Start a new garden

1. Choose a location in full sun, which means six or more hours of direct sun in summer. Producing vegetables takes the sun's energy — especially for fruiting vegetables such as eggplants and tomatoes.

2. Your gardening site needs soil that is well-drained. Roots have to breathe, which they cannot do if water sits in or on the soil for too long after rains. If grass or most weeds grow well, the soil is probably well drained. If not well drained, choose another site or build raised beds.

3. Grow your garden as close as possible to your door. The closer to your door, the more frequently you'll enjoy and work in the garden.

4. Start small. Too much garden may begin to feel like work. You can raise plenty of vegetables in even a 10-by-4 foot plot of land. Increase the size of your garden as your enthusiasm and experience grows.

5. Fence your garden. A fence keeps out rabbits and other hungry animals and helps define your garden visually. Unless deer are a threat — in which case you need a fence 5 or more feet high — a 2- or 3-foot-high fence should be adequate.

6. Make your garden pretty. Yes, it's just a vegetable garden, but even vegetable gardens can be attractive. An arbor, with climbing cucumbers or roses, can dress up your garden gate. Soften the fence line with an outside border planting of perennials or perhaps something decorative and edible such as grapes or herbs. Beauty will draw you into your garden.

7. Planning your garden to grow out of the box is a way to harvest more from limited space. Rather than single, widely spaced rows, plant in wide (3-4 feet) beds. Rather than keeping everything at ground level, plant vertically — those that can — grow up. Pole beans and tomatoes can be trained up bamboo or metal poles, and peas and cucumbers can be trained up fences — even that fence that encloses your garden. Plant shorter-season vegetables to follow those that finish early or start late, such as spinach following lettuce.

8. Pay attention to fertilizing and watering. Use manure and other organic fertilizers to enrich the soil. Apply an inch depth of compost. Collect water in rain barrels to save money and have the benefit of chemical free hydration.

9. Weed regularly and frequently. Weeds are much easier to kill — and haven't had time to spread many seeds — when they are small.

10. Grow vegetables that you like to eat, choose the best-tasting varieties, and don't take up valuable garden space with inexpensive veggies such as squash unless you have the space.

The newest trends in gardening are chemical free, cheap and heirloom varieties. This new back to the land movement is gaining momentum to fight back the industrialized food conglomerates so get a tiller or shovel, and dig up your new garden area, or build some raised beds, or use the newer method of lasagna gardening, but get to it!

And don't forget to read gardening books from your local library to keep up on the latest trends in gardening.

Spring is almost here. I'm going to start working on turning my backyard into my little urban homestead in the city. My heroes for this are the Dervaes family in California. Check out their website. 6000 lbs of food from 1/10 of an acre. If we all could do that we wouldn't need the big factory farms and the practices that abuse both the animals and the workers.

http://urbanhomestead.org/

FRENCH INTENSIVE METHOD

A promoter of this system, quoted in the book, had this to say to his British compatriots about the French and their stinkin’ cloches:

We have several important things to learn from the French, and not the least among these is the winter and spring culture of salads inasmuch as enormous quantities of these are sent from Paris to our markets during the spring months… The fact that we have to be supported by our neighbours with articles that could be so easily produced in this country is almost ridiculous. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this culture for a nation of gardeners like the British ; and if it were the only hint that we could take from the French cultivators with advantage, it would be well worth consideration.

French intensive gardening, also called Biointensive Gardening, is a gardening technique which is designed to maximize yields, using a combination of biodynamic agriculture and specific alterations to the normal garden layout and planting system. In addition to being very productive, French intensive gardening is also extremely efficient, and an astounding array of crops can be produced in a very small space when the garden laid out well. This form of gardening can also be beautiful, especially when gardeners take the time to plan and map before plunging into the project.
One of the defining features of French intensive gardening is the raised used. In this style of intensive gardening, the beds are very large, allowing gardeners to walk in the beds rather than along established pathways to perform garden maintenance. The beds are also double dug, which means that the soil is worked to twice the usual depth. The intensive working of the foil in French intensive gardening produces light, fluffy soil well amended with compost and humus, which encourages healthy plant growth and the production of deep roots.
The beds are also mounded, rather than flattened, creating more surface area for planting in each bed. While it takes a lot of work to establish the beds for French intensive gardening, many gardeners feel that it is worth it, especially in a small space. The garden is maintained with the addition of rich compost, organic fertilizers, and daily light watering.
Another important aspect of French intensive gardening is plant spacing. Plants are typically grown very close together, with the leaves of the plants creating a cover which reduces weeds and helps keep the soil moist, acting almost like mulch. Gardeners who use this system also utilize companion planting, a planting system which pairs plants to their mutual advantage, using things like beans to enrich the soil for energy hungry plants, for example, or scattering Marigolds in the garden to reduce insect pests.
You may also hear French intensive gardening called the Marais System, or just the System. This technique was adopted in France in the middle of the 19th century, and it spread to other regions of Europe such as Austria from there. In people with limited space for gardening, French intensive gardening is a great way to get the maximum benefit of a garden space. Fortunately, many companion plants are pretty as well as functional, so French intensive gardening can be used to create a form of landscaping as well as a source of food.

What are the features of bio intensive gardening?

1. Maximum utilization of soil especially in areas where enough space is impossible to obtain. All vacant spaces of the soil shall be utilized. The kind of plant that shall be planted is aligned on the features of the soil and the shape of the garden plot. All the space in the plot will be filled with assorted but fully organized plants and these are also interchangeably planted on different seasons. This method shall guarantee that all year round the gardener shall reap fruits and different types of vegetables.
2. Using the double-digging method. The soil is aerated and is more conducive to plant grow because the earth worms will be encouraged to reside in the garden plots hence in the long run the soil is sustain ably fertilized.
3. Use of compost and the use of organic fertilizers in the planting beds will ensure the nutrients supply needed by the plants. These will also help increase the volume of microscopic organism that are friendly to the plants, not unlike the use of synthetic fertilizers which will in the long run destroy the balance of the soil in terms of biodiversity of the microscopic organisms in the soil.
4. The use of indigenous cultivars; these are local vegetables that are resistant to pest due to their adaptability in the regions.
5. Sustenance for the balance diet of the family. Selecting the kind of vegetables that are highly nutritious and of good quality will ensure the source of nutrients for the whole family. It must include root crops, legumes, leafy veggies and fruit bearing crops.
6. Use of natural pest control without harming the environment and without side-effect to human health. This is done by planting crops that are naturally resistant to pest and also inserting plants in the garden rows that emits odors repellant to most insects, such as onions and garlic and ginger. In extreme cases where pesticide is necessary an organic component is used by utilizing the indigenous compounds. Pruning of the infected leaves of the plants is also manually done to suppress the spreading of plant disease.
7. The seeds of the plants must be collected from the matured crops in the garden to avoid unnecessary expense to buy the seed from the seed store. The gardener must reserve a certain plant for seed production, just a very small portion of the garden area. The cropping cycle must be ensured by creating a miniature seed bank of the indigenous plants.
8. Labor-intensive in the initial phase of gardening. But in the passing of times the method of bio-intensive gardening is not laborious anymore because it is not necessary to plow or shovel the soil for recultivation. This help a lot in the production of nutritious food for the small family and this is also practical for the poor family because they can resell the excess production of the veggies and at the same time almost all members of the family can help in gardening and eventually in reaping the fruits.

Heirloom Vegetables

Heirloom Tomatoes
While people have been discussing heirloom vegetables for more than a decade, gardeners find it difficult to reach an agreement on exactly what an heirloom variety is. Experts in the field agree that heirloom vegetables are old, open-pollinated cultivars. In addition, these varieties also have a reputation for being tasty and easy to grow.Just how old an heirloom has to be to be considered an heirloom still be decided. Some say heirloom vegetables are those introduced before 1951, when modern plant breeders introduced the first hybrids developed from inbred lines. While many people have good reasons to use that date as a cut-off, many heirloom gardeners focus on varieties that date from the 1920s and earlier. A few, especially those re-creating World War II Victory Gardens, add varieties from the 1920s, 1930s, and the early 1940s. While many of the varieties are 100 to 150 years old, there are some heirlooms that are much older. For example, a few experts think some heirlooms are actually Native American crops that are pre-Columbian in age and culture. Just as different gardeners have different ideas about how old heirlooms are, they also have different ideas about which old varieties are heirlooms. To some, nearly all the old-time varieties are heirlooms. To others, varieties can be old without being heirlooms. When heirloom gardeners refer to open-pollination, they mean that a particular cultivar can be grown from seed and will come back "true to type." In other words, the next generation will look just like its parent.Now, however, there are more and more vegetables that will not come back "true to type." For example, plant nearly any F-1 hybrid tomato, and go through the steps described above to save seed. The next springs, plants it, and see what happens. The seed may not even germinate, since it may be sterile. If it does sprout, the young plants will probably not have many of the characteristics that made its parent noteworthy. Heirloom gardeners are, of course, aware that the term "open- pollination" is a bit of a misnomer, because there is nothing at all open about the pollination of many heirloom vegetables. Take squash and pumpkins, for example. They cannot be left to pollinate each other willy-nilly, or the resulting offspring will be mongrels. That open-pollinated varieties can come back true to type does not guarantee that they always will. Gardeners in the past knew that open-pollinated seed would occasionally produce an off-type seedling. To maintain a seed line, they looked for and rogued out off-type seedlings. Gardeners sho uld do the same today.
Heirloom Potatoes
What draws many gardeners to heirlooms is flavor. We want a tomato that tastes like a real tomato, not a plastic one. They long for corn that tastes like it did when they were a kid. They search for a sweet, juicy muskmelon, and wonder why cantaloupes are crisp and dry. After trying varieties that look good on the pages of seed catalogs but just don't taste like much, they turn to heirlooms. What they find may well be something of a mixed bag. The best of the heirlooms really are wonderful. They have it all. They taste wonderful, look beautiful, and are easy to grow. No doubt about it, these varieties are terrific. There are, however, varieties that take a more experienced hand to grow well. Some are local or regional varieties that may or may not be suited to conditions in your back yard. Others are susceptible to problems unknown to earlier gardeners. Today, certain plant problems are much more common than ever before, and new, resistant cultivars may be the only ones suited to areas where certain diseases and pests are entrenched.Finally, heirlooms can be quirky. Seeds may germinate slower than their modern counterparts, or they may straggle in erratically. Some may pop up after you've given up on them. As they grow, some heirlooms have traits that are downright strange. About all gardeners can do is wait to see what happens, perhaps reflecting on all the things our gardening forebears knew and the wonders of biodiversity.

canning

1943 Poster. Artist: Parker, Alfred, 1906-1985. United States. Office of War Information.

I took a canning class from the Sedgwick County Extension Service a coupla years ago. Very informative. Canning and freezing food cannot be thought of as chic and stylish but the trend does fit into the movements of going green, urban farming and local food eating and growing. People want to take back their food from factory food farms. They want to eat well and eat healthy. Sales of canning equipment is up 50% from last year. The U.S.D.A.’s strict guidelines for canning procedures, which have become even stricter over the last two decades. Blake Slemmer has written these guidlines in plain language for the rest of us on http://www.pickyourown.org/

Another trend in canning is the community kitchen or community canning event such as the ones on http://www.yeswecanfood.com/ . Everyone comes together at the time that a certain fruit or vegetable is ripe and cans together and then split or sell the proceeds.

"Canning was first used as a way to preserve food in France during the Napoleonic Wars, a process in which fruits, vegetables, or meat are boiled, then stored in an airtight container, extending their shelf-life by months or even years." -- Misty Harris, City Farmer News

On the other hand:

"However, home gardens don’t make as much economic sense at current prices because processed food is so much cheaper today. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Americans were spending almost 20 percent of their disposable income on food. Today, they spend less than half that because of increased farm productivity and the establishment of a global distribution system." Darryal Ray in Neighbors Alabama farmers Federation.

So if you are growing a garden to save money, well, you may not save much. But many people these days are growing and canning to try to eliminate pesticides, unsafe growing practices and using and reusing natural resources.

Here is a picture of the Harvest Heartland Gardens at Powell Gardens in Kingsville, Mo. They have a 12 acre exhibit up there that includes a garden created by Rosalind Creasy about edible landscaping. She is the queen of edible landscaping. These are some of the things I want to explore as I go along with my projects. I have plans, y'all. Wish me luck.

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.” Isak Dineson

There is so much work to do. I have never been afraid of hard work. I was a single parent, working full time, and going to school all at the same time, for years and moving several times in between all that. These were things I wanted to do. Things I wanted to be successful at, but I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I have always been energetic, OK, obsessive maybe, about the things I’m passionate about – being a mom, education and now sustainable farming or organic gardening. Now that I’ve decided to find out about sustainable farming (on a micro level!) I can’t get enough information about it. I know this winter I will spend many long, dark, cold evenings reading up on all the new things happening in the field. No pun intended…lol, well maybe. I believe we haven't treated this world very well and I can do something to make it better, even a little, will be fun and worth my while. I love picking and eating something I have grown. I hope to eventually be efficient enough to grow enough fruit and vegies to feed me and my girls and their families. But there is so much to do.
Sometimes I stand out in the backyard looking around and thinking about the things I want to do and then I see myself at the age of 97, bent over, a straw hat over my long gray hair, ( what an imagination, eh? as if I'll have any hair by then.) still working on my list of things I want to do in the backyard. Maybe that’s a good thing. If I get to 97, I will most likely have to have the great grandkids help me in the garden, which is something else I’m passionate about, getting children involved in growing things. One of my only memories of my grandma Mae is when I was about 7 and she and I went into her garden in Great Bend, Ks and picked Black-eyed peas for dinner. We were not a close family and so memories of her are few but I’ve never forgotten being in the garden with my grandmother. She always had a garden my father said. Grandma Mae went through the depression with 7 children, running her own resturaunt. Born in 1900, she grew up in Vinita, Oklahoma. They were poor with 10 kids in the family. In fact, one of the only pictures I have is of my grandmother as a teenager and her family in their garden. My father had a garden for many years, I remember him always growing tomatoes. Tomatoes tasted better when I was a child then they do now. Now tomatoes are grown for looks and the ability to be dropped from 3 feet and not break. In other words so they can be transported all over the country without shattering. So they are tough with no flavor. I want to grow heirloom tomatoes asap, so I can try to recapture the sweet/tangy taste of the old time tomatoes that I remember back in the 60's.

Next year, I'm a poultry farmer

I can’t wait to get chickens. I’ve had chickens before and they are fun to watch as well as the free eggs. Simple pleasures for simple minds, I’m thinking. I could never eat one of my chickens. If I get to know them (and I will), I could never kill them. I’m going to have to turn Vegetarian, I guess. The biggest problem for me is that if you buy from McMurray Hatchery, which is a well respected national hatchery you have to buy 25 at a time. That’s a lot of chickens. A lot of eggs, hmmm, maybe I’ll go into business, I’ll sell them and get rich!! A good thing is you can buy all girls, that means no loud roosters to piss off your neighbors!I’ve done a little research into what kind of chicken I want. I’ve decided on light Brahma chickens because they are a great breed for
backyard flocks. Light Buff Brahmas produce medium size brown eggs and tend to be rather large birds. The Brahma breed is good-tempered, enjoys interacting with people, and is not aggressive toward other chickens. They are a great addition to any flock with their mild manner and pretty black and buff feathers. Brahma chickens also have feathered legs. The gentle Brahma personality makes this chicken breed an excellent choice for children.
These fine feathered friends can contribute to the social, economic, and environmental well- being of your community.
Why raise Chickens? They help out in the garden and the neighborhood by: improving garden health, suppressing pests and weeds, and building soil fertility, giving neighborhood children the opportunity to learn where their food comes from, and producing nutritious eggs to be enjoyed by their caretakers and sold at farmers’ markets.
And aren’t they purty? They’ll add a little color to the garden and make fertilizer too. Unfortunately, I have to wait till next spring to get them….I’m going to need a coop and a way to keep my dog Titan from eating them…bad doggie.