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.

Let the Hurricane winds blow!

Well, hurricane Irene left us high and dry! While the eastern half of the state was getting several inches of much needed rain, all we received was a lot of wind and a cloudy day. However, the cloudiness was exactly what I needed for my task for the day, planting some fall seedlings. I took off on a reconnaissance  mission at Southern States and I found that they had many of the things that I will be needing in the future, including chicken supplies and seed for clover, along with several other cover crops. They also have several varieties of chicks in late February, so we have a local supplier for chickens at that time. I like the idea of being able to pick several different types all at the same time so they grow up together; I know that at some time I'll have to introduce new chickens to the flock, but I'd like to start off easy. They also had some broccoli and cabbage plants; I bought four cabbages that I hope to turn into some lovely cabbage rolls in November and eight broccoli, because I found out in the spring that four are not enough for us! We really like broccoli. I had to both put water in the planting hole before planting and water again after planting since it is so very dry. Then I did the ultimate twofer; I mulched the plants with a layer of compost, giving the plants both nutrition and moisture conservation. I would post a picture of the plantings, but it looks just like the one I took in the spring, so I'll show you the little friend we found in the frame I was planting:

Our toad friend

 We always have toads in the garden, and I love having them there. They are little insect destroyers. I try to do what I can to attract them because we don't use insecticides and I love the free insect service. We really don't have a big problem with pests of the six legged variety, just the four legged variety. As you can see in the next picture, I have wire around the back of the tomatoes, and over the bed to keep the deer/bunnies/groundhogs out of my food.

Vertical Tomatoes

We are growing four tomatoes vertically in four square feet of soil, whereas if we were growing them in traditional cages or staked they would take sixteen square feet, or the whole square. In retrospect, I need to use either wire or stouter string for the trellis because this one is sagging with the weight of the tomatoes. See the almost ripe Cherokee Purple? The deer got all of the last ones because I let my guard down and left the wire off just before several tomatoes ripened.  In front of them I have recently planted a mix of radishes, turnips, beets, onions and spinach. I haven't seen any spinach yet, it think it might be too hot for the seed to germinate, so maybe it will turn up later when it cools down.

Seedlings

This seedling bed previously had onions, turnips, lettuce and spinach in it. I'm trying to get the most of the long growing season by planting succession crops this year, of course with the drought I'm having to water much more than I want to, I just hope that we will get some rain soon.