other forays into urban food production

This whole idea of producing or at least increasing notable parts of my food supply has started to go a little bit past the stage of "hobby" for me. I think it's really fascinating. I have environmental and conservtionist leanings to begin with and upon learning more of the details of the tremendous wastefulness and pollution of the convetional food industry, I've tried to detach myself from it as much as I reasonably can. That amount increases as I get more creative. The running joke in college was that I chose to major in dirt and water, and since those are the two things which the status quo of agriculture most degrades (besides the livelihood of small farmers) it's a natural cause for me to latch on to.

But I'll leave the preaching for now - there may be a little during winter, when all my garden is doing is composting itself - to tell you about some of my other efforts and ideas. First, I am sewing up an old hemp skirt to make a "sprouting bag," which is essentially the same as a normal bag but for the fact that you use it to sprout bean, radishes, greens, whatever else. I am doing this because with a little water and a little time, you can about quadruple the amound of food afforded by beans and many other seeds. I already have a fair few seeds left over which I will not be using in the spring because I'm switchig to heirloom plants. As an added bonus, a 60 cent bag of dried beans can be turned into a great deal of bean sprouts for use in salads, stir fries, etc. That is cool, because even while my cheap instincts tell me to buy dried beans, they are pretty nasty.

Also, I purchased a small, inexpensive "mushroom kit" of a variety of (purportedly delicious) mushrooms which will grow from spores in a sterile substrate in my kitchen. Or my office, if Alli makes me move them. It will only yield for three or four months, but after that I can dump the well established spores into the composting material in my garden and they will occur randomly beneath my plants for the next several years. Actually, since I probably won't live here that long, they will occur under someone else's plants. And really freak them out.

I forgot to mention

In the space cleared by removing the bean and cucumber plants I have planted some heirloom beets and that multi-colored chard, as well as some perrenial buching onions. So these little guys will survive the winter if I take care of them, and, theoretically, keep producing as long as I keep thinning out their bunches. That's pretty cool.

Time elapsed, and notes on mulch

So, since my last post about the first tomato, we've had a few more tomatoes ripen and find themselves in salads, the carrots have been thinned sufficiently that those which I pull these days are edible sized, instead of comically tiny. The lettuces are doing quite well, especially the arugula and I've had a good time thinning those rows, because the thinnings taste awesome. Even at the tiny stages when most of the sprouts look the same, radishes look like lettuces, look like turnips look like mustard greens, they taste entirely different. It's really interesting. Between beet greens, lettuce and mustard thinnings, pea shoots, carrots, tomatoes and basil, we've had a couple of really decent meals out of this garden. Poorly drained, infertile, rocky soil and all.

Every time I get to bring stuff in, wash it off and eat it, it makes me happy. Stupid happy. Still, my dirt sucks; It's horrible, and I can tell that its affecting the growth rate, yield and overall happiness of my pants. I fret over them a whole lot for average to below average results. I don't want to fall into the expensive trap of ammending my garden with pre-made compost which my plants will rob of its nutrients, forcing me to buy it all over again. I definitely don't intend to use any sort of synthetic fertilizer, that's a bit scary for me.

So step 1: mulch. I used the grass that I chopped off at the edge of my plot to mulch between the pea plants, and i can already see some benefits. The soil around them stays wet longer than the exposed soil and weeds don't go quite as crazy, due to the lack of light. Now that my lettuce, radish, turnip, spinach and mustard green sprouts are a little sturdier I think I'll mulch around them, too. Probably with hay, because I've heard good things about it and huge amounts of it were scattered around my neighborhood during a sidewalk construction project. I think that I will borrow some of this, as it has served its civic purpose and it also has the added benefit of already being a little decomposed.

my hope is that, after frosts have knocked out sections of my garden i will fold the plant matter of these sections down, and cover the whole mess with a few inch thick layer of hay. Most of the hay and plant matter will all slowly decompose over the winter (I'll purchase worms and throw them in there if I have to), providing much needed organic matter. To improve drainage and make the soil a bit lighter so that if I plant root vegetables next year they won't struggle so much, I'm going to spend a few dollars on a bag or two of some kind of crushed volcanic rock. I'm also looking into soil-building forms of "biointensive gardening" (more on that later) which have their own methods which often don't call for mulch, but whatever I choose to do, better soil can't hurt.

Cha-Ching!

Oh man. The very first tomato got ripe. And we ate it. It was awesome.

BFH's garden, in her own font.

Here is the square foot garden that BFH and I constructed on her balcony. Looks good, eh? I think that is at least in part due to the fact that she has way better font skills.

In other news

While I was pulling out the bean plants (actually I had help from just-moving-in roommate, Baumer, who has confessed to accessing this blog from her blackberry. What?), I also hacked the shit out of the grass and mint that was free-loading near the Western edge of the garden.

I did this on the assumption that since the mint ran rampant all of its own accord, shitty soil and all, if i cut it back to a couple of tiny sprigs, it would make a comeback on its own. The grass all came out, out of spite. I used the cuttings (those free of root matter or seeds) to mulch around the pea plants. Take that.

The freed up space has been used as the new home for a couple of basil transplants and an herb that smells a lot like pineapple which I came to own in a totally legitimate manner. Welcome to the family, herbs, please don't die. It would be an especially hard blow, since I've taken more care and improved the soil for every successive round of plants. The survivors of my earliest attempts are a hardy bunch. I salute them.

BFH's new home

When this whole garden adventure started, Best Friend Hannah lived with us and so was often around to help me. She has since moved to a few miles away and the garden misses her. She misses the garden, too, and sometimes makes it over to visit. There is not a community garden plot at her new home, but she does have a balcony. So we got to talking how we could make use of this balcony (you know, besides for a hibachi).

There was some talk about the two of us setting up a simplified hydroponics setup. We'd be the only people our age delving into hydroponics for lettuce growing rather than weed. The problem there was that no matter how bootleg we made the system, it would be a little time consuming and labor intensive for a 2 foot by 4 foot growing area. Also, hydroponics relies on a nutrient heavy water solution to sustain the plants in a soil-free growing medium, and the chemical intensive nature of this gave us both pause.

Before we cut our losses, I found this guy, Mel Bartholemew, who originated "square foot gardening." You can read about it on his site, it's actually pretty interesting. It was also just the degree of simplicity for what BFH and I had in mind. I only had to shell out a few dollars for a plastic tub that had been used for underbed storage (yay craigslist) a few more for some compost-rich dirt and vermiculite (a volcanic rock used to keep the dirt porous) and we were set to go, since I already have many extra seeds.

The method allows intensive planting, re-use of the soil, (just add a little compost, which BFH is now making herself)and requires very little water compared to a conventional garden. There is only enough time left in the season for lettuce, greens, radishes, some herbs. But that's fine, it's a good experiment of the method. If it works out really well I might use some 2x4s to make a frame for part of my garden, next spring.