Tater Talk

Like, you know, totally tuber-lar, dude!

Whaddya mean, half-baked idea?!

We like the spuds at the Ben-David farm.  We could have some potatoes prepared some way with at least one meal a day and we've been known to have them twice a day.  I like all kinds of potatoes.  Russet, small whites, Yukon gold, etc.  Twyla needs to stick to the red variety because they have about half the starch in contrast to the white kind.

While it probably seems imperceptible to most people, when you eat anything containing a lot of starch, it starts turning to sugar in your mouth.  This is because of an enzyme in your saliva called alpha amylase.  It begins breaking down the starch into the components maltose and dextrin.  Sorry for digressing like that, but I just love science.

Because ground space is limited, we want to get the most out of what we have.  Twyla found more info on the web about gardening by the foot, and while the straw bales work great for a lot of stuff, it's not the best method for taters.  It was a four hour ordeal the other day preparing the bed for the asparagus and all I did was dig out about 8 to 10 cubic feet of clay and granite.  I had already done about 10 cubic feet in the same area last fall.  It's back-breaking work. Anything I can do to avoid turning soil is a good thing.

The great thing about potatoes is the way they grow that makes them easy to manipulate.  If you just stick them in the ground, even with rich soil and let the leaves and stems grow naturally, you just have to hope they'll produce a lot of taters in the ground.  But you don't have to settle for that.  While some plants don't like to have their stems covered beyond a certain level, potatoes will just strive to grow up through whatever falls on them.  By taking advantage of this fact, and the fact that potatoes don't mind some lightly decomposing plant matter, you can really increase your yield.

I had disassembled the temporary chick run that we used when the chickens were little and was just about to take apart the last section when Twyla showed me the pictures for growing taters in containers.  That's when I realized what I needed to do.  We still have truckloads of decomposing leaves and pine straw in our yard and the neighbors yards.  So I set out this cage near the storage shed  where it should get a decent amount of sunlight.  I found an area under the dogwoods with a couple of wheelbarrow loads of good, rich topsoil.  I laid about a four inch layer of this mix in the cage and set about a dozen red seed potatoes in it.  It looks like this:

That's a four foot long drywall square for perspective.  The cage measures about 30" wide by about seven feet long and it's two feet tall.  That's a Gala apple tree in the foreground.  As the leaves and stems of the plants sprout up, I will just add more leaves and old compost at a rate of about a half inch to a couple of inches at a time.  Based on what Twyla has looked up on the web, we could have that whole cage full of about two hundred pounds of taters by the fall.  The seed spuds that I put in there are spaced about a foot apart, sort of in two rows, if you could call them that.  They are about six inches from the edge of the wire. You'll be able to see them better when the plant tops come up.

One of the reasons this technique works so well is that the plants don't have to work very hard against the weight or compactedness of regular soil to produce the tubers.  Far more nutrients and a high nitrogen content is in a mostly compost medium.  Tubers don't have to compete so much for the nutrients.  At the end of the growing season, all I'll have to do to get to my spuds is unfasten the corner of the fencing and pull it apart to get to the spuds.

I'll have to write myself a reminder to take pictures at the various stages, so at the end of the growing season my readers will be able to see the whole process and how high the yield is by using this method.

My other chores today included fixing a tire, planting some more zucchini seedlings, and butchering four chickens.  The three smallest hens and one rooster.  The hens were laying really small eggs and Twyla and I were very tired of that temporary coop.  It had to go.  The other hens got distributed to the other movable coops.

I'm working on the post about Yeshua's death and resurrection.  Stay tuned.

Chicken Arks

A beloved reader of this blog wanted more info on the chicken arks.  I also know of a dear lady friend who wants chickens, but her hubby is against the idea, ostensibly due to predators.  So herein, I will give some more detail about the arks and why they are working so well for us.  I will also give some basic instruction on the construction of said these movable coops.

Being very limited on capital resources, the goal was to make these arks in the cheapest possible manner while still meeting the requirements of A) not losing any chickens the the various predators, B) providing the highest nutritional standards of fresh vegetation and "other" natural foods besides the cracked corn and laying pellets, C) being able to move the chickens around the yard which both provides the fresh greenery and fertilizes future planting ground.

Most of the wood that went into the construction of these arks was salvage wood that I merely asked for and received from somebody down the road who had it laying out near a barn.  There are lots of such places in the area, and we have many more ideas for the use of such wood, but that's a subject for another post.  The point is: you can get a lot of stuff for free if you are just willing to ask.  The lumber was old pressure treated decking, well-weathered.  This is important, because you would never want to use fresh PT wood as something that the critters would be in constant contact with, due to the chemicals involved.  I think it is safe to say that this wood has since had most of the bad stuff leached out of it.  Of course, it is only the wood that is used for framing of the arks.  We had to buy some 1/4 inch oriented strand board (OSB) for the bottom and sides.  A  4' x 8' sheet costs about $8 (your price may vary).  I got the basic plan by googling "raising chickens" and came across http://www.raising-chickens.org/chicken-tractor.html which has a series of somewhat detailed photos to show you the basic design.  The size of their ark was too small for my tastes.  I wanted a design that would hold six chickens comfortably and provide at least a day's worth of grazing space.

I started with the idea that I wanted the base to be 4 feet by 8 feet for each ark holding six chickens a piece. That provides 5.33 square feet per chicken.  Now, if you are thinking  that seems like a tiny amount of space per chicken, just keep in mind that the chickens that lay your store bought eggs just sit in a cubical just big enough to lay their eggs and are just fed and watered by some machinery.  Our chickens get fresh air, sunshine, stray bugs, our personal attention and petting.  We pay attention to how much fresh vegetation they get.  And my next post will probably gross most of you out when it comes to feeding chickens.

We bought a hundred foot roll of the 48" rectangular wire fencing material.  I still have enough left to do a couple of more arks or to create cages of some other sort. The reason for using this instead of chicken wire is because it seems more open, but it is much stronger against predators than chicken wire. We have too many cats around here right now for snakes to be an issue.

There is enough space in the "loft" for a dozen chickens to roost, but there are only six, so they have plenty of room.  There is an opening in the middle of the floor with a ramp attached with hinges underneath. There is a rope and a pulley that I use to draw the ramp up to the floor when I need to move the ark. I attached a standard rope cleat on the end to secure the rope.  The pulley is hard to see in the photo.Ark One is about 40 percent heavier than Ark II because I was experimenting with design and what I learned from the first model, I applied to the second. To move the arks I made a single axle to place under one end of an ark when I want to move it.  It's very simple. Just a 2 x 4 with a couple of utility wheels fastened on with "shoulder" type lag screws; 3/8" diameter by 3" long, with flat washers. You should know that Twyla doesn't have the strength to move either of these arks.  I think most healthy men and some women could, but you need enough strength to pick up one end and use your foot to position the axle and then pick up and move the ark with the fixed handles at the other end.  If you are going to build one of these contraptions, you need to size it accordingly.

Once again, if you have any questions or comments, please leave them below.  Thanks for stopping by the farm.