Some food for thought.......

I have gardened for as long as I can remember. Mom tells a story about me as a small child pulling carrots and washing them in the dog's water dish outside before eating them-at least I washed them! I have found myself recently washing a carrot in rainwater before eating it, it was delicious. (You can stop saying eeeewww now). I have a lot of memories of that little garden at the house on Maple Avenue; strawberries along the back fence, an apple tree to climb and to eat from, raspberries, chestnuts, plums...the list goes on and on, no wonder I was a forager for all of my childhood! Mom taught me how to recognize what I could and couldn't eat as well as when to expect it to be ripe. It still amazes me that we had so much on that tiny lot, surely it is only about 1/8 an acre!

Various types of gardening followed as I grew up and left home, container gardening at an apartment, a small plot at a rental house, a big, quickly weedy garden at our current house, and most recently a small, square foot garden that produced a lot of stuff for the space over the summer . Now I find myself in a situation where I want to produce most, if not all of our produce and some other things right here on our little farm in the city. This idea has lead me to a bunch of reading, no surprise to anyone who knows me, and I would like to share a few of the things I have been reading for anyone else who would like to grow even a little of their own food.

First and foremost is my original go to book, Joy of Gardening, by Dick Raymond. The inscription in it reads " Christmas 1995: To my wonderful sister Cheryl who will grow me yummy tomatoes next summer! Jennifer" What a productive gift it has been! I had borrowed this book so many times from the library that I was renting it when I forgot to take it back, so I was glad to have my own copy. Dick promotes wide rows (now called intensive agriculture, he was so ahead of his time) and gives many tricks to expand the growing season and to get more bang for your buck with your plants. I still use this book very often.

 

My next go to recently has been Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew. In its own way, this method is the antithesis of Joy of Gardening because it emphasizes not wasting seed, planting each plant or seed purposefully and not crowding. However, both methods push the spacing closer than the seed packets recommend and get a lot of produce out of a small space.   Bartholomew's method emphasizes vertical growing for most big plants rather than cages for tomatoes or letting vine crops run on the ground. The plant descriptions are also very good at describing when to plant, transplant, and when to expect a harvest as well as if and when to plant succession crops.

Our friend Scott gave me a wonderful book twelve years ago, The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening by Rodale Press. It has everything you need to know about organic gardening; how to prune, get rid of pests, when to plant etc... and all without putting things on your plants that you wouldn't want to eat. My copy is at least twenty years old and still very useful, you could probably find it used at a very low price. As a matter of fact, all three of these books have been out for years and can be found cheaply at used book stores.

Most recently I have been reading two more up to date books, The Quarter Acre Farm, by Spring Warren and Mini farming: self sufficiency on a 1/4 acre, by Brett L. Markham. Both are about using the small bit of land you have and making the most of it. I have much more space available to me than a quarter acre, so you know I'm salivating at the idea of being able to "live off the land". Markham's book is a more technical, how-to book that is very realistic while Warren's is more of a "how I did it book" that helps to inspire a would be farmer.

I've also been reading a lot about the urban or backyard homesteading movement, and will if things go as planned add our first productive animals to the farm on the city: chickens and rabbits. Ok, so the cat does rodent control, but other than that, all the other animals we have just eat and dig holes in the yard. A good book that I purchased which addresses the small acreage homestead is The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! edited by Carleen Madigan, put out by Storey Publishing. Storey has a whole line of books on farm animal care: goats, chickens, horses etc... but this book is a compilation of many of their other books. It covers a lot of gardening and preservation skills and planning also, and excellent choice if you are only going to get one book about homesteading.

So there you go, some food for thought as we go into the dark days of winter. I'm looking forward to the next year as we try to produce, use and share as much food as we can. Even if I fail in the goal, there is something about being outside and doing something productive that invigorates me, I'm working harder physically than I have in a long time, but I feel terrific-except the sore muscles from double digging a 4x4 bed yesterday. Even the tops of my feet hurt, but I'll be back at it tomorrow.