Fall Garden Update.

Yeah yeah, I know; Long delay since the last post; but things here at the farm are chaotic as usual. People come and go, Shaina left for a month to work in new england. Its just Andrew and Myself at the farm right now. Our main effort was and still is maintaining and developing our horticulture endeavors.

The fall garden is doing great.

The barren field from two months ago, looks like this today:


The mulching was superb and most of the weeds are under control. Further more, the thickness of the hay layer means greater water retention which means less watering for us. We water no more often than once every three days. The fact that the plants are in straight rows ease the process even more. Less work for us, Less water bills for duel. Perfect.

And now, we'll take a little walk through the garden and show you our precious plants.

The Holy Vegetable

Yes yes, the staple of the farm and our key player from last market season is with us yet again. This "Vegetable Of The Gods" has proved its worth to us once again and was one of the first plants to show us first beautiful honey colored morsels.

Garlic

Three Big beds full with healthy looking garlics. We approximately have at least 350 plants. Wonderful!

Mustard Greens

Very prolific and robust plants, but alas; they are just standing there and begging to be used for something. The leaves are extremely spicy for regular human tongues (Although Turman And Mr. Fiddler would munch the whole field in a few days.) We tried cooking them but their zest yet remains. Any ideas?

Cucumbers

The plants have started climbing slowly on our own made sustainable bamboo trellises. A lot of blooms and many more cucumbers to come.

Zucchinis

We caged some of the plants and left the other one's untouched to compare the results. Looks good so far.

Lettuces

Looks great. Half of a row of these guys.

Onions

Two beds full of onions. We think we are going to have about 150 plants.

Beans

We have three rows of those guys. Three different varieties of beans. We are going to eat the first batch in a week or two.

Cabbage

Looking good. Still far from ready but they are extremely frost tolerant so no worries there.

BEETS!!!

Yeah beets! Hell yeah! For some reason we thought it would be a great idea to plant SIX beds full of beets. We later reconsidered and shrank the operation in to two beds.

Peas

Our original three rows of peas became just one after the hurricane ripped a whole bunch of them. The remaining row looks relatively good but not as healthy and dense as our other plants. The half assed trellises we made out of a few T Posts and a wire failed to deliver. We learned.

Tomatoes

The plants look very healthy, green and tall. A few fruits and hundreds of blooms. Our main concern is the approaching frost. (estimated at the 15th of November) Without any doubt we planted them a little bit too late. We are going to try to use some rescue contraptions as floating row covers. It is going to be interesting.

Mesculine

The greens not the drug. Tastes like lettuce but with a mild zest to it. We like it.

Drama Alert

Are you ready for this? Today we planted under Marty's advice. FOUR HUNDRED STRAWBERRY PLANTS. Yes yes, gentle reader, you are not mistaken. If everything will go according to plan (which it never does, but you know...) we are going to have at least a cool one hundred gallons of organic strawberry goodness. It was long and painful: the tractor tiller broke and we had to till by hand, but I think it was and is totally worth it. In the mean while, you can enjoy these virtual berries.


That's all for this time. We think about maybe trying to go to the market in two weeks and hustle some veggies.

Peace,
Reed

Mega-Super-Happy-Fun-Time Glass Center Update!

(with pictures to come)

Things have been moving and shaking here at the Glass Center. With the end of the summer quickly approaching, a lot of people have arrived and quite a few have left. I’ll start off with a sincere "Thank you" and "Goodbye" to those that have made the Center what it is up to this point. So, from everyone here, adios Hugh, Jeff, Laura, Geoff, Tyler, Will, Virginny, and Kevin. You'll all be missed greatly.

Even with the departure of so many fantastic friends, we're very blessed to have an incredible group here. As of right now, the community consists of Reed, Shaina, Andrew, Josh, Michelle (who'll be manning the fort in Tyler), myself (Hi.. I'm Aaron, if we haven't met), and, of course, the idea man himself, Duel.

This is the perfect opportunity to let everyone know about our current recruitment initiative. Reed and I have been blanketing the "interweb" with ads looking for enthusiastic people wanting to stay here long term and make the Glass Center into the sort of community we all know it can become. You can see one of our ads here. If you are interested in coming out and working with us, please write us as soon as possible. Living space is filling up quickly.

As a new group learning to live and work together, we had to organize all of the responsibilities. Initially, we tried creating a chore chart where each chore would be signed off on after completion, but this created a lot of confusion and unequal distribution. Then we decided to sign up for chores at the beginning of the week, rather than checking them off as we do them. Now, every week we sit down to see who will do what. Each chore is worth a certain number of “points,” based loosely on Dancing Rabbit’s model. There are still some kinks to be worked out, but we're all pretty happy with the concept and think the chore chart is going to be valuable asset around here.

Thankfully, a major clean-up and organization of the property has been spearheaded by the wonderful Shaina. With the help of Reed, she started by cleaning and "prettifying" the cabin home. From there, the ever-busy Shaina and I tackled the infamous workshop. This was sorely in need of some clean-up. It's fantastic to know what tools, materials, and supplies we have available, not to mention, being able to actually find them. She has also been continually mowing, edging, weeding, cleaning, and just making our home completely more bearable.

One of the greater recent accomplishments is our new giganto-garden. Reed has moved forward with planting for the fall season. Not wanting to do anything in small measure, we planted a wealth of tastiness. Hopefully, in a few months we'll be seeing... get ready for this... lettuce, broccoli, mesculine, tomatoes, beets, radishes, carrots, peas (two varieties), beans (three varieties), zucchini, sunflowers, cucumbers, and cabbage... whew. With Reed at the wheel, we'll be eating like vegetarian royalty and, if the fates smile on us, making a few dollars at market as well.

Speaking of the market, I should mention our wonderful experience with East Texas Fresh. It ended a few weeks ago and we can't say thanks enough to everyone involved. We learned quite a bit, made some reinvestment money, and made some friends along the way. Hopefully, we will be involved again this October, so come out and say hello! Of all the things that this market did for us, the top of the list would be allowing us to meet the great Moon Yah. He has been a fountain of knowledge and just a genuinely good friend.

Moon Yah has also been a boon to the Glass Center through his sale of thirty Plymouth Rock chickens to us. You may have seen the "Bear Tractor" in an earlier post. Well, now the tractor has ten residents happily weeding, debugging, and fertilizing our blackberries. The remaining twenty chickens are shacking up with our pet, Lone Chicken, in the pen.

We would love to move the all of our chickens out to garden, but we cannot seem to get the electric fencing working correctly. Once this obstacle is overcome, we’ll have a fleet of chicken workers in the field. Also regarding chickens, we have had no eggs in the past few days. I think the problem has been solved with purchase of the correct feed, but we’ll have to wait and see. Stay tuned for updates.

Unfortunately, these are not the only sad things to report. We have recently lost all of the fish in our second tank of the aquaculture project. Josh had, rather heroically, decided make the aquaculture and green house his personal mission. With his involvement in the zine, Little Brother, he was called away to Colorado to cover the Democratic National Convention. During his absence, things went downhill quickly. Some good can be taken from this, though. I have gotten over my personal fear of aquaculture and taken a genuine interest in the project; tank one is looking better than it has in a while, and Josh has chance to have a clean start with tank two when he returns.

…back to happiness: the goat milking stanchion is complete and training has commenced. We’ve actually milked Dorothy a bit, but she is not too happy about it. Training, breeding, and milking the goats will be a long term activity, and when all is said and done, we’ll have our own milk, cheese, scented soap and, possibly “cabrito.”

Yet another move toward the positive is the hot compost system, initiated by Shaina. We are going to layer, solarize, and flip our compost every four days. There will be eight piles rotating through a cycle that lasts 32 days total. Once the first cycle is complete, we’ll have a fresh pile of beautiful earth every four days.

Well, there you have it. Life at the Glass Center as it stands. Keep an eye out for more updates, and, please comment or email if you have any suggestions or questions.

Peace.

Comic Journal 8/31

If your interested in seeing the rest of my journal and art, go here... http://aaronbir.deviantart.com

Comic Journal 8/26 - 8/27

Okay... This is my first post on the famous Glass Center Blog, so please... be gentle.

Before I came out here to NE Texas, I use to keep a comic journal. I would pick the most interesting thing that happened during the day and make a short comic strip out of it. I've decided to start this once again. Since a lot of my life currently centers (no pun intended) around the the Glass Center, I will be posting the strips that apply. Hope you enjoy them. Here are the first two...

guatemalan biodiesel

I was studying Spanish in Guatemala when I noticed an article in a local magazine about a biodiesel startup. Although I had 1 day left in the country, I sent an email to the email address on the article. 24 hours later I was getting the full tour from the head of the organization, while he prepared his last 80-gallon batch of the week.
Alejandro Del Valle's plant produces 500 gallons of biodiesel per week, to service 12 vehicles from the municipal government of Antigua, Guatemala. His starting ingredient (waste vegetable oil) comes from Antigua and Guatemala City, primarily from restaurants that had previously been pouring their used oil into the street gutters. Valle uses a processor that was manufactured in Holland, which can fully react 80 gallons of biodiesel in about 45 minutes.

The most empowering thing that I learned was the following: this organization existed for 6 months before they began collecting oil, and 12 more months until they started processing it.
For us at the Glass Center, this is important. Since our biodiesel production is still not off the ground, we are inspired by this profound first step: start collecting oil.

It makes complete sense, since biodiesel comes after oil... but so far we have been so focused on the actual product (the biodiesel) that we've lost sight of the process that gets us there. Collect oil now, process it later.

I have digressed.

It was a tremendous privilege to meet Alejandro, and I hope to maintain a solid tie with his Guatemalan alternative energy organization.

puppies!

Sparky had 8 of them last week, and we're waiting 7 more weeks before trying to distribute the hybrid bundles of love into suitable homes... want one?

On a related note, Sparky will be spayed during late September, for the sake of sustainability.

Bear Tractor (chicken tractor)

Soon Reed will make a more thorough post about this, but I cannot resist sharing this picture of our finished product:
(A chicken tractor is basically a movable chicken pen, and we have built one that could probably house a family of bears.)

*UPDATE*

We've been using the chicken tractor for a couple of weeks now, and I made a short video of me and Aaron moving the chickens to a fresh spot. Here's the video:

A wonderful visit from our friend Cory

thanks to reed for the use of his camera, and to sarah for her camerawork
here is cory's myspace

Lots of squash, fire

Last week we grew over 150 pounds of squash, partially because we didn't realize how often peak squash needs to be harvested (about every other day; we were harvesting every 4 days). Most of the larger stuff doesn't sell as well in market, but we all still enjoy it (Reed: "it is immoral not to eat squash at every meal")


In other news, we had a fire at the farm. No major damage was done, except for the tractor/mower that started the fire.


Nick can probably tell the story better than I can, but basically he was mowing when the tractor caught on fire (perhaps because the grass was bunching up underneath the mower, but we still don't really know why). Nick ran and called 911, and a fire truck came pretty promptly.

We had to babysit the fire for another 12 hours or so, since it kept trying to resurrect itself from the coals. Probably about 1/4 acre burned, which has since been tilled in preparation for planting!

back at the farm

I'm back at the farm for the first time in 6 months, and it's crazy to see how much has changed. For example, look at this before&after of the blackberry field:
We've also had a few changes in our web presence. Michelle is still doing fantastic work on the website, and Reed & Kevin have been giving regular updates on the google group. If anyone wants to join the google group, send an email to community@glasscenter.org and we'll set you up.

New Season at Glass Farm

A lot is being done to prepare for the change in seasons. The Texas summer sun is too hot for many plants currently in the greenhouse, and we're working hard to transplant them outside. Crops are starting to fruit, and we have gotten tomatoes, radishes, and the biggest zucchinis I've ever seen. Collectively, we've learned a lot this spring, and we will be better prepared to come into the fall season, Texas' second growing season.

A lot of other things have changed at the Glass community. Hugh moved to our community in Tyler, so I've taken over the greenhouse. Jeff will stay on the farm every other week, the other week out of town. We have two new members, or maybe I should say returning members, Tyler and Laura. They have been on the farm before, and they are returning to spend a while at the Glass Center.

The situations with the farm animals has changed, too. The goats now live down the street at the quonset hut. We were given 4 more hens and a rooster. The chickens have gotten out of the pen and now live free-range around the coop. The good news is that we have a hen brooding 18 eggs (!) which will surely give us a few baby chicks. The bad news is that the chickens are in danger from predators when they are outside the pen, and the goats are running out of food. The solution is to have movable fencing systems that can be put over land that we need the chickens and goats to feed off of.

Things are starting to heat up, and jumping in the lake looks like a better idea every day. Hopefully Texas summer won't be any worse than Florida summer.

Chickens

Chickens are great. I'm not sure why we didn't have these little magical egg producers before, but I'm sure glad we have them now.

Reed and I visited a local Chapel Hill farm where a nice couple, Tony and Caroline raise chickens and sheep. It was a riot to see these free range birds laying eggs in trees and even funnier when we chased them down to catch them.

I worked out a barter for some valued plants in exchange for 5 chickens and we took them home to the farm. At first they lived in the goat pin before we made a chicken coop out of recycled building material.

After taking Tony's advice of picking up the hens and throwing them into the coop every night for protection, the little obedient birds are doing it themselves automatically and are already laying eggs in the roost. We have gotten over a dozen eggs in less than a week, without even needing to feed them.

We plan on extending our operation with more hens and a rooster to hopefully maintain a sustainable population of this eggselent source of protein.

Garden and Aquaponics

Spring has come and everything at the farmer is getter greener. The water is starting to warm up, and trees are lively and awake. We’ve also had lots of rain to fill up the lake completely, causing the spillway to become a roaring waterfall gushing with foam.

Jeff and I have started to find our niche in some projects that we deem the most important – me with gardening and aquaponics, Jeff with blackberries. I’ll let him explain the blackberries sometime but now I’d like to share some information about aquaponics.

This relatively new field is based on creating a symbiotic relationship between plants and bacteria with fish. Our 1500 gallon fish tanks have been filled with lake water and 12-14 Tilapia. (We started small because once they get started, Tilapia are known to put rabbits to shame.) The water is cycled, along with all the effluent and emulsion from the fish, through this tank and into the growbeds for plants. The water then passes through a bio-filter, a fancy name for media on which bacteria is housed, to transform the nitrates and nitrites the fish produce into nitrogen for the plants to use. After the water is filtered, it is pumped back into the fish tank to aerate the water for the happy Tilapia. This recirculating aquasystem is designed for minimum input (tilapia are great protein converters), with virtually no waste, and is a great way to grow food organically without the use of chemical fertilizers. Once we can find a way to grow the fish food in the system it will truly become an integrated, sustainable approach to food production.

In addition to aquaponics, Michelle and I have made our own potting soil from decomposed pine bark mulch, decomposed manure, peat moss and some sand for the raised beds and greenhouse plants. They seem to love the concoction and have begun to flourish. Here is a link to the web album to view photos of some of the gardening progress.
http://picasaweb.google.com/HughADaniel/GlassCenterGardening
Unfortunately Michelle’s job calls her away from the farm, but she has been an inspiration for all and I am optimistic about continuing what we have started together.

We're Sailing!

My first time to blog recounts another first for me - sailing.

The story is a heroic one, involving some great cooperation at the farm. After Duel read the post about the sailboat, he became inspired. He walked down to where the boat was "sleeping" and saw an opportunity. Although a tree was literally growing through the boat trailer, plants growing inside the boat, and lichen forming on its ropes, he believed that it could be salvaged.

I watched as he grabbed an axe from the cabin and proceeded to chop down the pine tree that mysteriously grew around the metal frame holding up the boat. After the tree was felled, we counted 12 rings giving a little bit of insight to how long it had been since the boat was functional. He then proceeded, with help from Sarah, to clean out all of the pine leaves that had accumulated before bleaching its exterior. It was amazing to see the transformation that occurred in just a few hours.

The boat stayed like this for a few days until Michelle, a new Glass Center member, serendipitously found the sail inside a random closet. It was all coming together, but none of us even knew how to sail! After researching it for a few hours we got the boat in the water and I discovered one of the great joys in life - sailing. It felt exhilarating to get into open water, wind blowing through my hair, trekking speedily along without producing any pollution in the wake.

We might not have an idea which direction is starboard, but that doesn't stop us from sailing here at Glass Lake.

SAIL THIS BOAT

The Glass Center is looking for someone with an interest in wind-powered transportation, even if they can only come over on weekends to enjoy the lake.

We have a boat with a tree practically growing through it, but other than that (and its ragged sail) it should be in decent working condition... my uneducated prognosis would call for a few hundred dollars and an afternoon of enjoyable labor.

Come over and take a look. (This includes you, Mom)

Moving Right Along...

So what have we been up to lately? Plenty of things:

We've had a fun filled and eventful winter break out at the farm. Plenty of new friends have been made, new things have been created, and residents have come (and gone).

We were lucky to have two great people out for most of their break from school at Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches. Geoff, a former resident and frequent guest, and Shaina, a new friend and excellent cook. They've both gone back to school now, but will remain (hopefully) as active members of the community.

In addition to these more or less full time guests, we had several people in and out for much of December. We got a lot of things accomplished with their help. Thanks to Laura especially for helping me paint and organize the cabin a bit.

Founding Glass Center member Will has left us to continue his education. He is sorely missed out here, but I wish him the best with his studies. I suspect he'll be back out before too terribly long for a visit and an evaluation of our progress.

In other news, we have a new member, Hugh. Hugh is a recent graduate from The University of Texas and is currently preparing himself for Law School this fall. Hugh will be undertaking the task of more or less building our horticultural activities from the ground up. We're lucky to have him as he already has quite a bit of experience gardening and is passionate about learning as much as he can about it.

I've been trying to keep myself busy and motivated in the right directions. We've come along ways on the new greenhouse, which has been a great learning experience for all of us. I've never been in charge of such a large scale construction project. It's been interesting- and next time we do something like this it will be that much easier!

We've been able to make some progress with our local food usage, which is great since we aren't producing on the farm just yet. We picked up a ton of persimmons from a guy in Henderson which we've preserved and canned. No more Welch's on my PB&J's; just persimmon jam! Which brings me to another item; I picked up a good load of pecans from my grandparent's trees in Tyler. I've been trying to shell pecans anytime I've had a spare moment and will be attempting to make some pecan butter (we'll see how that turns out). Throw that onto some homemade bread (even though right now we aren't using local flour) and we've got an all natural, local meal.

A recent discovery is how delicious homemade pickles are. Thanks Shaina. We also have Shaina to thank for getting us into Kombucha, which is a fermented green tea beverage that has all kinds of health benefits such as increased immune system function. Plus, it's delicious!


Me explaining a little of the Brewing Process to Geoff.


Hugh and I have pretty much jumped head first into all-grain brewing, using crushed grains instead of malt extract. It takes a little bit more time and some more equipment, but I expect the results to be just fantastic. We'll have to wait just a bit longer before we'll know for sure. We currently have nearly 15 gallons of beer in various stages of fermenting. Some people might say we have a little bit of an obsession...

Currently fermenting:
IPA
Sam Adam's Lager Copy
Writeover Ale- this is an experiment using the second runnings from our IPA, various unused hops laying around, and some expired bread yeast. We'll see about all this...

I guess the final big thing is that I have returned to school. After a year and a half sabbatical I have decided to continue my studies, this time at SFA as an Environmental Science major. So I'll be commuting to Nacogdoches a few days a week all the while maintaining my duties around here as best I can. I think it will be an ideal situation for me. I hope my studies there will help me understand the farm a little better, and vice versa.