Getting your garden started on the right foot makes the rest of the season simply work smoothly, but it also gives me a jumpstart on the growing season with a spring harvest. The key for me has been getting an early start, by starting my plants in my indoor system and warming the soil with black plastic and hoop houses. The best parts about the first spring harvest and gleaning is that you are picking baby greens and young plants. Some scientific studies indicate that all primates naturally gravitate to the young and tender plants, and we are no different. Those early salads are just so flavorful, particularly after months of getting by on winter kale, corn salad lettuce and broccoli.
Gardening with Kids
As stewards of the planet, we need to think of the larger, spiritual role our gardens play. Then we need to remember why it’s important to teach our children how to take care of themselves and the planet they will inherit. Gardens are wonderful classrooms, a place to home school biology, healthy eating habits and, more importantly, an appreciation of the wonder of life. Kids jump right in. When it comes to fruits and vegetables, I have the wonderful "problem" of always trying to get the harvest on camera before my daughter picks and eats it. When she wants a snack she just goes to the garden or mini orchard and picks and eats the fruit. This enthusiasm leads to the kind of healthy eating habits parents’ dream of - when they're not making sustainable living media. Check out this video of Alejandra and I picking and preparing a Spring Salad.
Harvest 1-3
If you stagger and schedule your planting schedule, you won’t have to worry about slow times in the garden. The harvest brings the joys and delights of growing your food to the best place of all, the kitchen. As I pick and glean my gardens, my mind races on what I can make, with what is fresh throughout the garden. My family’s diet synchs with not only the local natural environment, but it is always full of variety. Life is way too short to waste it on processed, factory food. With my gardens I always end up eating the most varied, wondrous, exotic and cost effective diet you can imagine. Check out my cooking page and see some of the things I have concocted with the freshest foods on the planet.
Healthy Soil=Healthy Plants=Healthy People
One of the basic principles of organic gardening, as preached by JJ Rodale, is that the soil itself must be a healthy ecosystem all by itself. If you have healthy soil, you will have healthy plants and thus the people will be healthy too. The equation isn't e=mc2 but, it is full of meaning, as it plays out its part in nature's web. Soil is full of millions of types of life, from MICRO bacterial all the way up to worms and hard shelled insects. As the manager of the eco-system it is my job as gardener to nurture my soil as well.
Soil is the Key stone in the garden. I can not tell you how many times I have had shade or drought conditions, but powerfully rich soil and the plants and fruits still came out spectacularly. It is like the old Michael Jordan shoe commercial "Must be the Shoes (Soil)"
Seeding and managing this ecosystem is your part of the equation. Do not use petro chemical fertilizer; it can destroy the entire ecosystem. Do make compost. Remember, a raised bed garden is just a compost bin in the winter, unless of course you have extended your seasons like I do. Have more questions? Just click on to the message board and share them with me and everybody else.
Mulching with Newspaper and Cocoa Mulch
As a square foot/bio intensive gardener, I don't have to worry about mulching very much at all. My plants are too close together and keep the soil shady. To keep my gardens as neat and fragrant as possible I love to compost the newspaper, using it as a mulch and weed prevention cloth. As the Dirt Diva says "Critics should be composted." And I agree. Building and preserving soil is a lot like making a layer cake, layer upon layer of organic material, pilling up and decomposing just like in nature. Don't use colored and glossy paper. PUT that out for recycling. I then TOP OFF the cake with my Cocoa Mulch, spreading it out thickly to keep the paper from blowing away, and off course adding a delicious smell to your garden, making it a magical and wondrous place.
A few words - AND A WARNING - about Cocoa Mulch. Cocoa and Chocolate can be poisonous to dogs, so do not let them in it. Train them to keep their paws out! Cocoa mulch also has a tendency to mold, so I work with my local garden center to find out when their shipment comes in and I am there first for my bags. I store my cocoa indoors as well, to keep them dry.
Cucumbers are delicious right out of the garden. I find that it is a vegetable that a large number of people can agree on. I’ve planted many types of heirloom cucumbers, all distinctive in flavor and color.
Try a few different types for yourself. I’ve found that Medium sized varieties that begin bearing fruit around 55 days work best in an urban garden. Don’t forget to save seeds for next year. I love using cucumbers when they are in season daily. Cucumbers add a hydrating crunchiness to my salads.
Night Shade Plants
It's odd to think that the tomato and potato are cousins, both from the nightshade family. This makes sense when you look at the leaves of both plants, some types of tomatoes and potatoes even look alike. The heirloom tomato, Tiffen Mennonite, in the video's leaves are potato like, but the two plants couldn't be more different. To properly grow tomatoes they need to have a good amount of water, be supported, and get plenty of sun. Check out my Vertical Gardening series for great info on supporting plants. The plants in my garden get about eight hours of sunlight per day. Soil conditions should be rich and with a PH around 6-6.8. You can bury your seedlings way down, or even on their sides, because new roots will grow out of the stems. Keep away slugs, by putting broken egg shells around the plants, and bugs with lady bugs, or diatomaceous earth. It takes a while for the tomatoes to vine ripen, but when they do, provided you use tasty heirloom seeds to start, you'll have an incredible treat in only 100 days. Potatoes are quite different. Potato plants need to be mounded with soil. You can also use hay or mulch and make sure no light can get thru to any part of the plant. The seed potato should have at least 2 eyes on them and it needs to be planted deeply. The tubers that form above the seed are the potatoes. As they grow, the potatoes need to be mounded with straw. The video gives an over view of how I grow mine, also check out my video 'Planting Potato'. Please watch and don't forget to sign up for my Ezine.
My Almost Record Tomato
My system of urban gardening really works. This video is the proof. When talking about tomatoes it is the taste that really matters, not size, well sometimes size matters. Anyway, "My Almost Record Tomato" had been on my radar for quite a few weeks, it became part of my daily ritual to check to see how big it got overnight. Finally the day came to harvest the tomato. I couldn't wait another moment. The cameras were there so I could share it all with you. The tomato was a Tiffen Mennonite from my own seed collection. I missed the mark by one ounce of being the 8th largest tomato grown in Massachusetts. This year hopefully, your results will match and even surpass mine. Check out the video and see for yourself. Size really does matter.
Italian Kitchen Garden
Flowers and landscape plants are wonderful, but the thing I like most about gardening is growing stuff that I can eat. In this video series you will see me plant 4x4 raised beds with Italian herbs and heirloom tomatoes and peppers and other Italian veggies. I am using plants that are very far along in their growth, but you can start yours from seed right in the raised beds. If you live in cooler climates you should start your plants early from seed. I'm using soil rich in compost and cocoa shell mulch (my favorite). This is a great way to get started supplementing your family's food with organic home grown food. Please watch the video and then check out my pesto recipe. You too can make fresh Italian food all season long. Interestingly, enough my parsley and oregano planted in the videos provided fresh herbs all winter. Want to know how I did it? Check out my Winter Gardening video.
The compost bin I use in my video is the easiest and inexpensive type to make. Just purchase galvanized metal 4 feet tall by 5 feet long. I’m using a ½ inch mesh 19mm galvanized wire. I make a cylinder with it and attach the ends with the wire that is used and comes with the roll. It’s light weight so I can place it any where I need it on my lawn. I start filling the compost bin with all of the leaves that are around it on my lawn. What a great workout! I want to make sure that I include only leaves, pine needles, and small twigs. Large branches won’t compost as fast as the leaves and weeds may contain seeds that are not wanted in my compost... Kitchen scraps may attract unwanted pests. As the winter goes by the leaves will begin to decompose and turn into compost. As that happens I can continue adding more leaves. In a few months I can pop off the wire and spread out the compost on my lawn. It’s the perfect addition to kick start my lawn or garden in early spring. There are different types of compost bins you can make. Check out 2 other types I have around my house.
The problems I encountered when I first started out in gardening, in retrospect, can all be traced back to my lack of understanding of the soil and the biological processes going on inside. Rodale said it best in the 1930’s, healthy soil=health plants=healthy people. Controlling and understanding these processes which happen at a microscopic level doesn’t require a degree in bio chemistry. The process are totally natural and to some degree spontaneous. What it requires is lots of organic material, leaves, manure, anything.
The easiest thing to do is to create you own home compost system. There are many ways to compost organic material, and here is one of them based on the 4’ x 4’ construction model. This
particular system is designed to also act as my main vermiculture factory, where hopefully I can breed thousands of composting worms. The idea is to get the bin to serve the garden it too useful ways. One, make compost so that I can fertilize and enhance the soil throughout the farm. The other is to create worms as supplementary feed for my poultry and aquaculture projects.
Worms are the true engine of my farm. I use “red wiggler” worms that I get from the Cape Cod Worm farm and Maggie Pipkin(www.capecodewormfarm.com). The worms rapidly break down the organic matter and turn it into nutrients for the plants that are readily acceptable to the plants as they grow.
The R2D2 factory I have built here are my standard small size garden beds stacked on top of each other. I installed simple 2” x 3” supports in the corners. I have left a gap between the boards so the compost has access to oxygen. I placed a second hand skylight on top so that I can regulate the heat and humidity easily.
At the bottom of the bin I installed hinges and latches so that when the compost is ready I can flip up the bottom and rake out the compost. Hopefully “compost crank” will send me a crank so that I can stir it up frequently (hint...hint).
Organic Insect Control
There are organic ways to control pests in your garden. I present 2 in my video series Organic Insect Control. There are great organic and humane fly traps and I've found one. Video one shows me setting one up in my garden. In the second video I use something called DE or Diatomaceous earth that comes in a powder form and that you dust on your plants. The great thing about this is that it is completely safe for humans and animals.
Indoor Gardening
I began by taking over a small section of my house, the sun porch, and dedicating it to the indoor garden project for apartment dwellers as well as for the seedling factory for all my outdoor garden beds. This part of my house is south facing and gets pretty good natural light. I wanted to capitalize on the natural light so all the shelves in this area are up off the floor about fourteen inches so that as many shelves as possible can get the direct sunlight. I use the extra space for storage. I use graph paper for most of the planning. It’s great because you can easily create a scale and then a floor plan. I measure the room and the space and then I draw out my ideas. At this stage it is easy to change my mind; I can simply erase it and start over. By creating a design on paper I am able to go to catalogues and websites and make sure anything I need will fit and work in the space.
Vertical gardening is a must in order to maximize your growing space when growing vining plants. Cucumbers, watermelons, pumpkins, and grapes all can be grown in small spaces by planting them along
a fence, an arbor, or building a support yourself like the one featured in my video. My in-laws in New Hampshire grew watermelons a few years back and they were some of the best watermelons I ever tasted. From then on I was determined to grow watermelon in the city. The best types are sugar baby or any small ice box (refrigerator) size watermelon variety. Cucumbers, watermelon and pumpkins are all susceptible to wilt which can kill the plant before fully fruiting. There are a few things you can do to try to prevent your plants from dying, but none of them fool proof. Another neat idea is to transform a chain link fence you have. I’ve incorporated chain link in my garden with great results.
So many of us in the city have chain link fences. What better way to make them beautiful and useful than to grow juicy grapes. I lived in Los Feliz, CA for 6 months and the back chain link fence had a beautiful and prolific collection of grapevines. Grapes don’t fruit in the first year, but you can use the grape leaves for a wonderful Greek inspired meal. Greek neighbors of mine bring their parents to pick grape leaves and make fresh authentic Mediterranean dishes. Watch my videos on vertical gardening and let me know what you think.
Because I live in the northeast, the growing season is only from late April to early October (lately into November). Using raised beds allows me to extend the growing season using modular hoop houses to create micro climates around the plants maintaining ideal growing conditions for my cool weather crops. You can't just grow anything. Do a little research and check out Eliot Coleman's book Four Season Gardening for more information. Certain herbs like parsley and mint also do really well; and lettuce and carrots thrive in cold weather. In the video, I'm in my urban sustainable garden starting a variety of seeds on a winter day that was pretty warm. In this video I am using a cold frame that I built from a recycled skylight. Check out the video so you can start your winter garden this year.
Shed
The shed is where you'll be organized and if maintained properly any task will be a breeze. In this video I go over how I've organized my bus stop shed. If you're thinking about getting a shed make sure you check your local zoning laws and get the proper permits. Usually there is a maximum square foot amount allowed without a permit. Make it easy on yourself and get all the facts before you purchase a shed. The shed in the video is 4'x4'. It's small and compact; perfect for smaller gardens. I have it in my Urban Sustainable Living Garden which is 500sqft. It gives me a place to put the tools I need when working in the garden and gives me a place to put things out of the rain. Sheds can come in kits. I've found that kits aren't always as straight forward as they may seem at first. My advice is that it's best to buy one and have it assembled by a professional on-site or have one delivered and placed on-site. Sheds are a lot of fun to have and will add value to your property. You can paint your shed or treat it with an exterior wood sealer. I've customized my shed and added places to hang my tools. Take a look at my video and don't forget to sign up for my Ezine.
