Lazy Man's Way

It isn't readily apparent here, but these lettuces are growing in the shade of an artichoke. None of my lettuces have bolted but it is early. Lettuce is great for growing under plants, especially those that like cool roots. They aren't heavy feeders and with so many varieties, they are quite pretty. I tend to start with seedlings from a nursery for faster gratification then later I start some in a small tray to plant out. Usually I do a mesclen mix for variety.

Lettuce is like a little firecracker that goes off all the time while you wait for the bigger bangs. A lot of greens are like that as well as chervil and cilantro, both pictured somewhere in this picture.

The lazy man's way to keep these going is to just let a few of them go to seed. This leads to chaos but it is my approach to many of my plants. Decades ago, somebody signed my yearbook, "The lazy man finds an easier way to get the job done." I can't say that any better.

This artichoke looks pretty spiny to me. I think it won't be the best eating so I am going to let it bloom. I am sure my neighbors will be impressed. They get pretty confused by a lot of my plants and yet they cannot deny their beauty.

Sometimes I think I should talk more in detail about what I am doing here. After some thought I have decided that for the most part if you want to replicate what I am doing, you really need to read some books.

One book I recently read was the e-book "Double your tomatoes," which is actually one of my advertisers. I do not completely endorse the author's philosophy but I have taken away a few good points. He does not however cover as much as I thought he would. Again I say, read some books. Tomatoes are kinda complicated.

I do not grow tomatoes to be highly productive but I have experienced late blight on some of my tomatoes in the last 2 years. I think "Double your tomatoes," gives some good advice about that which I intend to use. I am experimenting with fertilizing my tomatoes with bokashi. Most of my tomatoes have the contents of one bokashi bucket buried beneath them. There's a few other quirks I threw in that I will not elaborate on until later.

Again, I say read some books. The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Ed Smith has some very good specific advice that I will always remember.

On the other hand if you do have specific questions for me, please feel free to leaves them in the comments or email me directly. I am perfectly willing to keep your identity confidencial if you are a 'private person.'

What was I saying about being lazy? Here is the perfect image of that. This chamomile grew here all by itself. I have weeded other plants out of the cracks but left these and a few other plants alone. However, I have found it necessary to trim this a bit. If I had done it again I would have trimmed this back earlier though I think that right now this looks rather pretty even though it is also untidy.

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!

My checkered past

So what did I do before this?

Lots of things.

I'll talk about these 2 pictures 1st. These 3 steps shows just some of the seedlings I started with this past May.

Some of these seedlings went to other gardens but I do overplant. Just glancing at this I see a few that perished. Some due to my negligence, others for other reasons.

I had some catmint, a relative to catnip, that perished from a certain orange cat nipping at it. The same neighborhood cat I believe killed a cardinal chick in my tree hydrangea. For some reason my gray cat has befriended 'Orangy' while fighting with just about any other cat in the neighborhood. Orangy also liked to use one of my beds as a litterbox. I had to make a 'tiger trap' with skewers to keep her(?) out. But I digress.

So anyway, the 2nd picture shows a bed planted with red cabbage, lettuce, ocean sorbet pansies, and some tulips. There's also some onions.

Inspiration for this kind of planting comes from Joy Larkcom's book
Creative Vegetable Gardening: Accenting Your Vegetables With Flowers. This book was my introduction to Larkcom. I have since discovered that perhaps she should be as famous as Michael Pollan. Really, she is one of my heroes.

I truly believe that vegetables and flowers need not be separated. There are many reasons for this. Another proponent of this philosophy is Edward C. Smith. I learned a lot from his book
The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, a pretentious title from a non-pretentious man. One observation he made is that often plants that grow well together taste well together.

Didn't I say that I was going to talk about myself? Oh yeah, so here's a picture of me from this past May, shoveling compost from my truck to my garden.

I signed up for google analytics and found that finally somebody searched and hit this blog, which has had about 30 unique visitors. This was somebody in Beverly Hills, California! But they searched on my name!

Oh no! I have 2 guesses as to the identity of said person, but that could reveal my checkered past. I'll let you uninformed readers imagine something more interesting than reality.

I grew up 1 generation removed from a farm in South Dakota, 2 generations from Europe of 3 of my 4 grandparents. My father was a mathematician at the University of Pittsburgh, a bit of a leap from a dirt farm, my mother mostly a housewife, also from a South Dakota farm.

I have been to college but dropped out to work on archaeological digs in the lower 48. I've worked in more than a dozen states, mostly NE, but also New Mexico, California, and Oregon. My work as a field tech (shovel bum) spanned 15 years off and on, perhaps more off than on but it was pretty cool.

For 2 years straight I was a bicycle messenger in Pittsburgh, which included 2 winters. This was a blast but pretty crazy. If you think being a messenger is easy I've got a few bridges here to sell you.

After that, I landscaped for a very small company for some of the wealthiest people in Pittsburgh. I worked for this place for 2 years before I decided I'd be better off striking it out on my own. Plus I also decided that I wanted to try to get people to do something a little different from the standard stuff.

I think it's about time for people to rethink their yards. So there you have it.