Grow a Sustainable Diet: Planning and Growing to Feed Ourselves and the Earth by Cindy Conner Page A

and peppers in those, set them on my washing screen, and spray with a hose. The tub caught the water, which drained into the buckets. If I had something small like cherry tomatoes or snap beans, I added a piece of quarter-inch hardware cloth, sized to fit inside the tray. That way none of the small vegetables fell through. Once drained, the produce could be packed for the market, with minimal handling in the washing process. If I hadn’t had those plastic bread trays, I would have made picking trays from wooden 2 × 4s and half-inch hardware cloth.

    The washing station I have now contains a stainless steel free-standing sink that I found at a yard sale years ago. I clamped a hose onto the pipe going to one of the faucets so I actually have running water there — when the hose is turned on. A bucket by the drain catches the water. I don’t have as large a quantity of produce to clean at one time for our kitchen as I did for the market, but I still think it is a valuable part of the garden. I can wash and cut vegetables for the solar food dryers, filling the dryer trays right in the garden. Since it is not in the shade, this spot needs a roof. We have made a structure out of bamboo, which is fun, but it will eventually be replaced with a permanent metal roof, like the one I’ll put on the garden shed, with gutters to direct the rainwater. I have put down bricks as a floor to define the space. Long range plans for under this roof include an earth oven.
    Coldframe
    My coldframes are designated places to start seeds for transplant production and used all year long, not just when protection from the weather is needed. We harvest lettuce for the table from there from the fall until time to plant the seeds for the early spring crops. Our hardier winter-harvested greens are under low tunnels in the garden. You can build coldframes from just about anything. All you need is some type of surround to hold the glazing, which could be a piece of clear plastic, an old window, or a specially built top. The sides need to be high enough to provide growing room, but not so high that they shade the inside. I recommend you read Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman for a better understanding of season extension. The 12-Month Gardener by Jeff Ashton is also a good read to get your creative juices flowing for designing your season extension structures. Trust your instincts and use what is available. If you are growing on a large scale and have many structures, you will want to have more uniformity of size to make your work easier, but use what you have to get started. If what you build doesn’t perform to your expectations, study it so you can learn for the next time.
    Chicken House
    I’m not going to tell you how to build a chicken house, but there are a lot of books out there that will. I will, however, tell you the best tips that I followed for my chicken house way back when. Gene Logsdon’s Practical Skills was published in 1985, the year after we bought our five acre farm. Logsdon suggested making it possible to divide the chicken’s living area into two, allowing you to separate your flock. I did and have been pleased with the arrangement ever since. The top of the divider is made from 2″ × 4″ fencing. The bottom of the divider is solid, but can be removed. It is connected to a post on each side with one nail at each place — these are easily pounded out if I want to open up the space. Once my chicks come out of the brooder (an old chicken tractor with a heat lamp) at about a month old, they go into the smaller of the two areas made by that divider. The chicks in this pen have their own run that has smaller wire than the rest of the outside enclosure. All the chickens, young and old, can see each other. When the young ones are ready to join the flock, I take out the divider. Logsdon’s plan shows a larger chicken house with a door between the spaces.
    We already had an existing building for a chicken house, or rather, three sides