EVERYONE should try to garden SOMETHING, even if it's just a couple of tomatoes in pots on the verandah. Some of us get to take it just a bit
further than just a bit of a garden.
A bit more than four acres, before we're done. Once everything is de-toxified and back up to full fertility and good tilth. Inside the town.
We live in a small town, there are still about 7500 people left living here since Wally-World came in and shut down all the small businesses. Mine included (computer repair, some hardware sales, all gone thanks to those Bentonville Bastards). There are some junk shops and "antique" stores where there used to be small retailers and service providers. Not much left, and less every year.
The new neighbour across the street just bought the nice old house (built around 1895, our house was built in about 1891) and the land which went with it. Almost 4 acres of land goes with the acre and a half of grass with the house on it. She is a recent immigrant down here to Nowheresville, Illinois, moving in from east of the Chicago Imperium, and she had not a clue what to do with all that land she wound up with..... Heh. Heh. Heh. (Cue maniacal chuckle.)
It so happens that I'm an aulde pharte of a farm boy, but I'm stuck living in town. Along with my wife, and another neighbour - a carpenter who is medically retired due to a traumatic brain injury (caused by a company with more of an eye on the bottom line, less on personnel safety), I convinced our newest resident that it would be best NOT to plant more grass, with maybe a rose or two.
Instead, after some fast talking, we are all three families collaborating on making the entire thing into a community garden. It will be just US this year, and we're working our proverbial tail-feathers off. Next year in conjunction with the food pantry and some other charity organizations, we are hoping to get other local folks involved.
They will work the land with us and get a spot of their own for their own specific choices of vegetables, plus a portion of the production of the whole community garden, as recompense for putting in labour on the community areas. (AND they can also use the canning and processing equipment we're trying to get set up in the "country kitchen," if they'll chip in something for the propane! Labour, or cash, for the gas. I hope to move to methane from a waste-digester, perhaps in a few years, and cut that petro-chemical umbilical, too!!)
(More after the Orange Cheesy-Poof-Of-Death.)
We're having to start from the very bottom. Not much money, some luck in that I already had access to some excellent machinery (more about the BCS 715 later); mainly just our own sweat. LOTS of that, though. Humidity is something we have in abundance here. We call it, |"The Air You Wear."|
Toss some noodles up on a really hot, sticky day, and they come down soup.
Some of the ground had been gardened to DEATH by the previous owner, "Frank," a very "modern" gardener, who made a lot of chemical companies very happy. At the cost of his own health and the tilth of his ground.
Years back I gave up trying to convince Frank that the chemical waste dump he was creating wasn't exactly the best way to get food out of the ground. He didn't want to hear it, just poured on more petro-poisons. (He votes straight-ticket Republican, too, by the way. Not a shock, is it?) And the bugs and diseases just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse.
"Crop rotation" is another thing he mostly ignored. If you got a bunch of melons on that spot last year, why should you move them somewhere else -this- year? And the bug larvae said, "Hallelujah, he's SUCH a CHUMP!" It will likely be a decade before I can risk a root crop in his old sweet potato patch. Worms. Bad ones. Zillions and squijillions of worms. All hoping to drill through a toot-root, or failing that any other root they can find. Probably we'll put beans in there in a couple of years, and hope for the best.
Those areas where he used to dump fertilizer and Sevin and various other nasty and toxic things are now lying FALLOW. It took some near-yelling at the other two, who wanted to just plant something
, everywhere, but the worst parts of the place are now getting an over-due rest and some much-needed attention.
I'm planting them over with a mixture of yellow clover and hairy vetch seeds, and we're going to green-manure those cover crops. ("Green manuring" means that we will till the plants under and chop them into the soil to rot, adding as much other bio-mass as I can scrounge; putting back IN for a year or two without taking anything much OUT of the soil.)
The 'bad' bugs and various diseases that are in the soil there, and which have been getting more and more concentrated and nasty every year that he "gardened," should be under control in a year or two of intensive rehabilitation in the majority of that area. Only one or two plots should require more time, less than a quarter-acre of ground at the most.
To aid in that, I've been trying to get a local organic cattle operation (bison, mostly) to give us (or sell, I'm afraid he's a bit on the greedy side, and probably will ask for more than his crap is worth) some good old cow-manure from his barns. That will be mixed with wood chips from the electric company tree-killer operations (free for the asking), inoculated with the molds that break down lignin (wood cell walls, more or less) from an already-established compost pile, and allowed to rot until the whole heap is just black, rich humus. Then it gets tilled into that ground where nothing now grows.
I'm also collecting all of the free nitrogen I can get from the fools who insist on "grass only" lawns, and are also so DUMB as to rake the clippings up after mowing, bag them, and toss them in the trash collection. Sheesh, people! Get a freakin' CLUE, will you? If you just leave the clippings LAY THERE, not only do you get to go back to being couch potatoes more quickly (no raking, dip-weed!), the snippets will break down in a few days and you won't need to drop a lot of money on that chemical fertilizer junk to make the grass "green."
"But, th-th-th-thatch! Gotta rake, gotta remove the clippings! Thatching!!"
Bull cookies. "Thatching" is caused by keeping the roots from going down deep into the soil. Shallow root growth is caused by using CHEMICAL FERTILIZERS - which are only available at the surface and NOT down deep, which encourages - you guessed it, SHALLOW ROOTS! AKA "THATCHING!!"
Plus, it's FREE FERTILIZER that will make the soil BETTER and not DEAD!!!! Why are people so dense?? Isn't this glaringly obvious? I help my wife teach it to 9-year-olds and they get it instantly. (My wife's incredible. For one thing, she puts up with me. For another, she's an elementary school teacher, and hasn't slaughtered a kid or a parent in over thirty years. She retires after ONE MORE YEAR in the trenches. HURRAY for her!)
Grass clippings are high in nitrogen; so high in fact that to get it to compost properly I have to mix it heavily with dead tree leaves to provide the carbon compounds to balance things out.
Those are also donated, by more idiots who can't be bothered to make a little spot in a small corner of the back yard for letting nature take care of their "yard waste." One fool is so nuts that he won't accept that he is already in effect "paying" me by letting me have the grass and leaves; he thinks he has to GIVE ME MONEY to take it away! How brain-washed can you get?? (I donate the money he gives me to the food pantry, in his name. If he ever finds out what I'm doing with that money, staunch repugnicant that he is - dead-set against things like "moocher-pantries," in particular - he'll have a heart attack and die on the spot!!)
So we're bringing this place back to life, and it's going well so far. And we're doing it smack in the middle of this small, backwards, nowhere place where I grew up. In spite of the city council being completely against anything of the sort.
They do seem to hate our little farm-ette, but since we're not using it as a money-making business, they can't touch us. But they can legislate around the edges to annoy us. We are forbidden to keep poultry, for instance. I'd love some chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl around the place, for the weed and insect control, as well as the fertilizer and the guineas provide guard-duty! Nope. Can't. BIG fines if you even try.
We're working on getting that fixed, but they are adamant thus far, and have not budged a single egg's-worth. Other places can have chickens, Chicago for instance. Not here in the middle of nowhere. Curious, isn't it?)
There is a lot of hard work still to do. As a measure of how "dead" the old 'garden' area has become, consider that in ONE shovel-full of dirt from another area of this property, far removed from the original chemical-laden 'garden' plot, I counted at least twenty earthworms 3 cm long or longer. (One was a veritable 'earth-snake,' it was so huge!) The soil was warm, and MOIST, but despite nearly daily deluges for the last ten days or so, it was well-drained and not soggy.
There were LOADS of various other sorts of worms and insects and their larvae, mold and fungus filaments running through that soil, bits of roots, rotted and rotting plants, lots of other plant matter; it just smelled RICH. The tilth (crumbly-ness, the looseness of the soil composition) was fantastic, I could actually stick my hand, using no tools, into the soil and work it in half-way to my elbow in the loam in seconds.
By contrast, in Frank's part of the place, where there was a continuous stream of some sort of chemical thrown on the ground, I found NO worms at all. Other than Japanese beetle larvae, no insects at all. No nematodes. No molds or fungi. Virtually no organic matter. I couldn't break that soil with my hands to save my life. It's close to being rock-hard, and if you think THAT helps roots get deep into the soil to get nutrients and water, well, you would just be wrong.
It smelled like .... nothing. Faintly dusty. Not much water in it, either. It all ran off and there was nothing, no bio-mass, to keep it in the soil.
On the part of the place which was not poisoned (2.75 or so acres, by my guesstimate), we have tilled and started planting. This year, if disaster misses us and we have any sort of decent harvest, over and above all of the veg which our three combined families can eat or process for the winter, we are expecting:
at least 60 bushels! of tomatoes (And ALL are heirloom varieties! None of those plastic, 'perfect,' perfectly-tasteless things masquerading as tomatoes in the supermarket!!);
another 50 bushels! of sweet corn;
six to eight bushels of snap beans;
three or four bushels of dried beans (Or peas, we've not decided which to plant; I am leaning toward peas, my wife toward Navy beans - in other words, we're planting Navy beans tomorrow or Saturday.);
two bushels of pod ('sugar-snap') peas;
at least five extra bushels of beet roots and two bushels of beet greens;
three bushels of spinach leaves;
four or maybe five bushels of mixed leaf-lettuce, depends on if things get hot quickly or not;
two bushels of okra pods, perhaps more if the second planting does well;
a half-bushel of arugula (more than that of the bitter stuff is impossible to get rid of);
three, perhaps four bushels of kale (more of that next year if I can manage it);
and probably 100 bushels of turnips (and ten bushels of turnip greens).
a few bushels of potatoes, perhaps. (Whatever won't fit in the bins in my pantry...)
I don't even want to think about how many cantaloupe, watermelon, and Hubbard, yellow, crook-neck, and zucchini squash we're going to have..... (And I'm skipping the vineyards, berry bushes, and the orchard trees completely. We use all of that ourselves.)
(Old local joke: Q: Why don't you dare to leave your car unlocked here in August? A: If you do, and leave it for five minutes, you'll come back to find it stuffed full of zucchini!!)
Now, those are ESTIMATES, and all depends on whether we get to plant all the seed. Some of the things, like the beets for instance, are to go in for a winter harvest. And that depends on whether one of us is functional when planting time comes. Here's hoping! (I really like beets.)
I'm not sure if the parsnips and carrots will produce well enough for there to be any at all, forget any extra. Those are planted in the plot right next to one of the over-chemicalized spaces, and I suspect there is too much junk leaching out of there for the root crops to tolerate. I may have to just plow those under.... Sad, but if it's so tainted as all that, -I- sure won't eat it and I certainly won't feed it to my grand-babies, or to strangers! It was a risk I was expecting, and we shall just have to see what comes up. Or doesn't.
(Oh, and if you were wondering, "Ewww! Why so many turnips??" Well, my ex-carpenter friend and partner in grime ((sic) - we get awfully dirty on an average day!) thinks turnips are the way to rehabilitate the soil. He dumped a LOT of turnip seed on one of the half-acre plots that are in bad shape, "To break it up.".... So instead of disagreeing with him over it, I'm green-manuring and using compost and manure on another spot right next to his 'neeps. We shall simply see which piece of ground looks better next spring after we till it.... Any bets??)
I expect ZERO to go to waste. Even so, I plant an extra ten percent, as sort of a tithe to the wildlife in the area. There is another reason I know there will be no waste.
Watching an opossum bliss out on tomatoes is fun. Turtles, they're a riot in a strawberry patch. I'd rather watch them than kill them, that's for certain. And you have to kill them to keep them away from food like a garden. (Though this fall we may shoot the deer that have been marauding the place. Too many of them here, and the idiots have killed off all of their natural control predators. Humanity is all that is left, more or less. A bit of venison in the deep-freezer will go nicely in the winter.)
We have been in contact with the local food pantry to take all of our surplus. It will NOT go to waste!!! They tell me they can provide receipts for the donations, which can be used as tax deductions next April. Won't even come close to paying for the fuel and seed, and certainly won't cover our labour, but it won't hurt, either.
To do all this by hand, well, I'm handicapped now, dagnabbit, and my Uncle Arthur Itis says he doesn't care what I could do 30 years ago, I'm NOT going to be able to hand-dig even one, let alone four, acre, ever again.
C'est la vie. C'est le morte, for that matter. Sucks being me most days. (In exemplar, it's raining at the moment and I am flat -crippled- from the barometer change. They tell me it's a sort of minor case of the bends, all the bubbles in the joint fluid changing size with the barometric pressure changes. Could be, sounds plausible because I can SURE tell when the weather is changing. (What I really know for certain is that every bloody joint hurts like a slice of hot, hammered hell. Constantly, but worse when things are meteorologically unstable. On a good day I only want to suicide. On a bad day, well..... On a bad day I'm sure I'm already dead and I was wrong about there being no afterlife, this must be hell.
Plus, it makes me take about an hour and a half to type this comment, too. Slowly, and with lots of mistakes to correct.))
This other guy involved in the farm, "Randy," the carpenter with the hole in his brain? He's a working MACHINE, when he can keep his head focused on this planet, and when he doesn't just fall asleep standing up. Or sitting down. Or leaning. Or driving. Or hoeing. Or working on a piece of machinery..... (Traumatic brain injury, he has among other things, narcolepsy. He just -stops- and -sort of kind of not quite but close - goes to sleep wherever he is and whatever he is doing. My wife and I, well, we don't let Randy drive any more, and I don't let him run the heavy machinery. Too dangerous for him, he could fall into a moving machine and lose parts.
But he's a devil with a shovel when it comes time to dig up a big rock, or split some firewood for the winter, or something. Great guy, love him like another brother. He just can't do things like he used to. Neither can I, so we understand each other quite well. Good days, bad days. We work things out around them.
And the property owner, "Tracy," well, she's a living doll, SUCH a nice person, and she has the artistic side of things kept up tight for us. Between her and my wife (Randy's divorced, so is Tracy quite recently; they seem to be coming to some sort of understanding.... It's cute to see, they're like a couple of puppies sometimes.) She's also learning 'rural' very quickly, and helping out as much as possible with the actual scut work of making things grow. Her squash beds are pretty enough to be in pictures, for instance.
And her son-in-law, he brought us two hives of bees! (One of which might be getting colony collapse disorder, they're not doing well at all. I suspect some moron in the neighbourhood is using a neonicotinoid bug spray and it is decimating the bees. Hey, do me a favour? Get involved, PLEASE! and ask the EPA to BAN NEO-NIC! They did it in the E.U., and beekeepers there are reporting drops in colony deaths, starting the very next year after the ban. That stuff is horrible!!)
So, Randy and I, since we're both a pair of cripples, we need help to get this operation along down the road. So, I've got a powered "2-wheel tractor" device with some implements. It's smaller than a regular tractor, and a lot more fuel-efficient. And I can handle it without undue additional damage to my bones, isn't that nice??
This is something I can highly recommend for anyone who is planning on more than an acre or so of garden / farm. If you're doing nothing than a small garden, say 3 or 4 meters by 10 or a bit more, stay with a small tiller. (Just a shovel and a fork would be better for a small plot; the exercise as well as the low cost make it an exceptionally good choice.)
But if you are going bigger, get some assistance from a good machine. TOP line only, and get something a little bigger than you think you will need. If it is bigger than required (but NOT hugely over-sized!) then it will not only get the task finished quickly with less effort from you, it will keep the machine from wearing out, or wearing at all. If you get something that can -just- do the job, it will wear out in short order, or break down from having to perform at the edge of its rating all of the time. SLIGHTLY bigger, if you're thinking longer term than just one year.
Think in terms of generations, and leave something behind for your children and their children, instead. No more throw-away culture!
I can tell you from too much first-hand experience, DO NOT WASTE MONEY ON LIGHT-DUTY 'home use" MACHINERY OR TOOLS. You'll buy three cheap shovels, for instance, at a total cost of more than one high-end heavy-duty shovel. This goes double, or more, for power machinery.
For an example, a "craftsman" piece-of-junk tiller from Sneers (like the one on the bench, waiting for me to have the time and inclination to break all of the rusted bolts loose, disassemble it - AGAIN, and replace the broken gears which I replaced LAST YEAR - AGAIN!!) will be nothing more than a drag on your productivity.
You will spend so much time messing about trying to get it to run, trying to get it to do the job you need done, that you will quite likely despair and just give up. I've been in that trap myself (witness that "craftsman" p.o.s.) and seen too many others give up gardening altogether, simply because of shoddy tools. Wait another few months if needed, save more of your hard-won shekels, and get something PRO-grade instead.
Here's a clue. If it holds up to a lawn and garden / landscaping business it will hold up for you. (Here's the HINT! Ask the guys who run around all day and do this stuff for a living!! Landscapers are often your best source for tips on what NOT to get!!)
Buy a top-line tool and stop wasting money, time, and effort. Truly, even something as simple as a shovel, a top-grade one will make even something as simple and mundane as putting a hole in the ground a whole lot nicer.
The machine we have is a "BCS" (their model 715, an old, small one), and it produces a seed bed like face powder in ONE pass. Being small, this gadget is gasoline-powered; but there is a diesel option and it DOES work exceptionally well on BIO-DIESEL or even just plain cooking oil. There are several models of this make (BCS) and there are several other manufacturers of them. Grillo is another brand, for instance. One of the original of the breed is a perfectly wonderful machine, the "Wheel Horse" which made marvelous machines in the 30's and 40's. Those work very well still today, even as old as they are, if they are maintained properly. Parts for them are coming more and more dear, though. A newer, still-produced machine might be a better value. Unless of course you find your Grampa's old Wheel Horse in the barn under a tarp, with the sulky, harrows, plows, and all the other implements stored there with it, wrapped in oily rags. Stranger things have happened. Check around if you have rural relatives. Never know what you'll find in an old barn. (Full tractors are very nice, if expensive to keep. If you find a small one for little or no money, which has a 3-point or snap hitch and implements for it, for Pete's sake get it. 2 wheel or 4, good machines make things a lot nicer. I can deal with appropriate technology; Luddites just die tired, and early. I just can't stand wastefulness and grand-standing and foolish beat-the-Jones's competitiveness.)
In any case, the equipment isn't absolutely necessary but for more than a small garden it certainly helps a LOT.
Some gardening DO's:
Get HELP. PARTICULARLY if you want to try to do more than an acre, don't do it all by yourself.
Get BEES! Ask the local bee-keepers if they can park a hive on your place. Plant some clover or other bee-friendly flowers for the beautiful buggy beasties, if you can, well ahead of time, to help out with the nectar flow.
Get GOOD, HEAVY-DUTY EQUIPMENT, even the simple stuff like rakes and hoes. Even more so with power machinery. Check local auctions for somebody's Grampa's tools and buy them instead of new junk from the big-box-rip-off-marts.
Get HEIRLOOM SEED and find out from your local gardening experts or the farm bureau / county extension service how to POLLENATE it properly, to keep it from crossing with other varieties.
Get HAPPY! KEEP YOUR SPIRITS UP!! Hey, it could be worse. You could be ME - weird AND funny-looking.
DON'Ts:
Don't try to go it alone if you can help it. Gardening is better with a friend.
Don't plant hybrids. Look for a local seed-saver group.
Don't spray poisons to control insects or weeds, ESPECIALLY not the new "systemic" products with neo-nicotinoids in them. Pick the bugs and pull the weeds. There's this nifty gadget, great for weeds, it's called a "HOE." (Look for a "stirrup hoe," perhaps at the local auction house or antique junk store. Not all hoes are created equal.)
Don't use chemical fertilizers. Start a compost pile for humus to incorporate into your garden plot, and add all the leaves, grass, weeds, vegetable kitchen wastes you can. (And yes, you CAN compost meats, if you know how. If you DON'T know how, you create a messy, bug-infested STENCH!)
Don't Give Up!! Even a flop of a garden will improve the soil - IF you avoid those chemical traps.
Don't be discouraged if some, or even all, of one of your crops gets eaten by bugs, or succumbs to some disease or other. That just points you to what part of your local biome which needs help. Keep trying, and don't give up. Re-plant something unrelated there that those bugs or diseases can't eat, perhaps something for a winter or late-fall harvest. JUST KEEP TRYING!!!