Our big winter project is framing out the garden beds with old boards. I started using board and batten scrap left over from siding the barn, and am now tearing down a neighbor's old chicken coop for boards. Most are usable, by doubling up the 1x's - those that aren't will become firewood. Considering how poorly our hated Homelite chainsaw is currently functioning, any additional firewood that falls from the sky is worth burning.
3 out of 9 beds are done so far. They're terraced in sections due to the slope to the west. Between them are the nice concrete pathways from the old double-wide foundation. The beds aren't so much raised as given a form to hold them in place. Before we'd constantly had good fertile soil washing off the mounded beds into the pathways. And once summer hit the plants had gotten so huge and sprawling the garden turned into a jungle we could barely wade through.
I'd read the best way to put a garden to bed for winter is to give it a bath, something to eat, something to drink, and a blanket. This means cleaning out all the old plant debris to compost, adding a couple of bins of finished compost - for the blanket, either moldy hay from the floor of the barn, or shredded composting leaves we'd had around a fruit tree that was used for growing potatoes [which the voles mostly ate]. And for water, graywater from the sink and rinsewater from the fodder. This will go out in rotation to the fallow beds through the winter. In the same analogy, the beds need plenty of water to digest their food. Unfortunately the Dishmate soap with only one ingredient we've been using isn't all-natural like we'd thought after some research. So we'll switch to Dr. Bronner's.
We'll be adding some true raised beds to the north and east side of the garden - probably a series of 4x8's or 4x10's with 3' pathways between them. These beds will be made with 2x12 's, so a foot high, and filled with topsoil removed from where the cabin porch will go, and compost which we've accumulated massive amounts of with the humanure, the poultry, the goats, kitchen waste, weeds, and grass clippings. We fill a 5'x5' bin every 60 days.
With me working full-time this summer we got way behind in the garden and never had the chance to get up our row tunnels. It didn't make much of a difference though as our vole population has exploded. They can wipe out an entire garden bed in 2 nights. Late winter is the time to really go after them, when there's not much food - we'll try a combination of traps, bait, buckets of water, clear out as much mulch and debris as possible, and we're hoping giving some structure to the garden with all the raised beds will help. The common phrase I see over and over again in Permaculture is "productive mess". Unfortunately that's exactly the environment in which voles thrive. And they're now going after the trunks of our young fruit trees. Hopefully we can get it under control by spring.
On the flipside, we've got a forecast of lovely warm weather for the next week - we're already sick of the cold, and the constant freezing nights we have to cover the garden for and thaw animal water for are a hassle. Longer days too . . . we can get more done.
We have a lot of free time in the long winter evenings and have been reading Dr. Weston Price's 'Nutrition and Physical Degeneration'. He's a dentist that traveled the world in the 1930's and studied the teeth of indigenous and isolated rural people before and after they were exposed to modern foods. To sum it up . . . people eating a traditional whole food diet had nearly perfect health and teeth, and once exposed to modern foods such as white flour and sugar, they developed rampant dental caries and malformed dental arches, as well as crowded and irregular teeth - and other ailments such as arthritis and tuberculosis took over. It's a great read. Here's a link. We've so far cut out alcohol, caffeine, replaced white sugar with demerara and minimized it, and will soon get a hybrid manual/electric grain mill to start milling our own flour. The organic artisan-grown tobacco we smoke will probably be the last and hardest thing for us to give up.
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