Four Season Gardening, Part I

I have about 400 feet of perrenial beds. However, since these are relatively low maintenance, most of my time is spent on my vegetable garden. When I bought my house about eight years ago, the previous owner had three raised beds, each about 4X4 feet. They are arranged in a diagonal line. This year, for the first time I organized my planting. I put in a bed of herbs, 5 tomatoes (two cherry), a husk tomato and some rows of greens, carrots and radishes. The husk tomato is a really great plant. The fruit has a husk like a tomatillo and it looks like a yellow brown tomato about half the size of a typical cherry tomato. Its is unbelievably sweet when ripe, tasting like a cross between a tomato and a pineapple. When not quite ripe, it has a nutty flavor. It continues to produce until the first frost. The greens were a fiasco, we had an unusually dry and hot summer so the greens bolted almost before producing leaves. One batch of red lettuce did fine however. The herbs always do well and the basil was particularly good this year. This was my first year for carrots and they are working out great.

Anyway, I came across Eliot Coleman’s book on four season gardening. So this year I decided to expand my raised bed, build a cold box and plant some winter greens (swiss chard, spinach and greens). I’m almost through expanding my garden, using a combination of some new wood and some old wood from the raised bed, I built an 8X12 box around the old raised beds. I filled in the box with about 6-8 inches of rough compost from my compost pile (more on that another day). I finished the bed off with a couple of inches of screened compost from my pile. I’m going to start with a 4×6 foot cold box. So I planted four rows of seeds. Then we stared getting the perfect rain and temperature so my seeds germinated pretty quickly. The only problem is that in the meantime either the birds or squirrels decided there were easy pickings in my bed so I lost about half my planted seeds.

We have a week of warm weather forecast, so I am going to try to replant some of the rows.

Future posts will include the building of the cold box, my composting and of course updates on my winter garden.

First Crack at an Ubuntu Computer

My eldest son (age 10) has been asking for a new computer.  However, experience has shown that he primarily uses computers to play games.  I’ve been wanting to experiment with a Linux computer. Building my son a Linux based machine is the perfect solution.  I can experiment with Linux.  My son will have his own computer, at a low cost.  His gaming will be limited and I can give him access to the interenet without having to worry about viruses.  Also, he will have to learn a little about computers if he wants to make any changes to the environment or add any programs.

I started out by building a new box.  I took the advice of Thaed at Mental Interface http://thaed.wordpress.com/ and bought a biostar mother and AMD dual core chip.  With a gig of memory this ran about $175.  I had a power supply, but bought an inexpensive case.  I scrounged the keyboard, mouse and optical drive from old computers. So the only other cost for the computer was a harddrive which ran about $50 and a new screen.

 The build went smoothly. The next step is installing Ubuntu, my Linux choice, based on my own online research and the advice of Scott from Geek Nights, http://www.frontrowcrew.com/ .  I chose the Feisty Fawn for 32 bit machines.  Although my processor is 64 bit, it appears the the 32 bit version has more support.  On another PC I downloaded  Ubuntu and burned to a disk.  I put the disk into the new machine and Dos came up. Two hours later and a number of wasted CDs (I had another problem in that Nero sometimes has problems with InCD) I realized that I just need to burn a disk image and not a bootable disk.

 Finally, I burnt my disk correctly and Ubuntu loaded with no problems.

Next step, wireless networking with Ubuntu.

About this blog

In the course of my blog I will be discussing four main topics:  Gardening (in the Midwest), Cooking (which goes hand in hand with Gardening), Economics, and Ubuntu (for absolute beginners, like me).