravenna Road. It's really inconspicuous until it gets close to Big Creek. Lake Metroparks has a trail off the Greenway that visits the Chair Factory Falls, where there use to be a Chair Factory in the early 1900s.

Big Creek and its tributaries used to be bustling with commercial and industrial activity in those days, which is actually sort of hard to imagine when you walk around or drive around the region today.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information available about the chair factory, other than an interpretive sign at the park. The site was probably a strategic location back in those days--water power, access to a railroad, and access to local markets via roads. Not a trace remains of the chair factory which stood right next to the spot where the photo at  the left was taken.

Investing in Soil

Cross Section of Humus and Topsoil
in the Woods

A few weeks ago, a falling limb gouged a foot deep hole in the forest floor in our woods. It provided a good glimpse at the different soil layers and showed how thick the humus layer is in the woods compared to our yard, which has probably been treeless for 100+ years.

In that particular spot in the woods, the humus layer is several inches thick. The organic material decomposed to dirt, but it's mixed with all kinds of failed-young tree roots, thousands of seeds from nearby black cherry trees, the carcasses of old leaves, sticks, twigs, animal waste, etc...

It's possible that humus layer has been undisturbed by human activity, but my guess is it was farmed in the past centuries, so it might only be 100 years old more or less.

It seems like almost all the animal and insect and plant activity that goes on in the woods builds the soil. Small mammals dig tunnels that aerate the topmost soil. Deer leave their waste and also aerate the soil with their sharp hooves. They also mechanically break down old rotting limbs and trees by stepping on them or kicking them. They're all in on the project, whether they want to be or not, of building soil.

The forest floor is a mostly better at dealing with heavy rain or snow melt than the rest of the yard, which has been covered in grass for several decades. Rain or snow turns the yard into a mud pit, while the forest floor is well drained. Previous owners of our property allowed some patches of the yard to revert to scrubby new forests--mostly juneberries and young ash and maples. When the rest of the yard is totally saturated, those patches remain stable.

We've got christmas trees growing on a part of the yard and they grow rapidly, but it might make sense to allow rapidly growing trees, like juneberry take over open spots so they can start to deploy their root network and help break up compacted or very poorly drained areas.

Some Local History and Our Farm

Huntoon Road from 1900 to Today

When settlers moved into Geauga County in the early 1800s they relied on waterways for transportation and power for industries. The early part of the 1800s was the era of the canal and water wheel. A creek, like Big Creek, or even a modest stream like Jordan Creek could power a small enterprise's saws and power hammers, or turn a grist mill, or a wool mill.

The GIF at the top of the page shows the end result of a shift away from waterways being important. The part of Huntoon Road, which used to descend to the forge in "Howe's Hollow" (aka Liberty Hollow), is abandoned, then cut by I90 (and the railroad disappearing into the Green Way). In the early settlement days, the topographic features and water features defined how people related to the land. In our time, waterways and topography are barely noticed out the window of a car as we drive to a job in the city.

The people back then used renewable energy, but they were as far from being "green" or environmentally conscious as is possible. They made no effort to adapt their methods to their new home. They were human locusts.

By 1900 they'd cut down every single tree of commercial value and converted it into money and converted almost all the forested land into farmland or pasture. They literally killed every animal they could trap or put a bullet in. White tail deer, which we're so used to seeing all the time, were hunted to extirpation in a few decades. It boggles the mind that elk, bears, and bobcats once lived here in abundance. When you read their journals and histories written at the time (or shortly thereafter) it's apparent that they not only wiped out species that were competitors to their agricultural endeavors, or that had commercial value, they killed animals out of total wanton desire to kill. They put a bounty on squirrel pelts! Nature was their enemy.

It's pretty hard to imagine what was lost. Ten thousand years of primeval forest floor must have produced an incredibly rich and productive soil. The settlers turned that soil into food, pasture land, and of course money until it was washed away year after year. The lumber was milled for wood for local use (or to be shipped to other markets), but most of it was just burned. A tiny portion of that ash was used for fertilizer or to make household chemicals, but most went into the fields.

1906 Topographic Map

By 1900 newspaper accounts showed regrets at what was lost and communities started to change course. Also the patterns of land use started shifting toward our modern use. The property that Red Squirrel Farm occupies is on a tributary of Big Creek on what used to be a farm. (likely area of the old farm shown above. It was subsequently subdivided numerous times.) There are trees on our property that are almost certainly predate 1906, but most of the land was probably clear cut and used for agricultural fields or pasture land for dairy cows.

We've been here a year and we're in the very early stages of deciding on a direction or even trying to figure out what it means to "manage" woods and land like this. We've investigated the tree-farm scheme that the State of Ohio supports, but we're not interested in doing commercial timber harvesting or production. If you spend a lot of time in the woods and try to understand it in its own terms rather than look at the trees as a crop, the conclusions about what to do (if anything at all) are completely different than the commercial foresters approach.