Growing Local

In response to my little survey, not as of this posting completed and what's in my head this rainy day, I have decided to write at least partly about compost. Compost has more than one definition and it seems to mean something else in different areas.

In the United States, we tend to think of everything that we throw into a compost heap as compost. In more British areas, I believe that they tend to think of the final product from a compost heap, and potting soil as compost. I have had a few clients ask me if I can deliver some 'soil' to their garden for topping when what they really mean is 'compost'. All that really matters is that you reader, wherever you are understand what I am saying.

OK, so where was I? Growing local, yes, I am trying to establish a self-sufficient garden, but I have imported a lot of material into it. The 1st is compost, meaning the final product. I get mine from a local source, Agrecycle. I also use Agrecycle to dispose of yard debris, both my own when it's bulky, and that of clients. They compost it and sell it right back to me. So that means that the compost that I have topped my garden with is local.

I also supplement my garden with various fertilizers. I am not a scientist but I try to balance out my various plants need, especially my tomatoes. This year I am finding it easier to fertilize them with my bokashi, which because it allows meat and cheese waste, is richer than other self-produced fertilizer. I also have buried a lot of pet hair and some alpaca fleece waste(I started spinning last fall after I acquired some very inexpensive western Pennsylvania raw alpaca fleece).

I became very interested in hair and other things composed of keratin after I heard about smartgrow. Smartgrow is simply a mat made out of human hair which sounds really bizarre. I won't explain it here, visit their site. Anyway, it seemed to me that I could replicate smart grow results just by using my hair, my pet's hair and all the alpaca waste I accumulated when I carded my fleece.

Anyway, It occurred to me today that not only am I reducing the waste I am producing but I am truly turning my garden into a locally grown garden in more ways than I thought. And by doing so I am greatly reducing my carbon footprint. I am also reducing my fertilizing costs.

And I haven't even discussed my rainbarrel project. There are multiple levels in which that is beneficial. But that is a future post.

Chicken soup and other things

I love chicken soup in any kind of weather. Given my mass quantities of fennel, is as you see here, a primary ingredient, roots included. Also floating is fresh basil and fresh bay laurel, oregano, all from my garden. I don't have many onions.

This is a dragonwing begonia. I got it in a 4 inch pot on impulse.

Here's the same pot about 3 weeks ago. I think it is twice as large.

These are I believe, the same variety of mint, peppermint I think. I hope you notice that the sprig in my hand is greener. The pale mint is from a planting from last year while the green was potted this year. Clearly the old pot is becoming deficient of some things including nitrogen. I just added a little bit of dried cow blood to help it get back some vigor, but it probably needs some more help.

I suppose I won't talk about soil in depth here, but I do encourage all to look closely at your plants as they can't tell you what their needs are. Testerday somebody found this blog after doing a search for "enriching poor soil." Today it seems that this blog is #2 for that inquiry of blogs.

In this case the question is "fertilizing potted plants." There are many possible solutions, so don't take mine as the final answer but I occasionally lime my pots a bit, because the soil has a high organic content which turns acidic as it breaks down. Sometimes I fertilize with a seaweed mixture and very often I use some bokashi juice. If it is a plant with certain specific needs I may add some other things. Also, as the soil breaks down, the soil level in the pot goes down. I generally top it with some compost.

I have noticed that this year my beds seem to be in better shape, my plants seem to be less needy than they were last year. I guess I am doing something right.

Here we have a bunch of chamomile that is ready for harvest. Notice the round yellow balls with the white petals tucked under. When your chamomile blooms look like that, it's tea time! Pop them off and either make some tea or put them in a brown paper bag to dry out.

How much compost do I need?

Maybe this should be in the sidebar but it is an important consideration. I keep putting off writing about this because it's kinda a basic consideration and for my garden I didn't exactly figure it all out because I developed my garden gradually out of a weedy mess.

The 1st thing you know, if you do things like me is the unit of compost is a cubic yard. To most easily translate that to your garden you need to figure how many square yards of garden needs compost. I like to put 2 or 3 inches of compost on each bed, especially if it's a new bed. Sometimes it's a good idea to cultivate a bed a shovel blade or 2 deep and to amend the soil with some compost. I believe that in most cases ideal soil is 25% organic material.

If you have a rectangular garden this is easy, if not you might need to measure each bed remember of course that 9 square feet is equal to one square yard. I like to have extra compost around for topping off beds, making some potting soil, or just to mix in as I plant something, or maybe it just makes me feel safe.

Potting soil is easy mixed yourself. The general formula is compost, peat moss, vermiculite, perlite and some sort of fertilizer. The idea balance depends on what you're growing but I guess I do about 1 part each except for fertilizer. Even though I have a bit of land I still like to grow some things in containers. I also use potting soil to start seedlings and to root cuttings or just to split things up, maybe to share something with a friend.

One thing to remember is that compost breaks down. In most areas it breaks down at the rate of about an inch a year. If your climate is warmer, and perhaps moister, all things living are more active. So in most places you probably do not need to top your garden with compost every year but...

I suppose I primarily subscribe to the author of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, Ed Smith's W-O-R-D philosophy of gardening. He recommends WIDE beds, rather than skinny rows. The rule of thumb is just wide enough for easy access, so that's 3 to 4 feet wide. ORGANIC because well, it's just a better method. He also recommends RAISED beds, and that's the point I wanted to get to. Before I do that, just for completion sake, I must say he likes DEEP beds. I won't go into each point here, just read the book or maybe I'll paraphrase him more, though it is all echos of what others have said but he said it well.

OK, I was trying not to paraphrase anyone but that's it. I greatly enjoyed his book. The difference for me is that putting it ALL together takes a lot of W-O-R-K. A conflict I have in this blog is deciding what audience I want to speak to. I am perfectly willing to W-O-R-K for anyone willing to pay me but I also wish to encourage and H-E-L-P anyone less wealthy to realize their own garden. Or maybe you have money but aren't certain exactly what direction you want to go. At any rate I am here to help all of the above.

My personal philosophy towards gardening is a sort of evolution. Nothing is constant. So, a bed needs an average of an inch of compost topping it a year but my garden is evolving into a RAISED bed so I think I'll end up topping my beds with 1-3 inches a year until I either need to build something to contain them or I just let them spill over. I guess I am building little hills, not a flat topped bed. Now my memory banks recall something I read about rounded topped garden beds in Japan(?) perhaps in a Joy Larkcom book, but I digress.

In short 12-18 square yards is 108-162 square feet and may be covered adequately by 1 cubic yard of compost. That's a rectangle that measures 9 X 12 feet to 12 X 14 feet, though I fudged the larger rectangle. Really, the backhoe just dumps a big bucket into the back of my truck which probably is a bit bigger than a cubic yard. I haven't measured but above is a photo of my half-unloaded truck.

Any questions? Please, pick my brain!

Starting from Scratch

If you wanna start a garden where there was none, there's more than one way to do it. A lot of people think that you need a rototiller and to double dig before you plant anything. That is not my approach. I had an art teacher in high school who said, think of any art that you make as being complete as you are creating it. This definitely applies to a garden. Indeed, a good garden is good art. Art is often beyond your control. A garden is definitely that. A garden is really a partnership with nature.

You 1st need to ask yourself some questions. The 1st one should be how am I going to do this and have FUN with it? One thing that makes a garden fun is not doing too much work. You might have an overall goal but it's best to do it in manageable steps. When you take a step by step approach you also get to reassess your garden. Maybe that spot that you thought would be great for lettuce because it looks to be shady gets more sun than you thought. Watching a garden go through a year will help you make better decisions later on.

You've decided what area you want to use. What should you do to make things grow better? I start by clearing it of weeds. Ideally, one should get in there and not only pull them from the top, but dig down to the roots. Maybe your yard is a god awful mess. A large part of my garden was awful. Rather than weed the whole thing, I concentrated on the front. In back I covered my weedy mess with cardboard. On top of that was some landscaping cloth and on top of that I put compost. I made raised beds about 6 inches deep. you can't grow everything in that, but you can grow a lot. Square foot gardening is all about this.

The 1st picture shows an intensely improved bed. I dug in compost over most of it to a depth of 8-12 inches deep, some largely due to the fact that I had to dig up a weed tree then topped it all with 3 inches of compost. This bed was very productive but if I had committed myself to doing the same for ALL of my garden I would have become really tired. Personally I tend not to be so single minded. It's so much more fun to fill a silly swan planter with flowers! This year I will shape up more beds.

One bed all I really did is top it with compost. I'd dig some dirt in as I planted things, but I didn't go crazy with it. In some ways this is less disruptive to all the beings that lived in the soil before I arrived. My veggies did all right with that.

Another thing I did because a lot of my space was challenged is to grow things in containers. I like containers anyway because you can get very creative with them. Rose Marie Nichols Magee, and Maggie Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers is a great book even if your plans are not all about containers. These ladies really make it fun with very specific instructions to make your plants grow.

Another thing I believe is important are flowers. Flowers are not only pretty and smell nice, they attract many beneficial insects like bees and good predators. Whenever there has been a lapse of flowers, the bad insects have dominated.

Enriching your garden

Since it's spring It is time for gardeners to help out their garden beds, if they didn't get to it last fall or whatever. I will attempt to talk about what I have done to help others and my own garden without looking for somebody out there that says it better.

In this neck of the woods it's a good idea to top your beds with about 1 inch of organic material a year. This approximates the amount of organic material that will break down into nutrients for your plants. If you are starting out with poor soil, you might consider going considerably thicker than that. Then you can mix it into your beds as deeply as you either have the personal energy or cash to pay someone else(like me) to mix it in for you.

I get my compost from a local supplier, usually Agrecycle who is the same place I go to drop off my yard waste. In theory we all should keep our yard waste on our own property and compost it ourselves but... maybe you just moved in somewhere where the soil is really poor. You really are better off bringing in some organic stuff that has already been composted. Composting takes time! Maybe you don't have room. Personally, I don't exactly have a compost heap. I still have a few areas that I dump some yard waste, that is areas that are sorta weedy still that I haven't fixed up yet. This yard waste helps(I HOPE) keep down the weeds. Anyway, last year I imported a LOT of compost to my yard. This compost by the way is made of the yard waste that is brought to them and composted for 8 months or so. It's good stuff and is almost always full of happy earthworms.



Last fall I had a customer that had me top her bed with as much compost as would fit. Her beds were in decent shape but now she doesn't have to really do anything with them for a few years if she chooses. It's sorta traditional to do compost in the spring, because things are growing and compost's nutrients are pretty available and to top with mulch in the fall. Mulch is not as broken down and it helps insulate many plants that may be a little tender. Really in a year most mulch resembles compost anyway, depending on how thick it is spread and what kind it is. The mulch I prefer is 'double shredded bark'. It smells nice, sorta like sandalwood to me and is dark. It just makes me think of rich people's houses.

Some people do raised beds which depending on how raised they are and perhaps whether the soil is toxic should be filled with soil and then topped with some compost.

If you liked that lovely picture of my truck click on the composting label below.

I love my tarp

I guess I am allowed to only upload 4 photos at a time. Well gee.
OK, I love my tarp. If you are reading this you probably haven't read my 1st post about my wonderful supertarp.

I took all these pictures just to show how wonderful it is.

Here I have a few wheelbarrows shy of a yard of compost in my bed and you can see how the tarp works.

This next 2 pictures(above) show how I attached a carabiner type rings to my tarp, actually a bunch of them, which I use in conjunction with bungee cords and other things to keep things the way I want them. They let me quickly attach and detach things.

Next we have my wheelbarrow sitting on a smaller, cheaper tarp. This lets me toss my stuff faster and sloppier. Hmm, how many readers have I lost with this post?

Anyway this compost here is a must for gardens. You can either make your own by collecting various biodegradable things, or get it elsewhere. I explain below how more or less, commercial compost humus is made and how I arrange my tarp when getting a load. I decided yesterday that I might get a second tarp, about 6X6 to rest on my cab and slightly overlap the main tarp. I may or may not want another bungee to secure that one. I dunno, you can never have enough bungee cords or tarps. They all wear out eventually so I generally keep well stocked.

Tired

I am tired. I did 2 yards of compost today. The picture you see is not from today but last May.

Typically I go to this place and they dump a load in my little truck just like that. I told them it's OK to dump it on the roof of my truck. I guess some people don't like dirt on their roof, but I find it easier and they just can't dump it tidily in my bed.

I have a special tarp I call my 'supertarp' that I always keep in my truck. I have other tarps for doing other things but this one just lives there.

I have a special way I keep it spread on the bed so that the compost stays neater. I use at this point 3 bungee cords to hold it in place. In this picture you can see one bungee cord stretched from the tarp to someplace off screen which is my rearview mirror, there was another bungee cord attached the same way on the other side.

I've modified my method since last May by keeping the tailgate open and using a third bungee to keep the tarp secure at the gate. I also attached the other 2 to the actual corners of the tarp and higher up.

Not only does this keep my truckbed neater but it also makes it easier and faster to unload. I don't have to scrape my bed at all because when the compost gets thin, I pull the tarp and the dirt just slides down.

So anyway, compost humus, one small truckload is bout a cubic yard. If you have a garden, especially if you are breaking new ground, topping it with some compost helps a lot.

The compost comes from various sources, a good portion from landscapers dumping the yard debris from cleaning up things, this is weeds, branches, grass cuttings etc. This stuff is taken somewhere where it is composted with some other stuff, sometimes they accept roadkill, sometimes it's something else, like one place uses a lot of potato peels from a potato chip factory. Anyway, I do not know the specifics but they compost the stuff like you might if you had the space and were so inclined. It's good stuff.