Chapter Two

Essential Projects

Essential Projects

Urban homesteading is about action. What follows is a compendium of hands-on projects and how-to’s that help you grow your own food.

The first five projects we consider indispensable, and so have labeled them “Essential Projects.” When friends ask us how they should start growing food, these are the first things we suggest, because they are the basic techniques that make small-scale, intensive gardening possible.

ESSENTIAL PROJECT 1

START A COMPOST PILE

This first project is one everyone can and should do, whether they garden or not. All the space you need is a patch of bare ground large enough to set a garbage can on. If you don’t have that, you can still compost.

There’s no reason not to compost — it’s easy and the benefits are many. If you’re growing food you need fresh compost to renew your garden. If you’re an urban homesteader you don’t want anything to go to waste, and that includes your kitchen scraps, your yard trimmings, and the chicken poop from your hen house. Composting transforms all of this waste matter into new soil.

As unromantic as decomposition may seem to the uninitiated, homesteaders have gushed to us about how much they love composting, the simple miracle of it. There’s a lot of b.s. in the gardening world about the “science” of composting and an equal number of expensive devices that you supposedly need to accomplish the decomposition that nature does for free. With a few exceptions that we’ll get into, it’s hard to go wrong in composting. Yes, there are efficient ways to go about it that will speed up the process, but no matter what you do you will eventually end up with usable compost.

 

Acquiring A Compost Bin

The easiest bin to start with is simply a lidded garbage can with a few holes punched in the sides. This will keep in moisture which speeds decomposition and will help keep out rodent visitors. Both plastic and galvanized metal cans work fine. The metal lasts longer, but the plastic is easier to punch holes in. Choose the largest can your space allows.

If your bin is going to sit directly on soil (as opposed to your porch or something), punch a lot of holes ¼” or larger in the bottom of your garbage so worms can come up through the soil and help you compost. If you have to keep your bin on concrete, you’d better leave the bottom intact. If you do compost on bare ground, the ground beneath the can will become very rich with nutrients. Move the bin every once in a while so you can plant in that spot.

You can also create an open, circular bin simply by rolling a length of chicken wire or hardware cloth into a tube and securing the ends together with a few twists of wire. Or you could nail four pallets together into an airy box. Open bins dry out fast, so if you live somewhere dry you might want to stick with the more closed system. They also attract more animal visitors. But it is nice to be able to see your compost.

Another possible composting container is a stack of used tires. Every year the U.S. generates just under one used tire for every man, woman and child, meaning that there’s a hell of a lot of rubber out there waiting for the industrious urban homesteader. To re-use them as a compost container, simply start with a couple of stacked tires, and add more as the pile grows. The black rubber will help heat up your pile, which is a good thing. If you have the ambition to do so, cut out the sidewalls of the tires so your compost doesn’t get hung up in the tire wells.

You can buy ready-made composters. We have one that we got at a steep discount from the City of Los Angeles. It is basically an extra-commodious plastic garbage can with a built-in harvesting door at the bottom. If you want to pay for something like this that is fine, but we’d warn you away from the more complex composting gadgets out there. They simply aren’t necessary. They are another attempt by the Man to sell us stuff we don’t need. Composting is free!

All you have to do to start composting is set out your can, or tire stack, or whatever, and start tossing your yard trimmings and food scraps into it.

It’s good to keep a balance between the types of materials you’re tossing on your pile. We like to keep a ratio of about half nitrogen-rich material, what we call “green” stuff, and carbonaceous material, or “brown” stuff. Green materials consist of fresh leaves, kitchen scraps, garden weeds, manure from herbivores, and organic lawn trimmings (even though as a righteous urban homesteader you of course don’t have a lawn). Though brown in color, used coffee grounds are an excellent “green” material that many cafés give away for free. The more finely-chopped your green and brown materials are, the faster the pile will decompose.

“Brown” or carbonaceous material is dead stuff like dried leaves, wood chips, sawdust, and shredded newspaper. Avoid using sawdust from pressure-treated lumber or glossy magazine-type paper, as both contain bad chemicals. The brown layers in your compost pile serve to absorb moisture and allow oxygen to reach the interior of the pile since they are generally more loosely packed than the “green” stuff. Without them the green materials go mucky and stinky.

The rule we follow is that each time we add a layer of green stuff, especially kitchen scraps, we cover it with brown stuff. Leaving exposed kitchen scraps is like sending out an invitation for a giant maggot party. We keep shredded paper, newspaper, dried leaves, etc., in a separate, covered bin next to our compost pile for convenience.

If you ever add too many kitchen scraps, you’ll know it by the smell and the maggots. Just add some brown stuff and give your pile a stir to bury the maggots. No matter what the ratio is, the simple fact is that everything rots eventually, and in the case of compost, rotting is a very good thing.

Your pile should be kept moist but not soggy. If you live in an area that gets a lot of rain, you may need to cover your pile to prevent it from getting waterlogged. The consistency of the pile should be like a sponge that’s just been wrung out. In dry places you may need to water your compost every so often. One way to do this is to take a whiz on the pile once in a while. A compost pile makes an excellent urinal for gentleman urban homesteaders, though we’ve heard talk of some intrepid sister homesteaders placing toilet seats over their compost piles. The occasional addition of urine is a great way to add both nitrogen and moisture to the pile.

Some people choose to turn their compost piles once a week or so. Turning means stirring — going in there with a shovel and mixing it up. The idea behind turning is that it speeds decomposition. Being lazy, we are inclined to believe the need for turning is exaggerated, so we only do it if we end up with a maggot infestation. This may mean our compost doesn’t break down as fast as it can, but speed is just not a high priority for us. So turn your pile exactly as often as it pleases you. The fastest composting system, if you’re wondering, is said to be the worm bin, which turns scraps into compost in three months. See project 2.

It is not advisable to add bones, meat, fish, stuff with oil on it, dog or cat poop, or dairy products as these items could attract pests and your pile may not be able to achieve the hot temperatures required to safely decompose that kind of icky stuff.

Compost is done when it looks like soil. Good compost is dark and crumbly and smells nice. The best compost we’ve seen almost looked like crumbled chocolate cake. You might find a few things that just aren’t going to break down in your finished compost, like a stray avocado pit or a stick, but other than that you shouldn’t be able to find anything identifiable. Identifiable objects mean it’s not done yet. The top of your pile isn’t going to ever look “done.” The good stuff is found at the bottom of the pile.

You have two ways of inspiring your compost to become that crumbled chocolate cake. One is to empty out your compost bin. Spill it out on some clear ground. Shovel the unfinished top stuff from the top back into the container, then collect the finished compost. It takes up to a year using our lazy no-turn system to achieve compost, so if you don’t find anything that looks finished, don’t despair, just shovel it all back in and wait some more. Decomposition speed depends so much on temperature, climate, and the materials being composted.

The second option is to cut a little door at the bottom of your bin. A door allows you to reach in and scoop out compost from the bottom without disturbing the top. The downside of it is that if the door is not secured, critters will pry it open and rifle through the compost looking for bugs.

Compost shrinks. So don’t worry if you fill your bin with a lot of yard scraps. It will drop down pretty quickly, and you’ll have room for your usual kitchen scraps. We call it the equilibrium of the pile: there’s always just enough room. However, if you’re a composting fiend and you really do fill your bin, just start a new one.

Some forward-thinking people in Oakland put out a humble and wonderful series of publications a while back titled Eat to Live. The photocopied newsletters could be found for a brief period during the late ‘90s in East Bay pizza parlors and laundromats. Issue number two appeared with the headline “You Can’t Compost Concrete.” The writers of Eat to Live hailed the Chicago Pneumatic Paving Breaker as the gardening tool of the future and promoted backyard unpaving parties to get things started.

I can’t say that my love of composting stems entirely from the “Eat to Live” directives, but I do gain a keen sense of reattachment to the ground under my feet when I walk across the paved backyard of our Culver City compound and deposit our uneaten food scraps into the compost pile on a small patch of dirt surrounded by so much dead pavement. My compost is a bypass around the concrete sealant that separates me from the living ground underneath my feet.

Composting keeps me from taking things for granted. Should I throw those tortilla crumbs away? If I throw them in the compost they’ll feed a bunch of bugs and then some smaller bugs and then become soil. No waste. It’s a crazy sort of accounting. We’re done with the food, but it’s still food. It still matters.

Composting is, perhaps more than anything else to me, a meditation on death. Mine, in particular. Whenever I walk out to my backyard to turn the compost — about every other day — I look into it and think, “That’s where I’m going.” And it makes me feel all right. Makes me feel as though I belong somewhere. And I’ll contribute in a meaningful way, at least after I die.

There are so many lofty reasons to get a compost bin going in your backyard, or apartment porch. But those reasons fall away when you start looking forward to seeing the progress your microbial waste management crew is making every couple of days. It’s fun to play in the dirt and watch bugs. Remember the carrot peeling tossed into the compost at the beginning of the week? No orange in sight now. Bad yogurt? Gone. Lawn clippings? They’re soil now. It’s sort of like making a big soup that’s always evolving and always cooking; always changing colors and ingredients. And best eaten once it’s worked its way back up through your garden as a new vegetable or fruit.

 

Elon Schoenholz, Los Angeles, CA

ESSENTIAL PROJECT 2

VERMICULTURE or COMPOSTING WITH WORMS

Worm bins are the only feasible method of indoor composting for apartment dwellers, but this is no second-rate method. Even if you do have a yard and a traditional compost pile, you might want to keep a worm bin for your kitchen scraps, because the compost that comes out of a worm bin is some of the best you can get.

Worms will eat your kitchen scraps for you and give you a black, odorless, extraordinarily rich compost in return. Worm castings (a polite way of saying worm poop) are the gold standard of natural fertilizers: they are packed with water-soluble nutrients as well as beneficial microbes and bacteria. Castings can be applied to the surface of the soil, directly around your plants, or mixed into soil to enrich it, or soaked in water to make an energizing fertilizer tea that you pour over your crops.

You can keep worms indoors in a plastic bin small enough to fit under your sink. Properly kept, they do not smell or attract flies. The worms could also live on the back porch, backyard, mudroom, basement or the garage. Keep them anywhere they are safe from extreme temperatures. Worms can survive down to freezing or up to 100°F, but they work their best at room temperature.

In its simplest form, a worm composter is just a box with some drainage holes poked in the bottom, full of shredded newspaper, worms, and kitchen scraps. The problem with this system is that it is a pain in the ass separating the worm castings from the worms (trust us, we’ve been there). Far better to have a stacking system, sort of a worm condo, where the worms can be lured away from finished stuff for ease of harvesting. You can buy fancy worm bins online, though some are shockingly pricy. The next project will show you how to make a good bin for the cost of two plastic storage tubs. But first, some basics of worm wrangling:

 

What To Feed Your Worms

Worms like fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, tea bags, plain pasta and cooked grains, your basic vegan diet. Don’t give them any fats or dairy products or meat. Feed them food prep waste, not plate scrapings.

Grind up eggshells for them once in a while so they get the calcium they need to breed, or give them a crushed Tums if you don’t eat eggs.

Worms love rabbit poop and do great things with it, so if you have rabbits, you’re in luck. Some people even set up the worm bins directly beneath their rabbit hutches. But no, they will not clean your cat box for you, so don’t get any ideas. Pure herbivore poop is all they can deal with.

 

How To Feed Them

All you have to do is pile the scraps in the bin, and then cover with moist, shredded newspaper. The newspaper is important. The scraps have to be covered up so that they don’t attract flies. Rotate your scrap pile to a different corner of the bin every week so that the worms spread their love around.

 

How Much To Feed Them

How much to feed them depends on how happy and hungry your worms are, how many worms you have and what you are feeding them. When you are figuring this out, remember that your worms are, hopefully, breeding. That means they will eat more as time goes on.

It all comes down to getting a feel for it. Shoot for a pound of scraps a week when you start off, and see how they do with that. Try feeding them twice a week. If the food is just sitting there, the worms are overwhelmed. Give them time to catch up. The cycle from new garbage to completed compost is about three months.

 

Simple Two-Level Worm Bin

You need:

•  Two matching 8-10 gallon rectangular plastic storage bins  with lids. They must be opaque, because worms hate light.

•  Wooden blocks or bricks for the bins to sit on

•  A drill with a bit and a ¼” bit

•  A bunch of shredded newspaper

•  One lb. redworms (Eisenia foetida), about 1000 worms

1. Using your big ¼” bit, drill about 20 evenly spaced holes in the bottom of each bin. These are for drainage and worm migration.

2. Using the ” bit, drill ventilation holes near the top rim of both bins, and also around the lower edges of both bins. See illustration. The exact location and spacing of the holes does not matter very much. You can add more later if the bin seems too humid.

3. Using your ” drill bit again, drill at least 20 ventilation holes in the top of one of the lids, but not in the other. One must stay intact.

4. Optional: if you have some screening material around, or perhaps some nylon, you can line the bottom of the bin with it to keep clumps of compost from falling out of the drainage holes. This is tidier, but not necessary.

5. Cover the bottom of one bin with about four inches of damp shredded paper newspaper, cardboard, letter paper or brown paper, any kind of paper except shiny paper, such as that used in catalogs and newspaper inserts. Leave the second bin empty for now. Dampen the paper by submerging it in a bucket of water, and then squeezing it out before it goes in the bin. It should never be dripping wet. Worms drown. Its consistency should be like a wrung-out sponge. That said, their bedding must also be kept damp at all times, because a dry worm is a dead worm. Mix in more dry or wet newspaper to get the right consistency.

6. Mix in a handful or two of soil of any kind in with the paper to give the worms the grit they need to digest.

7. Add your worms to their new home. Feed them very modestly at first. Begin by burying just one handful of scraps in a corner of the bin the first week, working your way up to greater quantities as they acclimate.

8. Choose the bin’s final location. Lay the lid that has no holes in it on the ground. It is going to be used to catch drips. (There should not be much liquid spillage; if there is, the bin is too wet. But if you do catch some, feed it to your plants.) Arrange the bricks or blocks on top of the lid, and then rest the bin on top of them. Cover the bin with the second, ventilated lid to keep out flies and vermin. A third intact storage tub could be used to collect the drips instead of the lid — just nest the other bins in it.

9. What about the second bin? Use it when you’re ready to harvest your compost. In the meantime, you can nest it under the working bin, or store it somewhere else. You’ll know it is time when most of the contents of the bin have transformed from food and newspaper to something that looks like soil. Of course your most recent additions will still be recognizable. Don’t worry about those. Set the empty bin directly on top of the compost in the first bin. Fill the new bin just like you filled the first one: with damp newspaper and a little soil. Add some nice fresh food scraps and the worms will begin to slither their way through the holes up to the new digs. Continue as usual for one or two months, until your worms have finished the food in the first bin and completed the migration upstairs. Then remove the first bin and reap the benefits of a whole mess of fresh worm castings.

Escaping worms: If the worms evacuate out the bottom, they are desperate. Either they are drowning or starving to death or suffering from light exposure. If they are dying, maybe they are too dry. The contents of the bin should always be damp and fluffy, not soggy and dank, or dried out.

Bad smells: The bin may be too wet. Add more newspaper, drill more ventilation holes, leave the lid off a little while. You may be putting in too much food for the worms to handle. Stop feeding for a while.

Fruit flies: Keep the food well buried. You can lay a sheet of cardboard directly over the bedding to help with this, too.

Note: Be sure to buy redworms (Eisenia foetida) for your bin. These are proper composting worms. You can find them at bait shops, the occasional farmer’s market and online. When choosing a supplier choose one near to you so the worms don’t have to be shipped across the country.

ESSENTIAL PROJECT 3

MULCH YOUR YARD

No other tip, trick or technique will help your garden more. Mulching is an integral part of the urban farm, and it replaces the lawn in the homestead aesthetic. Mulch generously, frequently, passionately. Think of the rich duff on a forest floor, a soft carpet of fallen leaves many inches deep. When you walk on it you sink down a little and your steps are silent and you smell that rich, peaty smell. You want your yard, your garden beds, even your planted pots to be like that.

Mulched plants are happy, healthy plants. Mulch holds in moisture, stabilizes the soil temperature and represses weeds. As the mulch breaks down it feeds the soil; it actually becomes soil. Because it keeps the soil moist, earthworms move in beneath mulched areas and start doing their own improvements. Other beneficial insects use mulch for habitat. Mulch also looks pleasant — it creates a nice visual unity that makes your yard look tidy. Once you become a mulch convert, you will begin to cringe at the sight of bare soil.

While mulch will improve soil and make for better growing conditions, it can also be used in places where you don’t plan to plant anything at all, like walkways, open areas, seating areas. Let it replace the lawn as a sort of a placeholder. Ideally, your entire yard will eventually be mulched anywhere it is not hardscaped.

We are going to describe three styles of mulching in ascending stages of complexity: regular mulching, sheet mulching and lasagna mulching. All three are simply variations of laying down loads of organic matter in your yard.

 

What Is Mulch? Where Do You Get It?

Mulch can be made up just about any organic material you can lay your hands on: fallen leaves, small wood chips or wood shavings, straw, pine needles, corn husks, even dried seaweed — whatever is cheap and plentiful in your area. Lawn clippings are fine — just make sure they haven’t been sprayed. You can mulch with any of your yard trimmings provided they don’t have seeds in them. Those seeds will sprout later on; for that reason you should never mulch with hay, only straw.

Many cities offer free wood chips for the taking, as do many tree trimming services. To find out where to get free mulch in your city, do an internet search with your city name and “free mulch” and you should find your answer pretty quickly. Largish wood chips are fine for the outer reaches of your yard, under trees, on walkways, etc., but you will probably find you prefer something a little finer right around your food. You may want try your local equestrian center. Stables will often allow you to haul off truckloads of used horse bedding for free, which makes a fine mulch/compost, though your place will smell horsey for a week or so.

Rocks, polished glass and decomposed granite are mulch, too, and are okay to use in patio areas or on paths, but obviously they are not going to build the soil. Some people also call plastic sheeting and shredded tires mulch, but those, while they do suppress weeds, don’t build the soil or improve the beauty of the landscape. And worse, they never go away.

If you have a large area to cover, and you absolutely have to buy your mulch, it is much cheaper to order your mulch in bulk than it is to buy many bags of it from the nursery. Bulk suppliers will dump a truck full of it in front of your homestead. Truckloads might seem like a lot of mulch, but read on.

Bulk deliveries of mulch, wood chips, soil, etc., are measured in cubic yards. To figure out how many cubic yards you’ll need, multiply the square feet by the depth in inches you want for your mulch, and divide that number by 324. For instance, to figure out what you need to cover 100 square feet (a 10’ x 10’ plot) at a depth of five inches, you’d do the following calculation: (100 x 5)/324=1.54, or about 1.5 cubic yards.

 

Regular Mulching

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to lay down a soaker hose, the time to do it is before you mulch. Put the hose against the soil, and layer everything else over it. Drip emitters, on the other hand, need to be on top of everything, or they will clog.

All you have to do is lay down a generous layer of organic matter around your plants. Anywhere you spread mulch you will be enriching the soil beneath, discouraging weeds and keeping nearby plants happy. Hardy weeds will still pop up, but they are much easier to pull than weeds in bare soil. Be sure you lay down at least five inches, more is better. Use less than that and all you are doing is decorating. It might look nice (for a short while) but it’s useless.

Mulch breaks down, so you have to add fresh material annually. Fortunately, Mother Nature offers free mulch every autumn. You can probably do all the annual mulching you need with fallen leaves that you collect around your place and from your grateful (but perhaps bewildered) neighbors.

 

Sheet Mulching

Sheet mulching is just a regular mulch backed up by a weed barrier. A sheet mulch will kill a yard full of weeds — or a lawn — with no digging or tilling. And the best thing is that the weeds or lawn you bury will nourish your future crops. This kind of mulching is particularly good for reclaiming hopelessly weedy yards — or as an insurance policy against future weeding.

Start sheet mulching laying down a weed barrier, something water-permeable and organic. This will either smother existing weeds or prevent new weeds from ever seeing the light of day. The most common barriers are newspaper or sheets of cardboard, though feel free to use your imagination. We hear the Japanese use old tatami mats, for instance, which just seems so much classier than cardboard. Other possibilities are old 100% cotton sheets and towels and throw rugs. Maybe your old straw hat. All organic barriers will break down over time, some faster than others. You can plan that strategically — use sturdy barriers in areas where you know you aren’t going to ever be changing anything; they’ll serve for a long time. Use newspaper in more active areas. That way if you want to change things around, you don’t have to dig up the old sisal carpet that you buried there.

Whatever type of barrier you use, lay it down all over your mulching area, piecing it around the trunks of trees and shrubs as necessary.

If you use newspaper, soak it first in buckets and then lay down sections four to six sheets thick. Avoid using the shiny inserts, which might have toxic inks in them. After you’ve thoroughly covered the area you want to protect, lay down at least five inches of organic matter on top of it.

You can plant directly into this mulch. Just sweep the mulch aside, cut an X in the weed barrier with a knife or razor blade, and then tuck your plant in the soil beneath. Close the edges of the weed barrier back around the plant and replace the mulch.

A word for people in hot, dry climates: Sometimes dry weather and heat will bake newspaper and cardboard into water-repellent shields. If you find your mulch floating when you water, that’s what is happening. You might be better off without the weed barrier.

 

Lasagna Mulch

This is sheet mulching raised to a high art; a mulch of many layers, thus the name. It is used to remediate poor soil. So you would want to consider doing this in parts of your yard where the soil is hard packed and dry, or recently disturbed by excavation, or too sandy or too clay, or stricken by an ancient curse — whatever the cause, this is a part of your yard where nothing seems to grow at all. Even the weeds avoid it. An area, in short, that needs healing.

A real soil wonk would begin this process by sending a soil sample to the lab for analysis. Then they would design the mulch to address specific deficits or imbalances in the soil. If you want to learn how to do that, you’re going to have to read another book. We’re going to show you an all-purpose lasagna mulch that will do any soil a lot of good. If you try this, and a year later find that still nothing will grow in your bad spot, then maybe it’s time to contact the lab.

Mow or stomp down any weeds, but don’t bother pulling them or cleaning them up. They’ll help feed the soil. Water the soil if it is dried out. Put a sprinkler on low and let it sit for a good long while until the water penetrates deep.

Spread out a layer of high-nitrogen material — i.e. poop — to accelerate the decomposition process. This could be rabbit poop, chicken poop or horse manure — but not bagged cow manure, which is too salty. Put down 50 lbs. of manure every 100 square feet.

Lay down your weed barrier as described above in Sheet Mulching. Be sure to overlap all of your sheets significantly.

Put down the compost layer. Make this first layer at least three inches thick. It can be made up of any organic matter that does not have seeds in it: aged sawdust, dry leaves, dried grass trimmings, chopped-up yard trimmings, dried seaweed, compost from your bin, or a mix of things. This layer does not have to look good.

Add the top dressing. This mimics the top layer of a forest floor, and is made up of the freshest stuff, the nutrient reserves that will work their way down into the soil bit by bit. It is also the aesthetic layer, what you and the neighbors will look at, so it is best composed of one type of mulch only. This could be dried leaves, straw, bark, wood chips, pine needles, any kind of chafe or husks that might be available locally. This should also be three inches thick, at least. And this layer will have to be renewed annually.

If the soil under this mulch is in poor shape, let it rest, mulched, for one whole year. Yes, an entire year. It may actually be worth planting when you come back to it. Trust us, this is the easiest, and the most natural, way to remediate poor soil. Either build a raised bed on top of it, or make a few self-watering containers to hold your crops in the meantime.

If you live in an area that gets very little rain, you will want to water your lasagna mulch every so often to encourage decomposition, worms and microbial development. Just set up a sprinkler and let it rain. No need to over-water, just put your hand beneath the barrier and check to see if it is moist.

 

Regarding mulch in vegetable beds: Mulching helps keep veggie leaves clean — no splash up when it rains. It also keeps fruiting plants, like zucchini or strawberries, off the bare soil, so they don’t rot. Straw is attractive and clean and often used for that kind of thing.

 

Caveat about vegetable mulching: Be careful with mulching tomatoes and other heat-lovers because mulching cools the soil. If you live somewhere with mild, overcast summers, mulched tomatoes might not get as much heat at the roots as they want. Use your judgment. If you notice that the soil looks cold, moldy, or in any way unhappy under the mulch, rake it away and let the sun shine on the soil for a little while. When the weather warms up you can rake it back in place.

Slugs and snails like to hide under mulch. Realistically, they’ll go after your vegetables whether you mulch or not, so don’t let this put you off mulching. Just keep a sharp eye out for them. If the problem gets way out of control, though, you might have to de-mulch the parts of your garden which are most affected.

ESSENTIAL PROJECT 4

BUILD A RAISED BED

Once you have your composting systems set up, the next step is to set up a place to grow your crops. If you have a little bit of ground to work with, put a raised bed on it. If you have no soil, only a porch, balcony or patio, see the next project on how to build a self-watering container.

We cannot overemphasize the benefits of growing your food in raised beds. A raised bed is nothing mysterious: it is just a bottomless construction that holds soil, like a sandbox. Raised beds provide your crops with the fluffy, rich soil they need for good root development, which means much healthier plants and higher yields.

There are other benefits, too. Raised beds are easier to weed than the hard ground, and seem to have fewer pests. The soil in them is warmer, so you can start planting earlier in the spring. Rain drains from them more quickly, so you don’t have to worry about waterlogged soil. The soil never gets compacted from being stepped on. They make gardening more comfortable because the plants are closer to you. They wall off and protect your crops from wild dogs, dragging hoses, and running kids. They allow you to garden without digging holes in your yard, which may be helpful if you rent. And maybe most important — sad to say — they lift your crops off your native city soil, which may be contaminated with lead or worse.

When planning a raised bed, be sure it is narrow enough that you can reach all of it from one side or the other, probably a maximum of four feet, or less if you can only come at it from one side. If you have multiple beds, leave room between them for a pathway. Place your bed where it will get a minimum of six hours of good sunlight during your growing season, and try to orient it on a north-nouth axis, so the plants all get their fair share of light.

The height of the bed varies from a minimum of about a foot, up to waist high. The one-to-two-foot range is standard. The reason people build extra-high beds is so they don’t have to bend over to tend them, or so they can reach them from a wheelchair. In short, your bed can be built in any size and shape at all, but most often you will see them built as 4 × 8 foot rectangles, a size which arises from standard  lumber dimensions.

The walls can be made up of anything that will stand up to water. The style of your bed depends entirely on your imagination and resources. They can be elegant garden furniture or Road Warrior constructions. You can build free-form walls of broken-up concrete, for instance. You could do something more polished with masonry if you have the skill or money. If you choose wood, you should use to use rot-resistant cedar or redwood if you want it to last, but make sure to use sustainably-harvested wood. It’s okay to use whatever scrap wood you can find, from found pallets for instance, as long as you don’t mind rebuilding every once in while, because the wet and the insects will rot away your boards. Whatever you do, though, don’t use railroad ties, as they are soaked with creosote, a wood preservative that is a potential carcinogen.

Don’t confuse railroad ties with pressure-treated lumber (the green-tinged stuff). There is controversy over whether or not it is safe to use pressure-treated lumber near food crops — or anywhere at all. It is somewhat safer than it used to be. Until 2003 pressure-treated lumber was soaked with chromated copper arsenate (CCA), which leached arsenic. Now it is treated with other copper compounds which are supposed to be better. We are not convinced, personally, but we’ll leave it up to you.

Our raised bed is just a bottomless box with some posts in the inner corners to allow you to easily screw the sides together. What follows are instructions for building a bed measuring  4’ × 8’, and standing about 16” high. The sides of the bed are made by two courses of 2” × 8” planks. You can use half the wood (three planks vs. six) if you  want to make the bed only one course (8”) high. 

Tools

•  Hand or power saw (unless you have your wood pre-cut  where you buy it)

•  Drill 

•  Drill bit to drill pilot holes for the #14 screws

•  Shovel

•  Level (optional)

 

Lumber

•   (6) 2” × 8” boards, eight feet long. Leave four as is for the  sides, cut two in half for the ends.

•   (1) 4” x 4”, six feet long (cut into four equal parts)

 

Hardware

•  3 ½” #14 wood screws to assemble the lumber 

•  ½” #8 wood screws to secure the optional PVC pipe hoops

•  Hardware cloth or gopher wire (if you’ve got gophers or  moles)

NOTE: Screws are more practical than nails in many ways, but nails are just fine for this project.

Optional Accessories

•  (1) 10-foot-long length of 1” PVC pipe

•  (3) 10 -foot-long ½” PVC pipes

•  Bird netting 

•  Clear plastic

•  Gopher wire

It is much harder to describe the building of a box than to just sit down and build a box. Hopefully the illustration will give you the gist of it. Remember, it just has to hold together, that’s all that matters, so any sort of walled enclosure you can cobble together will suit the purpose admirably well.

The four corner posts make it easy to assemble. Line up your boards against the corner posts, and affix each board to the post with at least two nails or screws. Build a short side first for the easiest assembly. Pre-drill two guide holes on either end of the plank where it will meet the post. Screw a corner post to both ends of one of the four-foot lengths of board, aligning the top edges and the sides neatly together. Add the second board flush against the first board to make the side of the bed two boards deep. The corner posts will be a little longer than the two planks combined. This is good, because you’re going to bury those extra inches in the ground to make the bed extra stable. They’re the feet.

Now build the other short end exactly the same way. Then you can join the long boards to the corner posts of the short segments to make up the long sides of the bed. This is easiest to do with the bed upside down — with the legs sticking in the air.

If gophers or moles are a problem where you live, staple gopher wire, which is a kind of galvanized metal screen, or hardware cloth, across the bottom of the bed before you put it in place. How do you know if you have moles or gophers? Do you have any mysterious holes and mounds in your yard? Around the neighborhood? If you see any, err on the side of caution and put in the wire. It will be difficult to add later.

Before you place the bed, use a pitchfork to poke holes into the ground where the bed is going to go. You don’t have to turn the soil violently, just break it up a little. It’s fine to put the bed down right on top of a lawn. Poke holes in the lawn just as you would bare dirt. All that green matter will enrich your soil.

Dig four holes in each corner where the corner posts will sink into the ground. Flip the bed right side up and put it in place.

Fill the bed with good soil. It takes a lot of soil to fill a bed, more bags than you would think. If you compost, you will want to save all your finished compost for this event. You might be able to make a decent soil mix by combining the soil in your yard (assuming it’s not too crappy) with compost. Or go the easy route and buy organic soil from a good nursery. Buy the best soil you can afford. Good soil is going to pay you back over and over again in the form of healthy crops. Fill the bed all the way to the top, because the soil will settle dramatically after a few hours.

 

The Well-Accessorized Bed

The bed can be pimped out so it can easily be covered with aviary netting to keep out critters or plastic sheeting to keep out cold. Screw short  sections  of  1”  PVC  pipe  vertically  onto  the  inner  walls  of  the  bed using 1” galvanized tube straps to keep them in place. Pair them short-ways across the bed. Six, three on each side, should be sufficient.  These PVC lengths are used to hold hoops made from the 10’  lengths  of  ½”  PVC  pipe  or  thick  wire  that  you  bend  across  the  bed  (imagine a covered wagon).

ESSENTIAL PROJECT 5

HOW TO BUILD A SELF-WATERING CONTAINER

These containers make it easy to grow vegetables in pots. They are ideal for apartment gardening, but are so useful that everyone should use them to maximize their growing space.

The problem with growing food in pots is that pots dry out quickly and it’s all too easy to forget to water. Irregular watering causes all sorts of problems for sensitive fruits and vegetables. Container gardening is also water intensive. During a heat wave it might mean visiting the plants with the watering can two or even three times every day — obviously not a practical scheme for someone who works away from home, or someone with any kind of life at all.

An elegant solution exists in the form of self-watering containers. Rather than having a hole in the bottom of the pot, a self-watering container (SWC) has a reservoir of water at the bottom, and water leaches upward into the soil by various mechanisms, keeping it constantly moist. The top of the pot is covered with a layer of plastic that discourages evaporation. Depending on how deep the water reservoir is, it’s possible to go about a week between fill-ups. This arrangement, combined with the plastic layer, prevents both over-watering and under-watering that can occur with conventional pots. In other words, it takes the guesswork and anxiety out of watering.

 

KELLY SAYS: I’m going to tell you right now that you can buy yourself a self-watering container at earthbox.com. It’s great to make SWCs with found materials and all, but if these instructions make your eyes cross, or if you just don’t have time, there is no shame in trotting off with your credit card and ordering a couple of these ready-made. They start at about forty bucks.

ERIK SAYS: Au contraire, ma petite amie! All it takes is two five-gallon buckets, a few other easily scavenged items and about an hour’s worth of time. Those Earthboxes are damned expensive and my time is cheap.

 

A few years back, an internet hero named Josh Mandel figured out several different techniques for building DYI self-watering containers out of old buckets, soda bottles, storage tubs, etc. His plans are widely disseminated online, and you’ll find links to his instructional PDF files at the end of the book, and at our website.

Inspired by his methods, we started making our own self-watering containers. Each SWC is a little different, because each one, being made of found materials, is an improvisation. We’re going to show you how to make a simple SWC out of two five-gallon buckets. Once you have the basic principles down, it should be easy to improvise future containers on your own out of whatever you have on hand.

The five-gallon size described is good for one big plant. Try a basil plant in it, especially if you like pesto. Basil thrives with the steady moisture, as does Italian parsley, so both herbs grow huge in SWCs. Or plant a tomato, but be sure it is a small tomato. Look for types designated “patio” or “basket” tomatoes. These are bred to perform well in tight conditions. A five-gallon container seems big, but tomatoes have some of the deepest roots of all vegetables. If you plant an ordinary tomato in a SWC its roots might find their way into the reservoir, and then it will become waterlogged.

We recommend that for your next project you visit Josh Mandel’s PDFs for instructions on how to construct a larger, slightly more complex container out of  8-10 gallon sized storage tubs. That size SWC  is very good for growing a little salad garden, a stand of greens, or a patch of strawberries, or even a blueberry bush.

Five-Gallon Self-Watering Container

It all starts with providing a water reservoir at the bottom of your container. You can do this either by nesting two containers together (the top one holds soil, the bottom one water) or by making some kind of divider that sits toward the bottom of a single container and holds the soil above the reservoir. However it is constructed, the barrier between the soil and water should be full of small holes for ventilation.

The water is pulled up from the reservoir and into the soil by means of something called a wicking chamber. This can be a perforated tube, a basket, a cup, or anything full of holes that links the soil to the water. The soil in the chamber(s) becomes saturated, and it feeds moisture to the rest of the soil.

The reservoir is refilled by means of a pipe that passes through the soil compartment down to the very bottom of the container.

The last essential element is a hole drilled into the side of the container at the highest point of the reservoir. This is an overflow hole that prevents you from oversaturating your plants.

Materials

•  (2) food-grade, five-gallon plastic buckets. If possible, one of  them should have a lid.

•  (1) 16 oz. plastic drink cup, or a 32 oz. plastic yogurt  container, or anything similar that you can punch holes in.

A plastic basket of similar size would work too.

•  1 bucket lid (can substitute a plastic garbage bag in a pinch)

•  plastic twist ties

•  17 inches of 1” diameter PVC pipe, copper tubing, a bamboo  tube, or anything similar

•  A big bag of potting mix

Tools

•  Drill 

•  Keyhole saw, safety knife or saber saw

1. Find two food-grade five-gallon plastic buckets. A good source is behind restaurants and donut shops. If they once held food, you know they aren’t going to be toxic (but do wash them). Don’t source your buckets off of construction sites!

2. Cut a hole right in the center of the bottom of one of the buckets. The yogurt container or whatever you are using is going to sit in this hole, so it hangs down into the water reservoir below (i.e. the bottom bucket), and act as your wicking chamber. Do this by tracing an outline of the cup on the bottom of the bucket, and then cutting a little inside the line. Use a safety knife, or a keyhole saw for this. It doesn’t have to be pretty.

All you have to make sure of is that your wicking chamber will fit in that lower bucket. If the chamber is too tall, you won’t be able to fit the two buckets together. This is something that is easy to adjust as you go, but just keep it in mind from the beginning.

To give you an idea of sizes, we have one SWC made from two five-gallon Kikkoman soy sauce buckets. For that one the wicking chamber is a 32 oz. yogurt container, and it hangs down 3 ½” into the reser voir.

3. Cut another hole in the bottom of the same container, anywhere near the outside edge (i.e. anywhere but the center). This hole is for the pipe that will refill the reservoir and should be sized accordingly. Again, just trace around one end of your pipe and cut.

4. Now drill a bunch of ¼ inch holes in the remaining real estate on the bottom of this same bucket. The exact number or spacing does not matter. These are ventilation holes. Go for a Swiss cheese effect, but don’t get too carried away. Leave the other bucket intact.

5. Now turn to your wicking chamber — the drink cup or yogurt container or whatever. Punch or drill a bunch of random ½”  holes all over the sides of the cup, but not the bottom (the soil would fall out if the bottom was open). These big holes will allow water to seep into the soil in the chamber, and thus be drawn into the soil above.

6. Attach the wicking chamber to the bottom of the top bucket. This is a very loose affair, consisting of four twist ties. Just drill holes at the 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock positions just below the top edge of the cup and drill corresponding holes near the edge of the large hole you cut in the middle of the bucket. Thread plastic twist ties through these holes to secure the wicking chamber so that it hangs beneath the holey bucket.

7. If necessary, cut the pipe that feeds the reservoir to a good length. You want it to poke out of the top of the container for easy watering. Seventeen inches is just about right for this project. Cut one end of the tube on the diagonal, and put this end down in the bucket. The angled end will allow water to flow freely out of the tube and into the reservoir.

8. Place the bucket fitted with the suspended wicking chamber into the untouched bucket.

9. Make your overflow hole. Figure out where the bottom of the top bucket sits in relation to the bottom bucket. Try holding it up to strong light, or employing a ruler. Drill a ¼” hole in the side of the lower bucket (the previously untouched bucket), placing the hole just a little beneath the bottom edge of the inside bucket. This hole will serve to spill off overflow from the reservoir chamber. You want the top bucket to be wicking water, not sitting in water.

10. Finally, insert the watering pipe through the hole you drilled in the bottom of the inner bucket. Be sure to put the pointy end in the bucket. The flat end will stick out the top.

11. Fill your new container with potting mix. Note that you must use potting mix because regular garden soil does not work very well in SWCs. Fill the container all the way to the top, moistening the soil as you go.

12. Plant your plant, dead center.

13. Make a circular, shallow trough around the perimeter of the plant, and sprinkle about a cup dry organic fertilizer in the trench. Then cover the trench up with a little soil so the fertilizer is just slightly buried — don’t work the fertilizer into the soil. You must be careful with fertilizers and SWCs because they are closed systems. Excess fertilizer doesn’t drain away. So always keep it at the top off the container, where it will work its way down gradually.

14. If you’ve got a lid for the bucket, and your plant is small enough, go ahead and cut a hole in the center of the lid for the plant to poke through, then ease the lid into place, threading the plant’s leaves through the hole. The lid will help retain moisture. If you don’t have a lid, or if your plant is too big, cut an X in a plastic garbage bag and lay it across the top of the pot, securing it around the sides with a length of tape or string, or if you’ve got a lid for the bucket, you can cut out the center and use the rim to secure the plastic. A how-to video can also be found at our website www.homegrownevolution.com

A Treasure Chest of Garden Projects and Advice

PROJECT

HOW TO START SEEDS

KELLY SAYS: I am all for skipping the seed stage whenever possible and buying seedlings (i.e. small plants) at the nursery or farmers’ market for instant gratification. Your garden will get going faster, and you will avoid the other pitfalls of seed starting. Seeds fail to sprout sometimes, or are just very pokey, and tiny newborn sprouts get nibbled on by bugs and birds. Sure, the per-plant price of seedlings vs. seeds is much, much higher, but you never meant to grow one hundred kale plants anyway, did you?

ERIK SAYS: Seeds are the future! By starting with seeds you can find much more exotic varieties thanks to the internet, catalogs, and seed saving exchanges. In fact that latter category, seed exchange, is one way we can all help preserve endangered varieties. Try letting a few of your heirloom plants go to seed, and share them with other gardeners. And best of all, seeds are cheap. I like cheap!

But we both agree that growing from seeds makes perfect sense for plants that you pull up whole and eat — one-use plants, if you will — like radishes and carrots. This also applies to plants that are good to eat as babies, like lettuce. In the end, starting plants from seeds is not hard, it just requires patience.

 

You can start your seedlings indoors early in the year. It takes them weeks to get to the point when they are ready to transplant, and in that time the weather will warm enough for you to plant them outdoors. So start them a month or so before your last projected frost. Germination times are listed on the seed packages — they vary quite a bit from plant to plant, so be sure to check. Once the weather warms, you can start your seeds outdoors, but make sure they are in a protected space. They can’t deal with harsh sun, wind or punishing rain.

 

To start seeds you need:

•  A container. Around here we start seeds in used containers, like empty six-packs. (Seedling six-packs from nurseries, not beer six-packs.) You can buy divided trays made for the purpose, or use little peat pots. Some people use egg cartons for seed starting, but we find they dry out the soil too fast. If you want to start a lot of seeds you can also sow them in flats, which are big plastic trays about three inches deep.

•  Soil. It is safest to use a seed starting mix from the nursery, but you can use garden soil if you are sure it is disease- and pest-free.

•  Spray bottle

•  Plastic bag

•  Maybe a little fertilizer tea

•  And seeds, of course

1. Fill your container with soil, stopping about ¼ from the top.

2. Wet the soil thoroughly.

3. Make holes for the seeds. Read the seed packet’s planting depth recommendation, and also open the pack and check out the seeds. Seeds need to go in a hole four times as deep as the seed is wide, unless the seeds are just teeny tiny. Then they just get a little soil sprinkled over them, or sometimes they don’t get any covering at all. So taking into consideration the size of your seeds, use your finger, or a pencil, to poke holes into your soil at the right depth. If you are planting in a flat, leave an inch or two between seeds. You can also dig out a mini furrow, a long ditch in the soil, with your pencil and sprinkle your seeds along that line.

4. Drop your seeds one by one into the holes or furrows, and gently cover them up with more soil so they’re buried at the recommended depth. Too shallow is better than too deep.

5. Mist the surface of the soil with your spray bottle to settle everything down. While the seeds are germinating, and later when they are just wee little things, you are going to do all of your watering with your spray bottle or a hose set to mist.

6. Label your plants so you don’t forget what is what. Write on popsicle sticks or plastic cutlery with indelible marker, or use the marker directly on the pots.

7. If you are starting your seeds indoors, provide them with warmth until they sprout; you can keep them on top of a DVD  player, for instance, or the back of a stove. After they sprout make sure they get lots of light.

8. If you have a hard time keeping the soil moist between waterings (this is more the case outdoors than in), seal in the humidity by slipping a clear plastic bag over your plantings. You can leave this on until the seedlings sprout.

9. Keep the soil evenly moist — just moist — all the time, before and after sprouting. Too soggy is as damaging as too dry.

If your seedbeds are too wet and cold they will come down with the dreaded damping-off disease, which results in failure to sprout or wilting sprouts. A white mold sometimes appears on the surface of the soil. To prevent it, keep your trays warmish, and don’t over-water. If you see any signs of damping off, stop watering for a couple of days, move the pots somewhere warmer, then only water from the bottom. Scrape off any mold, and increase light exposure.

10. Feed your seedlings when the true leaves appear. The first leaves that appear are called cotyledons. They are not true leaves, but food storage cells. They are always rounded and sort of generic-looking. The true leaves will show up next. Those will be miniature versions of the adult leaf. Once the true leaves have unfolded, you can encourage your seedlings with a little food. This is not mandatory, but you can water them one time with a weak solution of fertilizer tea.

11. As your seedlings develop, be sure they get lots of light. Add artificial light at night if necessary — a compact fluorescent will work fine, just put it close to them. A sure sign of insufficient light is leggy plants, seedlings with really long gangling stems. They’re stretching their necks out, trying to find the light!

12. Harden them off: Once their real leaves are in and they are looking sturdy and the weather is good, you can begin to acclimate the seedlings to the world outside. This process is called “hardening off.” The idea is to keep the plants from going into shock and keeling over from the change in growing conditions. Start putting them outside during the day in a protected spot that’s not too sunny, and bring them in at night. Give them a little more sun exposure each day for a few days, then finally start leaving them out all night.

Your seed package will tell you if you have to do anything extra to help your seeds germinate. One common requirement is pre-soaking, which is just setting the seeds in water overnight before you plant them. Another is scarifying. This is to break down the outer coats of particularly strong seeds. All you have to do is rub them between sandpaper or against a screen for a few seconds, or if they are larger seeds, nick them with a knife or nail file.

ADVICE

HOW TO TRANSPLANT

Advice On The Mechanics Of Moving Plants Out Of Pots

Water the plant first to reduce shock, and carefully ease it from its pot. Squeezing a plastic pot around the sides usually loosens it up a bit. You can try to slide a butter knife down the side of a clay pot. Tip the pot over and catch the root ball as it slides out without squashing the plant leaves. The easiest way to do this is to cradle the plant’s stem between your first two fingers as you turn the pot upside down. It’s considered bad form to yank the plant out of its pot by the neck.

If you’re transplanting seedlings from flats, carefully separate one plant at a time from the rest, trying your best to preserve the soil around their roots as you air-lift them to their new home.

Don’t dilly-dally when transplanting. You don’t want the roots drying out, or the plants going into deep shock while waiting around, naked, for you to get around to planting them. Transplant one plant at a time.

Break up the root ball. When plants have been in pots for a long time, their roots circle around the edges of the pot, looking for somewhere to go. When the circling roots almost make a pot themselves, this is called “root-bound.” You don’t want to plant a root-bound plant because it will never spread out its roots and make itself at home. You have to help it by loosening up the roots. With small plants (six-packs and the like) this is usually just a matter of gently pulling apart the bottom of the root ball so the heart of the roots is exposed. No need to maul or mutilate. Just loosen. The roots can be tough on bigger plants — too strong to open with your hands without a lot of wrestling and damage. With these you might want to take a sharp knife and make three or four vertical cuts down the sides of the root ball, starting about in the middle, poking in about an inch deep and slicing straight down through the tangled roots to the bottom. Then you should be able to get your fingers in and loosen up the ball.

 

Planting In An Ordinary Pot

Choose a container at least a few inches deeper and wider than the one the plant came in, and make sure there is a drainage hole at the bottom. Line the bottom of the pot with a layer of rocks, gravel, marbles, little chunks of concrete, broken pot shards, etc. to keep the soil from clogging up the drainage hole. Then lay down a layer of potting soil. The depth of this layer depends on the height of your plant. You want the top of the root ball to be an inch or so lower than the rim of the new pot. You don’t want to pot it up to the very top or it will be hard to water. So fuss with this level, adding or subtracting soil from the bottom of the new pot until you get it right. Then settle the root ball in the center, make sure it isn’t crooked, and back fill around the edges with soil and maybe a little organic fertilizer. Pack it all down gently and water.

 

Planting In A Self-Watering Container

See essential project 5 for how to build and maintain one. These do not have rocks on the bottom, or drainage issues like conventional pots. All you have to do in a SWC is gently dig a hole the exact size of the root ball, and tuck the plant in. Easy as pie.

Planting In The Ground

If you are planting in soft, loose garden soil, just dig a hole exactly as big as the plant’s root ball and pop it in there. If you are planting a large plant, like a bush or tree, you have no choice but to disturb the soil by digging a big hole. Dig a hole twice as deep and wide as the root ball. Make a little mound of soil at the bottom of the hole. Sprinkle a cup or two of organic fertilizer in there, or worm castings, then drape the spreading roots over the mound. The notion behind this is making sure you don’t end up with an air pocket at the base of your plant.

Fuss with the plant to make sure it is the right height and is standing straight. You might have to add to or reduce the mound beneath its roots. The idea is that you don’t want the root ball protruding from the soil, because watering will expose the roots. The base of the plant should be flush with the ground. Refill the hole with the same soil you dug out of it. You never want to dig a hole and backfill with fancy soil. The soils will be so different that they will have nothing to do with one another, the hole will become an underground pot, and the plant will never really put down roots and thrive.

For watering ease, make an irrigation basin by forming a little wall of soil in a circle all around the base of the plant, making the circle about the same diameter as the spread of its branches. When you have a reservoir like this, you can fill it up with water and let sink in slowly. It’s very handy. Otherwise when you water the water goes everywhere. These reservoirs are good for smaller plants, too, like tomatoes. After planting, feed the plant by watering with fertilizer tea, and put thick mulch around the plant so that the soil continues to improve.

PROJECT

FERTILIZER TEA

An easy, though slightly stinky, way of delivering nutrients to your plants is to make fertilizer tea — the gentle and healthy alternative to chemical fertilizers. Tea is great for plants in the ground, and great for traditional container plants, which tend to be nutrient-starved, but should not be used in self-watering containers. SWCs do not drain, so the fertilizer levels could build up too much.

Fertilizer tea is just organic fertilizer steeped in water for a day or so. The resulting liquid is super nutritious and easily applied. Any solids left over from the brewing can be mulched around the base of a plant, or added to the compost pile.

Different types of plants have different fertilization needs, so do your research before using the tea too freely, but there are two times where we can categorically recommend its use: 1) a single watering of your seedlings with a fairly dilute tea when they put out their first set of true leaves, and 2) just after transplanting anything, whether it be a seedling or a mature plant, to help with transplant shock.

 

Tea Recipes

Add one of the following to a five-gallon bucket and fill it with water. (Cover it to keep out flies, dogs and toddlers and let it steep for about 24 hours, or at least overnight.)

•  A shovelful of finished compost.

•  A couple of cups of worm castings.

•  A few cups of packaged dry organic fertilizer, like the Dr.  Earth brand. The packages will tell you exactly how much to use in tea.

•  A shovelful of horse or chicken manure at least six months  old. Fresh manure will burn your plants. Steer manure is too salty.

•  A shovelful of fresh rabbit poop, and if you’ve got it around, a  spoonful of molasses to activate it. Rabbit poop is the only poop you’re allowed to use fresh.

•  A whole armload of weeds or garden trimmings. Enough  to fill the bucket. Weeds, greens and some herbs are particularly good sources of minerals. Anything green would do some good, but we recommend comfrey, plantain, dandelion, parsley, chicory. Any leafy greens that are good for you will be good for your plants. Just make sure the weeds have not gone to seed yet — or if they have, strain your tea before you use it.

•  A few ounces of liquid kelp extract or fish emulsion. Follow  the directions on the bottle. (These ready-made liquid products don’t require steeping, just mix and use.)

PROJECT

TRASH TALKIN’ TIRE PROJECT 1: A TIRE HOSE CADDY

Here’s a cheap and easy way to keep that hose from trippin’ you up in the back yard. Used tires are one of our favorite junk building materials, easily sourced on any city street.

1. Cut out the sidewall of one side of a tire using a saber saw. You could use a sharp knife, but electricity makes this task a lot easier.

2. Drill a bunch of drainage holes in the remaining wall of the tire (aka the bottom of the caddy) at least one hole every three inches. This is to keep water from pooling when it rains. Tires combined with water make the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. Drainage holes keep this from becoming a problem.

3. Coil up your hose inside the tire. Enjoy your tidy patio!

PROJECT

TRASH TALKIN’ TIRE PROJECT 2: STACKING COMPOSTER

Want compost but can’t build a box? Can’t afford a commercial composter? Abandoned tires are always there for you.

Collect a bunch of tires the same size and you can make a stacking compost bin. It’s really simple. You’re just going to make a tire tower. All you have to do is figure out how to cut out the side walls, because if you stack the tires as is, the compost will get stuck in the tire wells. Without side walls, tires are basically big stacking rubber rings.

You can cut out the sidewalls with firm hand and a utility knife, but an electric saber saw makes it a lot easier.

When you’re done, just stack and start filling. Start by putting down a thick layer of dry materials at the very bottom, e.g. dry leaves, straw or dried out grass clippings. Then start to add your food scraps and green trimmings.

The black rubber helps to keep your compost warm and moist, and that’s a good thing.

It’s okay to start with just a couple of tires, and add more as you go. The best thing about a tire composter is its flexibility. Stack it tall, or break it into two short piles later, play around with different configurations.

Improvise a lid of some sort to keep out the rain and critters. We use a piece of scrap aluminum weighed down by a length of lumber-because we’re classy that way.

PROJECT

GROW SOME LETTUCE

This is a good first project for a beginning farmer. Lettuce is easy to grow, and tastes so much better homegrown than from a bag. Better still, it is always fresh when you want it, instead of rotting in your crisper drawer.

It is easiest to grow lettuce in cool (but not freezing) weather. Lettuce is not a sun worshipper. In climates with freezing winters, you should plant lettuce in the early spring. In warm winter climates you can plant it in the fall as soon as the summer heat dies down, or any time over the winter.

You need one packet of mixed lettuce seeds (also called salad blend or mesclun mix) from your neighborhood nursery. There are many variations on this theme, but basically a mesclun mix contains seeds of several different lettuces and salad herbs. If you can’t find any such thing, you can buy a few different types of lettuce to mix up yourself. Just be sure you buy loose leaf lettuce, not the ball-shaped Iceberg type.

The next thing you will need is somewhere to plant your lettuce. The best choice would be a self-watering container of the storage tub size. Failing this, any sort of big pot or found vessel would do, as long as that pot has a hole in the bottom of it for drainage. You can even use something permeable, like a basket, if you line it with a plastic garbage bag. Be sure to poke holes in the bottom of the bag for drainage. This general growing technique is suitable for garden beds, too.

If you have a regular pot, put a layer of rocks, or something similarly impermeable, at the bottom of the pot. This will keep the drainage hole(s) from becoming clogged with soil. Fill your pot or self-watering container with potting soil. Not regular garden soil. Add a handful of dry organic fertilizer or worm castings to the pot. If you are using a self-watering container (SWC), leave the fertilizer until later.

•  Before you sow your seeds, make sure you’ve set a little bit  of soil aside. You need just enough to cover your seeded area with a light sprinkle of soil.

•  Level out your soil and water deeply. Check the pot for good  drainage. You don’t want your seeds to go swimming.

•  Open your seed packet and sprinkle your seeds evenly over  the surface of the soil. Do not make rows or poke holes or worry about spacing. Be free — you’re sowing seed, man. Just let it fall where it wants. Shoot for a coverage rate that leaves the individual seeds about a finger’s width apart, but really, it doesn’t matter much if some spots are thicker than others.

•  Sprinkle your reserved soil over your seeds in a very thin  layer — ¼” or less. It’s okay if some seeds are not covered.

•  Water again, lightly this time, with a watering can or a hose  on the gentle shower or mist setting, or even with many pumps of a spray bottle. The idea is just to secure the seeds and their covering, since you’ve already watered the pot thoroughly.

•  Keep your seeds moist until they sprout, this might take a  few days or a couple of weeks, depending on the seeds. The seed packet will tell you what to expect. We use a spray bottle to mist the soil, so that we don’t disturb the seeds with big sloshes of water.

Eating Your Way To Equilibrium

Density is the difference between this way of planting and the row method recommended on the seed packet. When plants are close together they shade each other and keep the soil moist and crowd out weeds. This technique makes for lots of baby greens for you, and happy plants, as long as they don’t get too crowded. The key is to let the plants be crowded as babies, but thin them by the time they are mature. Your mission is to eat your way into equilibrium. Here’s how to do it:

Let the little seedlings grow to harvest height, say two or three inches high. You’ll see that as they grow all those identical looking little sprouts begin to take on the unique characteristics of the adult plants. It’s good to pay attention to them and learn how to differentiate them from baby weeds, or baby radishes, or baby turnips.

When your plants are the right size, thin out your crop by picking a baby green salad for dinner. Pinch them off at the root — they won’t come back. Pulling them up just makes a mess. Try to distribute your picking evenly so you free up a space all over the bed or container. Go after the plants that are growing in tight packs. When you consider that each mature plant will require an area about as big as a soup bowl, you’ll understand that you have a lot of salads ahead of you.

Salad by salad, empty out your bed until you have just a handful of full-sized lettuce plants left. They can be pretty close, as long as they are not touching. If there isn’t any air between them they will be stunted, and bugs and rot can set in. Six to eight full-grown lettuce plants (which is what would fit in a SWC built from a storage tub) will keep you in salad for the rest of the season. A mature leafy lettuce plant doesn’t have to be used whole. Just harvest its outer leaves. It will keep making new leaves for you, and you will keep eating salad.

Your lettuce should grow very well with very little attention from you apart from regular, even watering, and an SWC will do that for you. When you get the plants narrowed down to their final number you can mulch them with a plastic liner or organic matter. Mulch will help regulate the soil temperature, which they will appreciate.

When it starts to get hot and the lettuce decides it’s time to flower, it will send up a funny stalk. This is called bolting. Bolting makes lettuce bitter and tough. When that happens, it is time to plant something new.

ADVICE

TIPS & TRICKS FOR GARDENING IN CONTAINERS

Of course it is more difficult to grow food in quantity in a place without a yard than it is with a yard, but you will be surprised how much you can grow in very little space if you play your cards right. Start with the following suggestions, and once you max out your living space, look into renting a community garden plot.

If you can’t put your plants in the ground, you can put them in a pot. Most urban farmers will do some of their gardening in containers even if they have access to land, simply because no space should be wasted. So windows, patios, porches, stoops, balconies and decks all get fitted out with containers full of food.

We recommend using self-watering containers for all food crops, except herbs. Vegetables are greedy for water, and pots dr y out fast,  especially in the heat. In the dog days of summer you might have to water plants in pots twice a day. Self-watering containers only need their reservoirs filled maybe once a week. So while they do take a little time and energy to build, or money to buy, the investment you put in on the front end more than pays off later on, in saved time, saved water, and in extra healthy productive plants.

The exception to this rule is herbs. Most herbs like to go dry between waterings, which self-watering containers do not allow. A little suffering seems to bring out the best in herbs. This is especially true for the woodier, oilier herbs like lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage and oregano. So plant those in pots. Tender herbs like parsley, cilantro, basil and chives can go either way.

Get the most bang for your buck. Grow produce which is either expensive, unavailable or flavorless at the store. Lettuce is a good example. Growing salad mix is easy in containers. You will have a continuous supply of tender, flavorful salad greens on hand and save a lot of money on bags of bland lettuce. Fresh herbs are great to have on hand all the time, and also expensive to buy. Homegrown tomatoes are a hundred times better than store-bought. Fresh green peas are a real treat, and basically impossible to get — even at farmers’ markets — because they taste best if eaten within minutes of picking. On the other hand, some veggies, like onions, are so inexpensive and easy to come by that they would be low on our list of things to grow in containers.

When you choose your plants, remember that it is fine to buy seedlings for your container gardens. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to buy a packet of tomato seeds if you’re only going to grow two plants. Ditto for herbs. Just buy a little plant. However, seeds do make sense for plants you pull up whole, like carrots, radishes and green onions.

Grow only what you really like. This sounds obvious, but believe us, when you are at the nursery a kind of psychosis will overtake you and you’ll want to buy everything you see. Don’t waste your time growing stuff you are not thrilled about. Grow stuff you can’t wait to eat.

Always use potting soil in your containers — not generic garden soil, but organic potting soil. And buy the best soil you can, or make your own once you’ve got your compost going. You will be paid back in healthy, productive plants.

Potted plants need food. If they are not in self-watering containers the nutrients in the soil tend to be flushed with each watering. So either feed your plants store bought organic plant food formulated for vegetables or feed them worm castings or fertilizer tea.

Good drainage is vital. When potting a plant in a normal pot, put rocks or broken pot shards at the bottom of the pot before you add soil. This keeps the drainage hole from plugging. This is not true for self-watering containers. Big pots need to be set up off the ground a little, like on a pair of bricks or slats of wood, so that the water can drain out of them freely.

Our Favorite Things To Grow In Containers:

Blueberries, which require special soil anyway, so almost can’t be grown in the ground unless you live in blueberry country.

Strawberries, which can be grown in hanging baskets, or strawberry pots, or SWCs.

Cherry tomatoes, just be sure that you choose one labeled a patio or basket variety, so it will be well-behaved enough to live in a pot.

Lettuce, which we’ve talked about quite a bit elsewhere.

Swiss chard, which is much easier to grow than spinach and not picky about weather.

Stubby little carrots, like the round Thumbelina variety.

Radishes, because they’re ready so fast.

Basil or Italian parsley, but only in self-watering containers, because they both thrive on regular watering.

ADVICE

THE DIRT ON POTTING SOIL

If you are doing your growing in containers, you will want to renew your potting soil each time you plant something new, or at least once a year. Admittedly, we have occasionally been guilty of pulling an old plant and just sticking something new in. You can get away with that a few times, but if you do that too much your soil will tire out and your plants will suffer. For best results you should renew your soil between each new planting. Some books recommend that you throw out all your soil each time you replant, but we think that’s a little extreme, unless you have reason to believe the soil is diseased.

 

Renewing Your Potting Soil

If you’re working on a patio or balcony, or in your kitchen, empty the pot out on newspaper or something to make cleanup easy. Break up the soil and fish out big chunks of old roots.

Add new soil to the mix at the ratio of one part new soil to three parts old soil. The new soil you add can be either straight worm castings or new store-bought potting soil or homemade potting soil.

If you are not using worm castings as part of the blend, mix in dry organic fertilizer at the rates recommended on the box — probably about a handful for a large pot. If you didn’t have enough worm castings for the mix, but you do have some, by all means add a handful to every pot, either in the mix or just sprinkle them on top after you plant.

While your pots are empty, take this opportunity to scrub them inside and out with a scrub brush or nylon pad. Salts can build up on pots that are bad for the plants, and other beasties might be there as well. If the last plant in that pot failed, you’ll want to be extra thorough with the cleaning, in case it was a disease that caused the failure. Most sources recommend that you use a solution of one part bleach to nine parts water for pot cleaning, but we don’t like bleach and so and use a 50/50 vinegar/water blend that we keep around for household cleaning. Rinse well.

 

Homemade Potting Soil

Some gardeners really get into mixing their own potting soil, and a quick perusal on the web will show you that there are as many recipes as there are gardeners. We encourage you to experiment — plants are forgiving. Potting soil is different than ordinary garden soil because it has to drain better, therefore it usually has a lot of sand or other additives in it, like perlite.

Basic Potting Soil 1

⅓ finished compost, screened, maybe pasteurized
⅓ garden topsoil, from your yard, or planting mix from a bag
⅓ sharp sand, also called builder’s sand

 

Basic Potting Soil 2

⅓ finished compost, screened, maybe pasteurized
⅓ sharp sand, or builder’s sand
⅓ sphagnum peat moss or coir

ADVICE

INSTALLING DRIP IRRIGATION

KELLY’S TAKE: Slow, deep watering is the best way to care for your plants. You should become acquainted with one of two slow watering systems: the soaker hose or the drip emitter system. For years we used a soaker hose. We have dripper emitters now. Both are good, but I like the soaker hose more, actually, because it is so boneheaded easy, and it adapts easily to my random planting patterns.

All a soaker hose is is a black, coarse hose that full of invisible holes that weep steadily when water runs through it, soaking an area several inches deep to either side of it. You can find it at any garden center in different lengths.

Installation is a snap. You just arrange the soaker hose in zig-zags in your garden bed, or run it along a row of plants, or loop it around your trees. Stake it down so it stays put. You can buy special stakes where the hose is sold, or just use bent wire. You don’t move it around once you put it down. It just lays there and oozes. Even in a vegetable bed it stays put and the plants grow around it. If you are mulching, the soaker hose should be buried beneath the mulch, against the soil. It is more efficient that way, and it looks better.

Run a normal hose from your water source to the soaker hose. One normal hose can feed multiple soaker hoses if you get one of those branching on/off valve attachments to go between them. These are also sold at any garden store. Then you can choose to water one area while not watering another area by just flipping a valve. Once you’ve got it set up, all you have to do to water is open the faucet a quarter turn and go do something else for a couple of hours. The only way to know how long is enough is to dig down in your bed and see how far the water is penetrating, but soaker hose time is measured in hours, not minutes.

ERIK SAYS: If you’re the type of person who likes to tinker with model trains or robots, and drools over Make magazine, you’re going to love installing a drip irrigation system. Though Kelly complains that it is too complex, it’s simpler than robot building and it’s cheap. Anyone can do it. It just takes a bit of planning.

There are two ways to get started: buy a kit, or talk to an actual live human being at your local nursery or at a drip irrigation supply company to help you find the correct parts. If you try to do this at a big-box store with no help you are headed for tears.

To keep your system simple, start with a small area first, such as your raised garden bed, as it can be overwhelming to configure a drip system for a large, complicated space. And when you design your garden think ahead and try to group plants by their water needs as this will streamline the installation and maintenance of a drip system.

A basic system consists of three components, a filter, plastic tubing, and little plastic thingies that drip. The easiest way to start out is to buy a kit, which will cost somewhere between $30 and $40 and will include the aforementioned items along with some other useful parts. Most drip irrigation suppliers have basic kits to get you started as well as add-on kits for particular kinds of plants, such as vegetable beds, shrubs, or trees.

Whether you get a kit or assemble the items yourself, you must have the basics:

•  A filter which removes fine particles that might exist in  your water supply to prevent drip emitters from becoming clogged.

•  A pressure regulator, which lowers your water pressure down  to the level that drip emitters use.

•  A special hole punch to make the holes needed to insert the  drip emitters and branch lines.

•  Tubing — mainly ½”, but you may also need ¼” depending on  the drip components you use.

To this basic kit you will need to purchase drip emitters appropriate to the plants you are watering. These might include:

•  Individual drip emitters — to deep water individual plants and  trees.

•  Soaker drip line for row crops (note this is different than  soaker hose). Soaker drip line is a line with drip emitters placed on it at regular intervals.

•  Mini-sprinklers for broad areas.

•  Misters for special situations.

Timers are also a good investment, since beginning gardeners often forget to water, which leads to stressed-out plants. Real system geeks can even hook up a drip system to sensors in the soil, which automatically sense when your plants need water and to tell the timer to skip watering if there has been rain. Drip systems also work with low water pressure, so you could even hook up your rainwater collection barrel, if you have one, to a drip system. There are also accessories to convert a pre-existing sprinkler system to a drip system so that you can easily convert that bourgeois lawn to your revolutionary victory garden.

Drip Emitter

A warning for those who go fully automated: you still need to regularly check your crops for pests.  Vegetables need careful tending and  don’t do well when ignored.

This year Kelly and Erik have made a peaceable compromise, agreeing to use a thinner sort of soaker hose sold to work with Erik’s drip emitter system.

PROJECT

HOW TO MAKE A BEAN TEEPEE

Architecture That Feeds You — Who Could Ask For More?

A teepee covered with runner beans is beautiful, edible and fun. This is a good project for kids, but if you make your teepee big enough, you can spend time in there yourself. An edible home office, perhaps? A seductive boudoir for the farming set? Alternatively, you can set up several small teepees instead of one big one, and your garden will suddenly look very elegant.

You can make your teepee as soon as frost danger has passed, the earlier the better, because beans don’t produce as much when it gets really hot. Talk to the nice folks at your local independent nursery and find a runner bean or pole bean that is suited for your climate. Many runner beans make showy red flowers that attract humming-birds. All beans have big, heart-shaped leaves that will make your teepee a shady getaway for the entire summer.

As long as you remember to pick the beans, the plants will keep producing more beans. If you neglect picking they’ll figure their work is done and close up shop. So pick regularly, and you’ll have beans all the way through to fall. Always pick your beans when they are young and tender and tasty. Except toward the end (when you’re probably sick of them anyway) leave some on the vine to mature, and save these as seeds for next year’s teepee.

To make the teepee, you’ll need:

•  One or two packs of beans, or a whole lot of bean seedlings  (three per pole).

•  A bunch of pole-like objects. Verticals, we’ll call them. These  can be bamboo poles, tree branches, lengths of plastic piping, lathe, anything like that. Six to ten will do. They should be six feet long, minimum.

•  Some wire or string to tie the verticals together.

•  Compost and a pitchfork or spade.

Mark out a circle in a level spot that gets lots of sun. Say the center of your lawn. Circle size is variable. Who’s playing in the teepee? How tall are your poles? The shorter they are, the smaller your circle must be. Hold a couple of poles up and play with the dimensions. You can use a hose or a piece of rope to lay out the circle.

Once you’ve got your circle marked out, place your poles at equal intervals around the circle, leaving a wide space between two for the door. Sink your poles at least six inches into the ground, more if you live in a windy place or you expect the teepee to get a lot of kid abuse. Unless your soil is soft, you will probably have to loosen the soil first with a pitchfork or spade, and remove any turf which is in your way.

Bean Teepee

Lash the poles together at the top with some twine or wire.

Ordinarily we don’t turn over soil to amend it, but since you probably had to dig holes for your poles anyway, go ahead now and mix in some nice compost into the loose soil at the foot of each pole. Beans like loose, rich soil.

Plant three or four beans about an inch and half deep around the base of every pole. Follow the seed packet instructions.

Keep the seeds moist until they sprout, then water regularly, and then soon you’ll see why there might be some basis to the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Beans seem to grow by the minute. You don’t have to tie the vines to the poles, by the way — they’ll cling and climb all by themselves. It’s a beautiful thing to watch.

PROJECT

HOW TO DESIGN A POLYCULTURAL VEGETABLE BED

We’ve been experimenting with something called polyculture in the garden. We read about it first in Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, an introduction to permacultural principles.

Polyculture is the practice of planting a community of interrelated, interdependent plants, mimicking in your garden bed (or hedges, or backyard or wherever) the complex relationships that are found between plants in nature, as opposed to the monocultural practices (all lawn, all corn, etc.) that characterize traditional gardening. A diverse community of plants will support and protect one another in different, often subtle ways. The bigger ones will protect the smaller ones from harsh sun or rainfall. One plant will attract a beneficial insect which preys on the bugs that eat a neighboring plant. One type of plant takes nitrogen from the soil, another puts nitrogen back in the soil.

This project proposes to establish a polyculture in your vegetable bed.  Vegetable  beds  are  notoriously  orderly  —  neat  lines  of  carrots  and lettuce are what we imagine when we think of a garden bed. This is a radical departure from that model. Our lettuce bed described in an earlier project is based on this idea, but more simple.

A polycultural veggie bed holds more varieties of plants you commonly see in a bed at once, and the plants are allowed to grow much more densely than usual, and in random arrangements. The result is that a polyculture bed is a riot of dense green, with no discernible order. But underneath the apparent chaos there’s a lot of good going on. The faster growing plants protect the tender ones from the sun. The thickness of the planting virtually eliminates weeds, and also functions as a living mulch, keeping the soil moist and cool beneath a carpet of green.

There is no hard and fast rule about what to put in a polyculture bed. Growing a polyculture is a living experiment. You give up the traditional methods of growing in rows, of letting one crop mature, pulling it out, and then planting the whole bed with a new crop. Instead, you start by sowing a dense mix of seeds over an empty bed, and let the plants take over. They will grow at different rates, you manage them, but as little as possible. As you harvest, you fill in the empty spaces with seedlings, so that the bed is always full of something.

The benefit of polyculture for you is variety. As an urban homesteader you don’t have much space, but need variety in your crops. You don’t need bushels of any single vegetable, and you certainly don’t need all of it to come ready at once. Polyculture solves this by offering a sort of buffet of veggies for the picking each evening

The idea is to plant a whole lot of stuff at once, very densely. What you plant depends on what you like to eat, but you should choose a mix of things with different maturation rates. The maturation rate is noted on the seed packets where it says “days to harvest.”

You would not want to plant space hogs that would take up the whole bed, like corn or melons. Stick with the well-behaved garden bed standards: lettuces, greens, root vegetables, beans, and maybe for fun some tender herbs or edible flowers.

As the summer goes on, you will clear space in the bed by eating your way through it, and refill the empty spaces with seedling plants you have started on the side in little pots. Once a polyculture bed is in full swing it is hard to grow new plants from seed because it is so dense, but you can tuck seedlings into empty spaces and they’ll do well. You want the bed to be full and producing throughout the entire growing season.

A polyculture bed is an improvisational process, and yours will be as unique as you are, planted with the things you like to eat — maybe all hard-to-find Asian vegetables, or all rare heirloom varieties. For the sake of explanation, though, we are going to give instructions for a sort of generic polyculture bed designed for a typical spring-fall growing season, inspired by Ianto Evans’ bed, which you will find described in Gaia’s Garden. You need one packet each of the following seeds. Choose whatever variety appeals to you or seems suited to your local conditions.

Lettuce (preferably a “salad mix” of different types in one packet)

Radishes

Carrots

Green onions/scallions

Parsnips

Swiss chard

Kale

Cabbage

Bush beans (not pole beans — bush beans grow more compactly)

The success of your bed depends to some extent on you being able to recognize these plants while they’re seedlings, so you know what to pull, and what to leave. For this reason this project is best suited to someone who has grown at least some of these plants before.

As soon as the danger of frost has passed, prepare your bed for planting. As always, we recommend a raised bed for best results. The size of the bed is up to you, but we would recommend nothing larger than  a  4’  ×  8’  to  star t  with,  so  you  don’t  become  overwhelmed.  Pull  out any dead stuff that is there from the winter, and lay down a fresh layer of compost on top of the bed. Or if it is a brand new bed, fill it with fresh garden soil. Also lay down your drip irrigation system if you’re going to use one.

 

Gather your seed packets and decide what you want to grow. We think of crops passing though the garden in three basic waves:

1. The classic spring crops: lettuce, radishes, carrots and baby greens

2. Crops that transition into summer: some lettuces, greens, beets, beans and peas

3. The plants the carry on into the cold weather like kale, cabbages and parsnips

Sow the entire surface of your bed evenly with all of the following seeds: Lettuce, radishes, parsnips, carrots, green onions and Swiss chard.

Don’t premix the seeds, just scatter them one kind at a time. You want each type of seed distributed equally across the entire bed, and premixing can result in an uneven spread. Cover them with a quarter inch of soil (this really means just sprinkle handfuls of soil over the bed until the seeds look more or less covered) and water carefully with a watering can or a hose set to a gentle sprinkle until thoroughly moist, until the water penetrates beneath the surface. Keep the bed moist while you are waiting for them to sprout.

In the next couple of weeks, start some cabbage seeds off to the side in little pots. Later on you will plant the cabbage seedlings in the bed. Don’t start too many, because they are very large when full grown.

The first seeds to sprout, and the first plants you can eat, will be the radishes. All sprouts look a lot alike, but radish sprouts have red stems. Later on they’ll have hairy leaves, unlike the other plants. You can start pulling the radishes and eating them in as little as four weeks.

The lettuce will arrive at baby lettuce stage in about six weeks. Now you begin to eat tender baby lettuce salads every night to thin the bed. At this stage the garden bed is a carpet of tiny greens. Since each one of them wants to grow up to be a big plant, you have to eat many of them while they are small. You don’t have to pull tiny greens up whole, you can just pinch them off at their base, and they won’t grow back.

The carrots and parsnips will be slow to develop. The green onions will come along, but it will be a while before they are ready to pull, but you can throw immature ones into your salads. The young Swiss chard can be eaten as a baby green in salads, or you can wait until it is bigger and eat it as a cooked green.

As your eating of radishes and lettuce begins to clear empty spaces, fill the empty spots with cabbages and bean seedlings. Place your cabbage seedlings in empty places. Remember, cabbages are big, so don’t plant two right next to each other. Cabbage grows really slow, so it won’t be ready to eat until the end of summer, or into the fall, depending on the variety. Distribute the bean plants evenly across the bed. Beans are good for the soil. They add back in the nitrogen that the leafy greens are sucking out.

As the spring transitions to summer, your bed should be just full of plants at different stages of development. You are pretty much guaranteed lettuce all season long. As you get down to fewer, more mature lettuce plants, harvest only their outer leaves instead of the whole plant. This way just a handful of lettuce plants will keep you in salad.

Your radishes will be gone by this time, and your carrots will still be growing (you can pull up some baby carrots if you want) and your Swiss chard will be coming into its own. Like lettuce, you can eat the baby chard plants whole, and just keep a few big ones around. Harvest only the outer leaves and they’ll keep making more.

Around midsummer start your kale seeds in little pots. Kale does very well in the cold, and becomes sweeter after a frost, so it is going to provide you with greens into the winter. This is also the time you might lose your lettuce. It really doesn’t like summer heat, but some types do better than others, and the tight conditions of a polyculture bed also can provide it with extra shade and cooler soil. But nonetheless, when your lettuce starts to bolt — shoot up flower stalks — you know it’s time to pull it.

As you pull and plant, remember you are trying to keep a balance. You don’t want to see much bare soil. You are trying to maintain a cooling canopy of green. But you don’t want the plants packed so tightly together that their leaves go rotten and soggy. Balance. This might mean that you leave your lettuce plants in after they start bolting, so they function as green mulch. Pull them only when you have something to put in their place, like the kale.

When your beans start bearing, it is important to go out and harvest them all the time. If you leave the pods sitting, the plants will stop producing. If you don’t have enough beans to make a side dish, use them as more of garnish — steam them and throw them into salads, or toss them with noodles.

When your kale seedlings have their second set of leaves they can go into the bed.

As the summer turns to fall, your lettuce and beans will fade out. Your cabbages will be getting big. Your carrots and parsnips will finally be coming into their own. Your kale will be taking its place as your primary green, though Swiss chard is hardy in all temperatures, and might still be doing well.

The kale will be the last thing you pull from your bed. Even snow will not kill it, so don’t pull it prematurely. Spread a thick layer of mulch around it, and see how long it can last into winter.

When your bed is empty, feed it with some fresh compost, and put down a layer of mulch over that, and let it have a rest over the winter.

Despite the many steps above, remember there are no rules. The fun of polyculture is the experimenting. Plant whatever you want. The worst that can happen is that something will not grow, or the timing will be a little off and everything will mature at the same time. Just plant generously, water regularly, harvest continually, and most of all, have fun, and you can’t go wrong.

In our California polyculture beds, we plant much more at once than what is described here. A typical winter bed (winter is the best time for greens for us) might hold green chicory, red chicory, radishes, carrots, wild fennel, common cress, arugula, lettuce mix, beets, garlic and green onions. There’s so much going on that we have to eat salad every day or the bed will spin out of control, but they are the best salads, the best greens imaginable.

PROJECT

HOW TO MAKE TATER TIRES

A stack of tires allows you to grow a ton of potatoes in a small amount of space. The trick is forcing the potato plants to produce deep roots by slowly burying them alive. You need:

•  Three or four car tires, preferably all the same size, to  build one tire tower.

•  Three or four seed potatoes per tire tower (see below).

•  A whole lot of compost, garden soil or potting soil  — or a mix of all three — whatever you can put together, because potatoes aren’t picky.

Potatoes are not grown from seed, they are grown from other potatoes, called “seed potatoes.” You might want to try this with good organic potatoes that you buy at farmers’ market, but the most reliable way to grow potatoes is to mail-order seed potatoes. The reason for this is that eating potatoes might have been treated with growth inhibitors, or may carry some disease. The seed potatoes are certified as disease-free. More compelling than that, though, they are also available in a dizzying array of exotic varieties, and growing heirloom varieties is one excellent reason to grow a vegetable as common and inexpensive as a potato. So do an internet search for “organic seed potatoes” or call your local nursery at the beginning of the year. They might carry seed potatoes, or be willing to order them for you.

In  temperate  climates  late  March - April  is  the  earliest  planting  period. In the southern climes, you can start in February. Seed potatoes do not like to sit shivering in soggy, cold soil. Potatoes form best when the soil is between 60°F and 70°F. When the soil reaches 80°  and more, tuber production stops. The black tires warm the soil, so you could push your planting a little earlier, but you should never plant at the height of summer. If you have to cool the stack a little, paint the tires white.

Start with choosing your “seed.” Whether you are using bought seed or one of your own potatoes, the routine is the same. Choose potatoes with two or three big eyes. If it’s a little tater, plant the whole thing. If it’s bigger and has lots of eyes, you can cut it up into two or three pieces; be sure there’s at least one eye on each piece. Let those pieces dry out for a couple of days before planting, otherwise they will rot in the soil.

Cutaway View of Tater Tires

Pick a sunny spot. If the ground is packed hard, stab the soil beneath the tire a few times with a pitchfork to help with drainage.

Fill a tire with soil. (You can cut the sidewalls out if you want, or leave them; cutting them out saves work in the long run.) Potatoes don’t need fantastic soil, but they do like loose soil. You can even use unfinished compost. Just don’t add any fresh manure because it will burn the plants.

Plant three potatoes (or potato chunks) with their eyes facing generally upward and cover them with a couple of inches of soil. In a couple of weeks you should see sprouts. Potato vines resemble tomato plants, their genetic cousins. As they grow, you’ll see they are a quite handsome plant.

After they have sprouted and grown tall enough to clear a second tire, add another tire to the stack and bury the plants until only their top sets of leaves are unburied — in other words, leave a few inches free. You may bury some of the smaller shoots, and that’s okay. You can keep adding compost, or loose soil, or you could even stretch your soil by mixing it with hay or dead leaves. Potatoes will grow in almost anything. Just make sure it’s loose.

Repeat this process as the plants grow, adding soil and tires as necessary until your stack is three or four tires tall. You are forcing the plant to grow an extra-long taproot, which means that the plant is making many more potatoes than it would if not encouraged in this way.

Water consistently but moderately. Container plants tend to dry out fast, and that includes plants in tires. Water is particularly important once the vines begin to flower. But if you water your potatoes too much they will fail to produce, or even rot. Be sure the entire stack is watered through, not just the top.

We recommend using a drip system, or turning your hose as low as it will go and leaving it on the stack a half hour for a slow soak. Deep, infrequent waterings are preferable to frequent, shallow ones.

Two or three weeks after the flowers die there will be tiny baby potatoes ready for eating under the soil. You can root around under the plant gently and pull up the newborn potatoes close to the surface. The potatoes in the lower tires will grow into full-sized potatoes.

After the flowering is over and the vines turn yellow or die back, the potatoes are ready for harvest. Stop watering and let them sit for a week or so, then you can harvest. You can do this by removing the topmost tire and harvest the taters at that level, leaving the rest for later. They store best in the dark, dry soil, so they will be very happy waiting for you in their tires. Or, punk rock style, you can just kick the whole stack over, revealing the entire tater treasure within. That method has its merits too. Harvest amounts will vary, but reports of 20 lbs. per stack are common.

Never wash your newly harvested potatoes (until you’re ready to eat them, that is). The moisture will cause them to rot. Never leave potatoes in the sun. They will turn green, and it is not a schoolyard rumor — green potatoes ARE toxic. Your potatoes will improve in flavor if you let them cure (i.e. sit around) for a week or two before you eat them. Cure and store potatoes in a cool, dark place. Basements and root cellars are ideal. A refrigerator is not. It’s too cold, and alters the starches in the potato.

ADVICE

CONTROLLING INSECT PESTS

We have to admit there is not much to our active pest control methods beyond our monkey fingers and the garden hose. See pests, pick them off or hose them off. That’s about it, but it works. Healthy plants don’t have too many insect problems, to tell the truth. Bugs and diseases move in on a plant when it is already going down, the same way you’ll catch a cold when you’re stressed. That said, there are more sophisticated methods than your monkey fingers, and we will talk about those in a bit.

Your first line of insect control is just keeping your plants happy. That means giving them good soil and slow, deep watering. It means keeping your soil healthy. It means planting the right kinds of plants at the right time of year.

If a plant looks sickly, we’ll make sure there isn’t a technological problem first — like maybe the drip system isn’t working. If it is not that, it may just be the wrong plant for that space. Or we planted it at the wrong time of year. Or it has some disease. We pull it out before it before it can spread disease or attract pests. If a type of plant proves consistently difficult or vulnerable, we will not grow it. So many great plants grow with almost no care whatsoever that it is senseless to nursemaid fussy prima donnas.

When you pull out a plant that’s either diseased or infested, don’t put it into your compost bin, or you might spread the problem around next time you use your compost.

Another idea to consider is that loss to insects is just part of doing business organically. You’ll learn what to get alarmed about and what to let go, and when to plant extra to compensate for loss. For instance, something might snack on the leaves of your bean plant, but if it does not go too far, it won’t harm the plant, and won’t affect the bean crop at all, so why get your panties in a twist? When it comes to insect worries, remember: Healthy Plants, Healthy Attitude. Beyond that, here’s some things you can try.

 

Hand Picking

Get used to touching bugs. You can pull off cabbage worms, tomato worms, snails and slugs. At these times you will really wish you had hungry chickens or ducks to toss them to because — ugh! — what are you going to do with them? But if you don’t have chickens, the least gross thing to do is toss them in a bucket of slightly soapy water. The soap is what kills them. You can throw the grisly contents of this bucket onto your compost pile afterward, providing your soap was natural soap, not detergent.

Perhaps the best way to control snails and slugs is to keep ducks. If that’s not in the cards for you, hunt them yourself at night with flashlights. Water in the afternoon to draw them out, then go hunting at ten or eleven at night. No earlier. A couple of consecutive nights of hunting should get squelch any outbreak. Wash your hands with vinegar afterward to cut the slime.

Spray Nozzle

 

The Hose

Smaller insects, like the pernicious and always annoying aphids, can be blasted off with a hose. A spray nozzle with multiple settings will become your favorite garden tool.

Control Ants To Control Aphids

Ants husband aphids for the honeydew they produce — aphids are the cows of the ant world. We would not have much against ants if it weren’t for this, as we understand that they do good things for us as well, such as fighting turf wars with termites and eating flea eggs. But we will occasionally discourage them in selected areas by flooding their nests with a hose. If you do this enough, they’ll move to where they are not bothered.

Boric acid, which is easiest, and cheapest to buy under the label of “roach powder,” can also be used to control ants in a more deadly manner. It is not as vile as most insecticides, but it is not good for kids or pets, so handle it with care. For garden ants you make up a mix of 1 tsp. boric acid to one cup of bait. Your bait is whatever ants will go after, such as sugar syrup, jelly, applesauce, etc. Not all ants are sweet freaks. If they ignore sugary bait, try peanut butter or grease instead. Stir the boric acid into whatever you choose. Don’t use more than this ratio of 1 tsp. boric acid: 1 cup bait, because higher concentrations will kill too fast. You want the ants to live to carry the boric acid back to their nest. Divide your bait between small jars. Poke a single hole in the lid of each, and lay the jars on their sides in the garden, or bury them up to their lids wherever you see ants. Within a couple of weeks your ants should be gone.

While these baits are fairly contained, we can imagine a determined dog or toddler getting into them, so keep an eye on them.

 

Don’t Forget Your Bird Friends

Birds eat enormous quantities of insects. Make your yard a bird’s paradise and your bug problems will diminish drastically. But be aware that some types of birds like to eat brand new seedlings, and others like fruit, so you might have to protect your newly planted beds with a little aviary netting until the plants are couple of inches high, and your fruiting plants with it once fruit sets. Aviary netting is a good idea for a newly planted bed anyway, because it keeps out cats and squirrels as well as birds.

If you’ve got them, corral chickens or ducks around a bed that is between plantings. They’ll decimate the bug population, and leave some fertilizer behind.

Wolves Of The Garden

We all like to see lots of ladybugs and lacewings around the garden, because they are pretty, and they do eat lots of bugs. But garden spiders are also real bug gluttons, and there are lots of them in a healthy garden. The hunting kind (as opposed to the web-spinning kind) will make their homes in the thick mulch that you are going to lay all over your yard. Now, if you’re a bit of an arachnophobe, don’t freak out. The mulch will not be teeming with giant black widows like some 1950s horror flick. These are mostly tiny spiders you cannot even see, and, whether you like them or not, they are your very special friends and helpers. They are truly the wolves of the garden.

Some organic gardeners purchase predatory insects and set them loose in the garden, hoping they’ll stick around and eat the undesirable insects. We’ve heard mixed things about the efficacy of this (they often wake up and fly away en masse) and have not yet found it necessary to buy bugs.

Better to attract them naturally than to buy them, again by having a pesticide-free garden with lots of places to live and things to eat. If you have space to do it, it is well worth growing some things that beneficial insects like to dine on. If you have use for the plants yourself, all the better. As a rule of thumb, plants from the cabbage family, the carrot family and the sunflower family are known for attracting beneficial insects. Consider finding a place for a few of these plants in your garden: angelica, bee balm, buckwheat, calendula, carrot (left to flower), ceanothus, chervil, cilantro, clover, daisy, dill, erigeron, evening primrose, fennel, goldenrod, lovage, mustard, parsley, Queen Anne’s lace, rue, snowberry, sunflower, sweet alyssum, sweet cicely, thyme, valerian, and yarrow.

We do 95% of our insect control using the simple methods above. What follows are other organic methods we might resort to if we were desperate.

 

Sprays

If plain water is not enough, try spraying with soapy water. Soap suffocates insects — beneficials as well as non-beneficials — so be careful where you spray. If you consider that an adult ladybug eats about 50 aphids a day, the you’ll see that the accidental poisoning of even one beneficial sets your cause back a good way. So don’t do this casually, and move with caution. Use only detergent and phosphate-free soap. You can also buy something called insecticidal soap at the nursery, which is a combination of soap and oils, and is approved for organic use.

 

Bt

If you have huge problems with caterpillars or beetles eating your cabbage and broccoli, you might try spraying or dusting with Bt, which is short for Bacillus thuringiensis, a natural bacterium in the genus Bacillus. Bt kills the bugs after they ingest it, basically by interfering with their digestion, and eventually busting open their guts. Mmm. It is considered safe for humans, but it will kill butterfly larvae, so consider it an extreme measure.

 

Traps

If you can’t deal with touching bugs, trap them.

 

Slug And Snail Traps

Lay down a board on the ground near a slug or snail infestation. They’ll go beneath it in the morning to hide from the sun. All you have to do is smash them under the board the next day.

Fill a shallow container like a tuna can or cottage cheese container with beer and bury it up to its rim in the dirt in the middle of slug and snail territory. The next morning it will look like the aftermath of a tragic fraternity party.

 

Earwig Traps

Earwig traps are similar to slug traps: bait ‘em and drown ‘em. Take some kind of deli/cottage cheese-style container that has cover, and poke holes big enough for earwigs in a circle all around the upper rim, just beneath the lid. Fill the bottom with an inch or so of soy sauce and cooking oil, and bury it so that entry holes are level with the soil.

 

Physical Barriers

The sticky commercial substance called Tanglefoot can be painted around tree trunks to keep insects from crawling up the trunk and infesting your trees and shrubs. Bands of copper keep snails and slugs from doing likewise by shocking them — the copper somehow induces an electrical charge in their mucous.

 

Floating Row Covers are super light fabric barriers that you spread over your garden bed. It is so light you don’t even have to prop it up, you just lay it directly on your plants, even on tiny seedlings. The gauzy fabric will let the sun in, but keep birds and flying insects out.

 

Companion Planting

This is a complex subject, and one that goes beyond simple insect control. In this limited context, though, companion planting refers to the practice of pairing plants with the hope that one will deter insects from attacking the other. Cabbages are said to do well paired with mint, strawberries with chrysthanthemums, and so on. It certainly makes for pretty gardens, but it is definitely an art, and not backed up by lots of science. We don’t practice it (consciously) ourselves, we simply haven’t had time to delve into it, but we understand that success or failure has much to do with the ratio of the pairings and spacing of the pairing. Gardening is always a local process, and one size doesn’t fit all, so if you wish to try companion planting, do so knowing it will be an ongoing experiment. If they do nothing else, companion plantings will keep your garden beds diverse, and biodiversity is a powerful insect deterrent in and of itself.

ADVICE

ROTATING CROPS

Each plant draws differently from the soil, and attracts its own set of pests and diseases. If you switch your crops around from year to year it takes some of the burden off the soil and confuses the pests. It is an elegant, common-sense way to avoid all sorts of cultivation problems.

In larger-scale yards, the traditional method is to have four large growing beds and to rotate crops through these beds so that ideally there is a three-year interval before one crop returns to the same bed. On an urban homestead you probably do not have that much space. What we do, and what you can probably do too, is rotate them around in every possible growing space you have available: in beds, along walkways, sharing space in the herb bed, planted in containers, etc. If your garden is all in containers, this is easy: it just means changing out containers and soil every year.

Don’t worry if crop rotation sounds confusing at first. For the first year or two you don’t have to worry about it — your soil is fresh, and the pests and diseases are not likely to find you. As time goes by, and you know your plants better, start taking these rotation ideas into account as you plan your garden.

As we said in our Principles in the beginning of this section, keep notes! A journal, even just a couple of notes scratched in a calendar, is critical to planning your crop rotations.

Plants in the same families tend to be prey to the same diseases and pests. They also like similar growing conditions, so once you learn about one member of a family, you already know quite a lot about the other members. You’ll also begin to recognize familial similarities from plant to plant. For instance, all members of the carrot family have similar flowers: flat clusters of small flowers shaped like little umbrellas. Once you know that shape, having seen it in dill, and in the carrots you let go to seed, you might recognize the same shape in fennel blossoms, and realize (perhaps even with some excitement) that it must be a member of the same family. You will be well on the road to botany geekdom.

In its simplest form, rotating your crops is just a matter of avoiding using any one bed, pot, patch of ground for the same family year after year. Try to stretch it out so that you don’t plant that family in that spot for two or three years.

These are the families:

Tomato family (Solanaceae): tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplants

Onion family (Alliaceae): onions, leeks, garlic

Beet family (Chenopodiaceae): beets, spinach, chard

Cabbage family (Brassicaceae): cabbages, mustard, broccoli, cauliflower, kale

Legume family (Fabaceae): all types of beans and peas

Squash family (Cucurbitaceae): squash, melon, cucumbers

Carrot family (Apiaceae): carrots, dill, parsley, fennel

When you get comfortable with rotating by family, you can add to the challenge taking into consideration how the crop you’re growing affects the soil in addition to its family designation. You’ll note in these groupings the plants of the same families don’t always stick together, since this is about behavior — how they feed.

 

The Way Plants Feed

The three principal nutrients that plants require in soil are nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). The labels of both chemical and organic fertilizers are marked with their N-P-K ratios expressed in numbers, like 4-8-2. You don’t need to worry about those ratios,  or NPK levels, too much when you don’t have to go to the store to build your soil. A little store-bought organic fertilizer is fine now and then — particularly for container plants — but the old-fashioned way with great compost, worm castings, fertilizer tea, and mulch is a more desirable way.

You should know about NPK to understand how plants feed, because you are going to strive to balance your planting so that you don’t put plants that are hungry for the same thing in the same place over and over again.

Fruiting plants, e.g. tomatoes, melons and squash, require lots of phosphorus (P). Phosphorus is essential for root, flower and fruit development.

Leafy plants, e.g. spinach, lettuce and cabbage, eat up lots of nitrogen (N). Nitrogen promotes dark green growth, and helps plants grow quickly. People flood their lawns with nitrogen to “green” them.

Root crops, e.g. garlic, carrots and radishes, like lots of potassium (K). Potassium protects plants from the cold and gives them resistance to disease. It also helps them keep from drying out too fast.

Legume crops, e.g. all beans and peas, actually put nitrogen (N) back into the soil, which is very handy.

Say you plant tomatoes in the summer. You don’t grow anything over winter, then the next spring you plant melons in that same spot. You have done right by not planting another member of the Solanaceae family in the same place — thus discouraging pests and disease — but by planting two fruiting crops in a row, you are depleting the phosphorus in your soil. It would have been a better choice to plant something that did not fruit, like leeks. Beans and peas are always a good choice too, because they add more to the soil than they take away. A good rule of thumb is when in doubt, plant beans. And what about your depleted soil? Just give it some fertilizer tea, mulch with some fresh compost, and it will be okay.

ADVICE

ANIMAL PESTS

Gophers and Moles

Gophers, also called pocket gophers, are found all over North America and some of Central America, while moles cover the Americas, Europe and Asia. In places where they are both found, they are sometimes confused. For a gardener, the important difference between a gopher and a mole is that moles are insectivores. They dig tunnels, which can ruin a lawn (and ruining lawns is a good thing in our opinion!), but other than inadvertent root damage, or possible ankle twists, moles are not your enemy. In fact, moles tend to eat all the bugs in one area, and then move on, so mole problems are often transitory.

Gophers, on the other hand, are herbivores and hence much more annoying for someone trying to grow their own food. They eat both the roots and the tops of plants. They will pull entire plants down into their burrows by their roots. They can devastate a vegetable bed in short order, and damage young trees by gnawing on their roots. So if you have gophers, you have to go to war. If you have moles, we’d advise you not to get too excited about it. But if they prove a problem, gopher-type controls work for them as well.

How do you know which critter you have? Moles make volcano-shaped mounds, whereas gopher mounds are crescent or horseshoe shaped. Moles tunnel so close to the surface that you can sometimes see the tunnels themselves raising the soil, whereas gophers dig much deeper. Moles are nocturnal and elusive. Gophers are active all day, and do pop out of their holes to nibble on surface greens, so you’ll probably spot them.

Gopher Cures

There are a ton of folksy gopher deterrents that people swear by, everything from feeding them Juicy Fruit gum, which supposedly clogs their intestines, to various high-pitched-noise-making electronic devices. Then there’s the practice of shoving wads of hair, cat poop and various foul-smelling concoctions down their burrows. Unfortunately there’s no science behind any of these schemes.

Some people make a blood sport of gopher control: they flood the burrows and play Whack-A-Mole when the gophers try to evacuate. We prefer a less theatrical form of control. Basically you approach a gopher problem as you would a rat infestation. It’s a two-pronged approach: you prevent them from getting to your stuff, and if they don’t move on, you kill them. The methods that work reliably are poisons, traps, barriers and predators.

Poison we rule out for urban homestead use. It’s too dangerous to pets and other wildlife to have poison laying around, and you don’t want it tainting your soil.

Traps are brutally efficient and probably the most humane way to kill gophers. There are specific gopher traps, and they have to be set up exactly right to work, so pay close attention to the directions. There are mole traps too. Gopher traps don’t work for moles and vice versa.

Barriers prevent the gophers from getting at the crops you value most. This is another case where a raised bed is a great idea, because you can line the bottom of your raised bed with gopher wire and lock the critters out. Gopher wire is sturdy, galvanized wire similar to aviar y wire, and can be purchased online, or you can substitute ½”  hardware cloth. Don’t use chicken wire because the holes are too big. Aviary wire can be used, but it rusts and will eventually break down. You can also buy baskets made of gopher wire for planting individual plants, like baby trees — or fashion them yourself.

Predators such as cats and dogs can be quite effective for controlling moles. Cat smells alone are said to be somewhat of a deterrent to gophers. Dachshunds are ruthless vermin killers (yet so cute!), as are most of the small terriers. If you don’t have a bloody-minded little dog, perhaps you could borrow one for a weekend.

Squirrels, Raccoons, Possums, Skunks

All four of these are omnipresent in the urban landscape and fairly intractable. Barring gunplay, the first step in dealing with these larger pests is not providing food and habitat for them. Don’t leave out plates of pet food. Make sure that all entrances to your basement or garage are closed at all times, and that you don’t have any holes in your roof, your foundation, or accessible old sheds. If they start breeding on your property, you will be worse off than ever. Most importantly, harvest all fruits and nuts and keep them from accumulating on the ground. Also realize that if you have a water garden, you will have raccoons. No question about it.

Squirrels are just going to happen no matter what you do. They really are intractable, and as far as we can tell, nothing really repels them. Trapping them and relocating them is problematic for two reasons; first, it makes your problem someone else’s problem. Second, all creatures, including squirrels and mice and raccoons, carve out niches in the places they live. When they are trapped and moved, they become unwelcome intruders in someone else’s niche, and will have a hard time surviving there. It would be more humane to kill them. So short of hunting them, you’re just going to have to learn to live with them.

Skunks are somewhat easier to deal with. Thankfully they don’t climb very well and can be excluded from most yards with a fence. Bury some chicken wire a foot or two deep and connect it to the bottom of the fence — this should keep them from digging under to get into your yard.

Yes, you can hire a professional to trap these critters, but they’ll either kill them or relocate them, which, as we just said, just means a slower death.

 

Rats And Mice

For rats and mice, we use the classic wooden trap, one of those inventions that, like the bicycle, is elegant, simple, cheap and effective. Place the business end of the trap (the part with the food) against a wall, where rats and mice tend to travel. Put it in a place that can’t be accessed by nosy dogs, cats or kids as these things can be dangerous. We’ve had the best success using dried fruit and peanut butter as bait. Rat poison is a really bad idea. First of all it is deadly to pets and native animals that might find it. Secondly it can kill a predator, such as a hawk or owl, that might prey on a poisoned rat and so end up poisoned themselves. Lastly, poisoned rats have a tendency to die in your walls, and thus have their stinky, posthumous revenge.

With few exceptions, birds are your friends and should be encouraged to visit your garden on account of their insatiable hunger for insects. Occasionally they will get into new plantings and eat your seeds, or eat berries from your bushes. This is easy to prevent by covering  tempting  plants  with  inexpensive  ½“  mesh  netting,  called  aviary netting, that can be found at your local nursery.

ADVICE

WHY YOU MIGHT TEST YOUR SOIL

There are two reasons to test your soil. The first is that since we are dealing with urban — therefore polluted — environments on our city homesteads, it may be a good idea to make sure that the soil does not contain any toxins that could make their way from your crops to your kitchen. It depends on the history of your property. Possible sources of contamination could include previous tenants who stored or repaired cars in the yard, or toxic runoff from streets and alleys finding their way into your yard. If your dwelling is a repurposed industrial building, there is all the more reason to be cautious. And no matter what the setting, paint chips from careless stripping jobs are a big source of lead contamination. Lead is a highly stable substance that has a nasty tendency to stick around for years. It is especially a concern if you will be feeding young children with home-grown vegetables, as they are much more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults.

Your local health department should be able to point you to a certified testing lab that can handle soil. All you have to do is send in a sample of your soil for analysis. It will probably run you around 30 bucks.

Lead contamination does not just come from the soil, it also comes from the air. If your yard is near a busy street or highway, or you are near any big industrial operation, lead might be clinging to the surface of your food. Peel away the outer leaves of leafy vegetables. Scrub and peel root vegetables, and wash everything thoroughly. The University of Minnesota Extension recommends washing your veggies in water containing 1% vinegar to remove pollution.

If your soil does come back with high lead levels, do not despair. Plants do not readily pick up lead. You can safely eat the fruiting parts of plants, like apples, tomatoes, corn, squash and the like. Lead will cling to the surface of root crops, so scrub those thoroughly. Leafy greens pick up the most lead, so we’d recommend you grow those in containers or raised beds.

One interesting thing we discovered in our research is that adding a heavy concentration of organic matter — mulch or compost — in the soil has the effect of “reducing lead availability.” It interferes with plant uptake of lead. Like we’ve said all along, mulch is great stuff.

Lead is a common urban contaminant, but should your yard be contaminated with anything else, our best advice in any case is to grow above the ground in high raised beds or in containers.

Troubleshooting your soil: Aside from checking for contaminants, the other reason to test soil is to troubleshoot bad crops to see if persistent problems could be due to a lack of nutrients or a high or low pH level. If your food is growing fine you don’t need to test it. What works, works. But if you’re having problems, knowing the soil pH and/ or the nutrient levels might give you some clues as to how to amend your soil for better yields.

Soil pH is the degree of acidity or alkalinity. Most plants thrive in the 6.0 to 7.0 range. Some, such as blueberries, like an acidic soil around  5.0. Most nurseries sell an inexpensive and easy to use home test kit that will determine the pH level of your soil. You can then adjust the pH by the addition of sulfur to make the soil more acidic, or lime to make it more alkaline. In general the eastern United States tends towards the acidic, while the west tends towards the alkaline.

It’s also possible to test for nutrients, i.e. the levels of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus in the soil. There are more expensive home kits for this or you can send samples to a lab (ask for a reference at your local nursery). For most folks, except for the geekiest of urban farmers, it’s probably not necessary, but if you do it remember to take samples from multiple locations because nutrient levels can vary widely.

ADVICE

NOT DIGGING IT

As we discussed earlier, we advise against tilling or turning over the soil in your garden, because of the damage it does to soil quality over time, especially to valuable microorganisms. Nature does not till, after all, and as much as we can, we try to imitate natural systems in our garden. In a forest, nutrients are delivered by the slow decomposition of plant and animal materials on the forest floor, and by the action of undisturbed worms working deep in the soil. So we improve our soil from the top down by constantly mulching and applying compost and other organic amendments to the tops of our beds. This is far easier than working amendments into the soil every year, and so highly recommended for lazy people.

The no-dig method is dependent on the use of garden beds, either raised beds or dedicated beds on the ground with paths between. The soil must be loose and untrampled for this to work. Just keep adding compost and worm castings to the top of it — at the beginning of your growing season, in the middle, at the end. Whenever. Don’t mix them into the existing soil. Just lay it down and leave it alone. It all becomes one in the end.

If you are trying to colonize a dried-up, compacted nasty piece of ground, you have a choice to make. We aren’t going to be dogmatic about this no-dig system. You might want to start by digging up the soil and amending it heavily with organic matter. That is one legitimate route. The other is to put a sheet mulch over it, and let it rest for a year.