A Garden in Pictures, 11/6/10

I'm out of town this weekend for a yoga conference so I won't be doing any work on the garden, but here are the pictures after our progress last weekend.

The fence is built and includes a wonderful gate.

The bean beds are ready (the back row); they include about 1" of compost followed by 4" of chipped leaves, and are covered by tarps.

The strawberry and broccoli bed is ready (front row on the right); it includes about 4" of chipped leaves followed by a smattering of compost on the line where planting will happen, then covered by tarps.

Cardboard boxes are down over many of the walking paths. Most of the paths are 2' wide, but the main path is 3' wide. We plan to put bark or hay down on top of the walking paths, but it is a low priority.

Next weekend we should be finishing up the front row (watermelons, celery, and asparagus) and the second row (carrots, onions, and spinach). Those rows will be planted earliest in the spring. Then at our next available weekend, whether that is in the middle of winter or not until spring planting time, we will finish the 3rd and 4th beds - which will house potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, and squash.

film review

We went to see Living Downstream at the local theatre, a newly released documentary about chemicals in the environment. We were lucky to have the filmmaker Chanda Chevannes and the main scientist in the film, Sandra Steingraber, available for questions after the film.

The basic point of the film is that at least some of the chemicals in our food, soil, water, and air - for whose presence humans are responsible - can cause cancer. I think this film has the potential to reach a much wider audience because of the cancer element which so many people can relate to.

The film was very good and I do think it's one everyone should see. Even more than the Future of Food or Food Inc, it shows the importance of large-scale changes. The film explains how chemicals get into our food, soil, water, and air supply - so even if you are eating organic, you are still swimming in harmful, cancer-causing chemicals with every breath you take. That was why it was surprising to me when after the film, the first question on the 'what should we do?' theme was unanimously answered "eat organic." After the leaving the theatre I wondered whether they were trying to avoid being political in an effort to avoid polarizing or alienating viewers.

The film receives high marks from me in terms of its educational quality, though even if I were using this in a college classroom I'm sure the students would need help making connections in certain places. For the most part, Dr. Steingraber does a great job of conveying scientific facts and reasoning to a lay audience.

One of the most interesting points she made was that when she was going through the initial doctors visits for cancer treatment, she would try to engage her health providers in a conversation about environmental factors and cancer incidence, to no avail. In the medical literature, the link has been clearly shown time and time again. This to me pointed out something that I am personally disturbed by, which is the gap between scientific knowledge and practical knowledge. I think one of the reasons for publicly funded higher education is for professors to be researching in the public interest, but the way the career of professor is structured, credit is given only for publishing in specialized academic journals, read by other academics. In my field of Sociology, this is a huge problem, but it just seems even more urgent in the medical field.

Anyway, I recommend it! Go find a way to watch this film and get other people to see it too!

thoughts on lasagna gardening so far

Well...so far lasagna gardening has not been as fun, easy, simple, or fantastic as it was reputed to be. It could be because my garden area is so large, or who knows. I wanted to go ahead and get my thoughts recorded because assuming it works out the way it is supposed to, in the spring I might forget the difficulty we had in the fall (because I'll be enraptured by how perfectly everything goes!)

One of the main selling points of lasagna gardening is that it physically easy, making it possible for older folks, people with arthritis, and people with limited use of their body to continue or start gardening. It may be easier than digging up sod and turning soil, but it was still really hard! Laying down the newspaper requires lots of bending down and standing back up. Spreading the compost made my back very sore. Raking, mulching, and spreading the leaves wasn't hard, but that was the only easy part. And of course, we only made the beds about a quarter of the depth recommended. We spent 8 hours Sunday, 6 hours Saturday, and my spouse spent probably about 4 hours Friday and in that time we built the fence and got less than half of the garden area ready. We were both exhausted Sunday night and I would say my energy levels didn't return until Wednesday. I'm not a competitive athlete or a gym rat, but I'm healthy and in good shape and it is annoying when my weekend activities slow down the work that must get down during the week.

I know when I prepared my little 4' x 10' bed in 2009, it took me two full days in the spring to weed, till, and mix compost until the bed was ready. So maybe I'm just forgetting how hard conventional methods are. I guess I just think they oversell the ease of this method, and I'm skeptical that it is as accessible as they advertise.

beets

I never liked beets until I had to figure out a way to use them through our CSA last year. Turns out I'd only ever eaten them boiled, which gives them a weird texture and a sweet/earthy flavor that I didn't like. We tried roasting them, and they are PHENOMENAL prepared that way.

The basic recipe for roasted beets is to cube them - you don't have to peel them first - then toss them with oil, salt, pepper, and any herbs you think would be good. Put them in a shallow pan - you pretty much want them in a single layer - and put them in the oven at 425 degrees. Mix them occasionally while in the oven, and when a fork easily pierces the beets they are ready (usually takes about 20-30 minutes). You can mix other root vegetables with them. We tried potatoes, turnips, and carrots. They each ended up with a slightly different texture, which is not my preference, so we usually do just beets or just potatoes when we roast vegetables.

Another way that I like them is raw and shredded. We just use a cheese grater, and they shred very easily. Since they are typically in season the same time as carrots, I like a mixture of shredded carrots and beets used on salads or in macaroni and cheese. We also use shredded carrots and beets as a replacement for lettuce garnish - for example, on top of tostadas or burgers. Beets when raw are extremely crunchy, almost too hard to eat. Shredding them is the best way to eat them raw, in my opinion!

My spouse like them raw and cubed in macaroni and cheese - they are mild in flavor but as I said, too crunchy for my liking. Last night we put turnips, green peppers, beets, and zucchini in macaroni and cheese. The spiciness of the turnips and peppers with the sweetness of the beets was a great combo!

know your farmer!

While at the market Saturday chatting with our farmer, who knows of our plan to have a large garden and preserve lots of vegetables for the winter, he had a great offer: he said that if I wanted to come out to the farm for a day or two in the spring and help with tomatoes, he would give me some seedlings. I am planning on at least half of my tomato plants being heirlooms and I don't know what he will be planting, but I figure this is a good opportunity either way.

I've looked into farm apprenticeship programs, which many of the local of farms offer. You apply and most of them offer housing as part of the payment, plus a small stipend, and it lasts through the growing season for one year. It would be a great opportunity for learning from an expert - it seems that farming is the type of thing that is much better passed on by working hands-on with someone experienced rather than learning out of a book, as I am doing. But in the end, the drawbacks outweigh the pros for me. I don't want to live away from my spouse and my dog. And I don't want to have to pause my dissertation work for a whole six months (or however long it would end up being). Of course I suppose I could try it out, do it for awhile until it gets too hard and then quit - but I think the experience would be best if you make it through the whole season. I also think if you make a commitment to something, you should see it through. Anyway, I will probably take any short-term offer like this I get, just for the learning experience.

For those with some time to spare who are looking to save a little money, this is a great way to get good quality seedlings and learning experience.

manure, part 33 1/3

We went to buy 50 bags of cow manure Saturday. When we pulled the truck around to load them up, I noticed the bags said "compost and manure." Looking more closely, it turns out the bags were about 10% cow manure and 90% other materials - mushroom compost, etc. Not what I wanted! I was totally at a loss for what to do. I mean, maybe this stuff would be better - or maybe worse. Do we still mix it with leaves? I just had no idea. We decided to halve our order (because that was all we could take anyway...they were supposed to weigh 25 lbs each but they actually weighed 40 lbs each...) and see what happened.

We prepared one bed - the green beans, which will be two rows of 35 ft each. I layered the newspaper down and even though I would not call the day 'windy,' I ended up having to quickly figure out a way to keep the paper down and just started throwing shovelfuls of the compost on each sheet. I layered the newspapers so that their are 3-4 sheets in each spot, overlapping to make it seamless. Then I gave the newspapers a good soaking, and by then it was sun down so we had to call it a night.

The next day I figured I would go ahead and make a solid layer of compost, so I began putting more down. One problem was that in between the piles of compost holding the paper down, air pockets seemed to form that the compost would actually slide off. It was difficult to spread the compost without tearing the newspaper - that might be one reason to have layers thicker than 1". We then put about 4" of chipped leaves on top, covered with tarps held down by rocks, and we'll wait and see how it goes...

We had enough time to get one more bed started, and my spouse and I were able to work on this one together because he had finished the fence by this point. It was SO much easier with two people! I would lay out the newspaper and he would spray it down - it kept it from blowing away, and I bet the newspaper got more thoroughly soaked. On this bed we piled chipped leaves next (just to experiment) and finished with two small rows of compost, right where the broccoli and strawberries will be planted. Just because we're running out, and well, we'll just see what happens.

Friday night I read online forums about lasagna gardening, and I discovered that although every person seemed to go about it their own way and have their own method, I did not find one person who said it didn't work. So I'm going to try a pretty bare bones approach and see what happens.

We still have not figured out how to get cow manure from our farmer. We did find a little trailer/cart that can haul more than a truck from our local rental place, but it's expensive ($66 for four hours, $88 for a full day) and we do not have access to a truck with a hitch. We chatted with him a little bit at the market and he seemed confident that we could come to a price agreement we'd both be happy with. If we have to rent a truck on top of the trailer AND pay for manure, I don't know...what matters to us is our total cost, not just the price of manure. I have no doubts he'll be fair about that. I do think we'll just get enough for 1" instead of doing the whole 18-24 inches. That would actually mean that we would only have to get about 30 more feet! We can get that in our neighbors truck, shouldn't be a problem. We would have enough to maybe even do the full recommended height for the smallest bed, for comparison. If we pull the tarps off the beds in the spring and find that it's not what we were hoping for, we can always do the recommended layering then and plant directly in it.