Here’s a quick status update on what’s going on in the garden. Well, maybe not so quick. There’s a lot going on this time of year! I’ll get some pictures up later this week. Mind you, I’m doing this all in my spare time while working full time, taking the Permaculture Design Course (PDC) one weekend a month, raising a family and so on. It can be done.

I got the swales dug, the paths laid out in straw, and about 30-40% of the garden plot (about 40′ x 60′) sheet mulched over the last month. I planted the paths and swales in white clover, but haven’t seen any evidence that the seed is sprouting.

I redeemed my “Christmas Cash” at the local nursery for a quince, a clethra and a variegated dogwood. The dogwood goes between the apple trees as a calcium recycler and “sweetener” to the fruit. Then I popped over to another fabulous nursery specializing in Japanese garden stock and materials for some clumping bamboo (fargesia rufa).

I also picked up a flowering dogwood down in Deposit this past weekend, but it was with a group that was devastated by the fungus now affecting many dogwoods in the northeast. So I’m a little nervous having it in the garden, but I’m going to try and keep it at least spatially isolated from the other dogwoods. I’ll also plant it with some lupines and poppies, which I believe have anti-fungal properties.

When down there I also obtained some free blueberries from one of my co-students in the PDC. My 9-year old and I planted these Tuesday night. I’ve been very into scrounging plant material, which is outrageously easy. I want a forsythia hedge (a “fedge”) along the back of the garden to keep the deer out, or at least discourage them. On my drive into work I saw that someone had cut back their forsythia, so I stopped and gathered up the free plant material. Later that night I cut the branches in small sections and stuck them directly into the ridge of the lowest swale. Hopefully this will be enough to get them to root.

Saturday night at the PDC we foraged for garlic mustard, dandelions and chives for a salad. We also boiled up some Japanese Knotweed (invasive relative of rhubarb and asparagus) to put in the desert. I wanted to go after the garlic mustard growing on my own lot this week, but sadly the guy who mows what’s left of the lawn cut them down. At least it looks better.

Another night I went exploring the old railroad tracks south of town and found a bunch of old apples, cherries and plums back there. Having brought along my clippers, I made a few cuttings, stuffed them in my pockets and headed home. I cut them at a bud or branch, on a diagonal, dipped them in rotenone to stimulate rooting, and put them in pots with about half garden soil and half potting soil.

Perennials and re-seeding annuals are coming up and out all over the garden: baptisia, yarrow, comfrey, lupine, bleeding heart, hosta, peony, hydrangea, rue, jacob’s ladder, bee balm, lungwort and pyrethrum. A number of these I dug up and made root separations, a great way to propagate many perennials.

This morning I started another biggish group of seeds for summer planting- tomato, tomatillo, fennel, stevia, purple bell pepper, ancho poblano, cayenne, jalapeno, perennial and annual sunflowers. I’ve been transplanting lettuces, tai sai, brassicas, cilantro, parsley, spinach and sorrel into the raised beds.

Theoretically, you can put pockets of soil directly on top of a sheet mulched bed and plant into these. I haven’t tried this yet, so this is my next test, as I am running out of established bed space.

Structurally, I moved the compost bin much closer to the back door, and started a compost bucket under the sink. I got some Aspen wood shavings from a pet store and I’m dropping a sprinkling of these into the bucket. The carbon is supposed to balance out the nitrogen and kill the ammonia smell that sometimes comes from kitchen scraps left too long. So far, no smell and no fruit flies.

Tuesday night I knocked the concrete off the iron pipes I dug up last summer. These were set as clothes line poles, sometime in the golden age of heavy industry. They were set about 3 feet deep with about 150 lbs. of concrete on each. These were not fun to dig out! Anyway, they’ve been lying there next to the garage with these big chunks of concrete on the end, until this week. The pipe is probably useful for something so I’m not getting rid of that yet. The concrete I’ll use as the base for a small berm which I’ll plant with shrubs like witch hazel and honeysuckle as a screen near the sidewalk and spruce tree.

I discovered a couple of cool videos on the Guardian UK about Guerilla Gardeners (here, and here). Then I found another on YouTube that really introduces the concept with some humor. I think this guy deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.

I’ve been seeing a number of comments on other blogs from readers who are concerned about Peak Oil, climate change and hunger and want to start a garden, but don’t know where to begin. As someone who once knew nothing about gardening, but now have some experience, I wanted to share some tips. It is said of game development that a good game is easy to learn and difficult to master. Gardening is the same. What you want is to start with something fast and easy- instant gratification, or as close as we can come in the gardening world. Quick wins build confidence and enthusiasm.

Start with Herbs
Thyme, oregano, chives and sage are fairly easy perennials (meaning they survive the winter underground and produce new growth in the spring from the existing plant). They need sun and that’s about it. They don’t need much water or particularly good soil. Go down to the local nursery and buy some starts, transplant them into your garden close to the kitchen or back door, or containers on a sunny porch or patio, or a pot in the kitchen. Now you have a good supply of basic cooking herbs.

While nothing is fool proof these herbs are as close as I’ve ever come to fast, simple and enjoyable. Once you have this base of herbs you can expand into annuals (that need to be grown from seed each season) like parsley and cilantro. Both of these do pretty well at reseeding themselves, so again, go down to the nursery and get starts and let a few plants go to seed and you should have a perpetual supply.

Starting from Seed
Nothing is quite as exciting for me as seeing a new sprout from a seed I planted last week. In general, the bigger the seed, the easier it is to sprout. The best things for first timers to start from seed are sunflowers, beans and peas. These are all fast sprouters and growers.

I use egg cartons and special seed starting mix, but you can also use potting soil in styrofoam cups, milk cartons with the top cut off, yoghurt cartons or other recycleable containers. In any case you need to poke or cut a hole in the bottom, so water can drain out. This means you’ll also need a plastic tray or bin. The nice thing about styrofoam egg containers is that you can separate the top lid, turn it over and you have a perfectly fitted tray to catch the water.

Sprouting requires warmth and water, so make sure your starting pots are full of moist starter mix. The bane of seed starters is something called “damping off” where suddenly, after two weeks, the leaves fall off and you’re left with a pathetic, dying stalk of a seedling. This is caused by fungi or microorganisms in garden soil, which is why it is best to start in a clean container with sterile potting mix. That said, I’ve rarely had this problem with beans, peas and sunflowers. And for some reason, damping off almost never happens when you plant directly into the garden bed, which you can also do with the seeds I’ve recommended here.

Tomatoes
There is no greater, more immediate sensation than the taste of the first home-grown tomato, compared to the mealy, hard, tasteless red things you get in the supermarket. Many, many home gardeners start with tomatoes- they’re the obvious choice, and not difficult to grow. They do have a few quirks though, and maybe the hardest thing is figuring out which variety to grow. I suspect most newbies go for beefsteaks or early girl varieties, which are not so tasty, or picky hybrid cherry tomatoes. My personal, starting-out favorite is the humble roma.

Tomatoes need sun and warmth. Don’t plant til well after the last frost. Here in Western New York (Zone 6) don’t plant tomatoes before Memorial Day. I put mine in last July and had a fine crop in September. Tomatoes need to be staked up or they fall over and rot. I typically use metal wire basket-like contraptions that you simply push into the ground around the tomato when it is small. Any respectable nursery or big hardware store will have these, but you can often get them cheap at garage sales. Finally, when the fruit start to appear and get ripe, cut back as much of the non-flowering leaf stalks as possible. This feels weird to a new gardener, but it channels the plant’s energy into the fruit rather than new growth, and lets in more sun in for ripening.

Humility

The lesson I keep receiving from my gardening practice is that I know only a little. One Permaculture precept is that human knowledge is only ever a small portion of the total information stored and flowing in a natural system. It has been very helpful to me to approach the garden as a child or a scientist, asking “I wonder what’s going on with that?” when I see something I don’t expect. I was surprised one day last year when I lifted a stone from the stone pile and a fat toad jumped up at me. Turns out toads like the warm stone caves to hide out in at night, and it also turns out that toads are great for the garden. So I put some little stone piles in various parts of the garden. Humility means litterally “a state of being close to the earth (humus)” and even after many years of this I don’t pretend to know everything.

Find out what works and stick with it. What doesn’t work, try something different.

One of the threads here at Greenerminds is to record the transformation of my garden this year. Many gardeners keep a garden journal, and this is mine. I want to be able to come back next year and see where I was in development at various points in time.

With that said, I want to indicate what I believe the final frost date for 2008 here in the Rochester, NY area was Wednesday, April 16. Actually I’m a bit south, but not yet in the higher elevations that start about 10 miles south. Officially we’re all in Zone 6 but there are many microclimates and miniclimates. I got some frost on parts of my site yesterday, and it was very light, with a low temperature overnight of around 32° F.

Which meant also that I was able to put out the first seedlings last night, which I’ve been hardening off (taking out during the day, back in at night) for the last two weeks. I put these seedlings in two raised beds I built last summer using a sheet mulch, and the dirt is nice! There were tons of earthworms and other soil activity. Anyway, I put out parsley, cilantro, mesclun, arrugula, tai sai, broccoli raab, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, snap and sugar peas.

I also rented a rototiller for half a day Saturday. I’m only rototilling the swale / paths and where the pond will go, just to make it easier to dig. I’ll do another post in a few days on how the swales and paths go together. I need to get some red or white clover for the paths, and may need to scrounge some mulch for the swales. Fortunately, tons of free organic material is available on the local sides-of-the-road as people do their spring yard “cleaning.”

George Monbiot finallly makes the point today in the Guardian, that I have been wanting to make about the emerging global food crisis. While some stories on the subject in recent days have mentioned the epic drought in Australia, likely due to global warming, most blame the situation on biofuel use of corn. The fact is that most corn, and indeed most food grain is fed to livestock. Livestock can eat a lot of things beside grain, but grain feed allows for factory production, where massive numbers of animals can be housed on small areas rather than free ranging on pasture. Corn-fed beef and pork are also more “marketable” than pasture-fed.

Monbiot says this:

But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

He proposes eating farmed tilapia which is very protein-productive and efficient. I’m looking into raising a few in my new mini-pond, when it gets dug later this year. This is the first I’ve heard anyone mention tilapia outside Permaculture circles, although a commenter mentions problems with Chinese and Taiwanese farmed tilapia.

In energy descent, rather than centralized grocery shopping, fed by centralized distribution centers and trucking, fed by monoculture stockyards, fed by monoculture grain production, we need a system where most of the food is much closer to the point of consumption.

In other words, grow a garden. Farm some tilapia. Raise some chickens for eggs and perhaps meat, and maybe a goat for milk. Grain production may still be more efficient on medium to large scales, from an energy standpoint, but most industrial vegetables and fruits are clearly energy losers, even before they get shipped from Chile or California.

One point raised in the comments to Monbiot’s article indicates that the financial crisis does in fact play into the food crisis. Speculative excess capital has flowed into commodities of all kinds over the last two years and this is having a huge cumulative effect on grain prices, including energy and fertilizer input costs and a new midwestern land price bubble. Without being able to systematically untangle the skein of interrelated forcings, we can’t say for certain how much any of these factors —ethanol, oil, climate change, meat habits and speculation —directly contribute to hunger; we only know that they do.

I’m killing my lawn and turning it into a food garden.

Let the sheet mulching begin! I went for a walk around town the other day, poking around the old abandoned railway lines (often a good place to find old tree and shrub stock), and walked past a feed and grain store I hadn’t paid much attention to. I called them up and asked if they sold strawbales, and they did. I ordered 20 at $4.50 each.

Unfortunately they don’t deliver and I don’t have a pickup any more. So I decided to rent a U-Haul, and found that the repair shop around the corner from me rents them- I could walk there if necessary. So I lined up a truck for this weekend.

Meanwhile I went on craigslist and discovered all manner of cool free stuff including rotted horse manure and creek rocks (don’t tell these folks, but people pay good money for this stuff). Haven’t heard back from the rock people yet, but I have the manure and straw pickups scheduled for this Saturday. Naturally, the forecast is for rain.

So the way sheet mulching works is this:

1. first I put down a layer of manure, an inch or two thick, directly on the lawn.
2. If I need soil amendments, these go down now too, and I probably should lime and rock phosphate a bit, especially up the end with the spruce tree.
3. Next we need a weed barrier. My preferred material is corrugated cardboard from the gazillion shipping boxes left over from Christmas and various birthdays, coffee shipments, etc. Thick newspaper, cotton clothes or even carpet will work too. This is to prevent the lawn / weed from coming up through the manure fertilizer.
4. Next layer is a bit of topsoil, maybe an inch. This isn’t really needed, but I put it in anyway.
5. Then comes 6″ to 10″ of straw or other mulch. Last year I used double-ground bark mulch, but it was a bit too woody, so I changed to straw this year.

The great news about sheet mulch:

• no digging
• goes really fast
• you can plant into it right away by making little soil pockets into the mulch
• no digging

Once I get this going, I’ll include some pictures and maybe even a video on the process.

On my fourth try, I finally got the bread to come out nice, just in time for Easter. So here’s my Easter Loaf recipe. Sorry there’s no picture; we ate it! You’ll need a dutch oven and 5-10 hours ideally, although the actual work required totals about 5 minutes.

First make the sponge- mix the following in a large bowl and let it sit for half an hour:

• 1 packet of Fleischmann’s Instant Yeast (NOTE: Russ says use 1/4 teaspoon; I’m telling you what worked for me)
• 2 Tbsp brown sugar
• 1 cup unbleached flour
• 1 cup warm water

After half an hour there should be some bubbles on the top. Next, using a wooden spoon, mix in:

• 1 tsp. salt
• 1 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 1/4 cup unbleached flour
• 3/4 cup flavor flours (rye, whole wheat, buckweat, quinoa, chickpea flour, etc.- I used 1/4 c. whole wheat, 1/4 c. buckwheat low gluten, and 1/4 c. chickpea flour)
• Flavoring or seeds, such as caraway for rye, wheat germ, dill, rosemary, garlic, etc.

Flour a board or counter and knead the dough 10-15 times. Flour the bowl and dump the dough back in and cover with a towel.

Let the dough rise for 2-8 hours.

Smack down the dough and knead it again, well. Try to get the air out of it. Let it rise for another few hours.
Pre-heat the oven to 450°ree; and put the dutch oven with the lid on in to heat up for half an hour. Take the dutch oven out, sprinkle a little corn flour or polenta in and turn the dough into it. Sprinkle a little water on the dough and then some sesame seeds on top, and press into the dough. Bake with the lid on for half an hour. Then remove the lid and bake another 12-15 minutes, til you get a nice brown top. The bread should poof up nice and round. Easy work!

I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that it’s probably more helpful and productive for me to stop arguing the fine points of systems theory, energy dynamics and rhetoric and get down to doing some work, spending some time in the trench.

Finally, and I do mean finally because it’s taken me 13 years, I have a decent seed starting space set up down in the basement. Take a look:

I got my big batch of seeds from Seeds of Change this afternoon and got inspired. I set up the second table and light, on the left, and brought in the seed medium. I’ve also got a heating pad to help the new seeds germinate. Lights and heating pad are plugged into a three-way extension cord, plugged into a three-to-two adapter into a timer on the end of another extension cord. Hopefully the house won’t burn down.

I started the first seeds two weeks ago: cilantro, broccoli, broccoli raab, cauliflower, parsley, brussels sprouts, mesclun and snap peas. I used plugs to start these, which I haven’t used before. The cilantro, on the far right, is just now sprouting, but everything else is looking pretty green. It’s about time to snip off the lesser seedlings.

The next batch started about ten days ago and includes mung and adzuki beans, lacinato kale, lupines and poppies. The mung beans, in the middle, all sprouted really easily, being sprouting beans, but I’ve only got about 10% of the adzukis to come up. The kale is on the right. These were dried beans, several years old, so I guess I’m not surprised. The lupines I saved from pods last fall and the poppies are new seed my sister sent me for Christmas.

I like the fact that these plug trays come with a little clear plastic cover to keep the moisture in, but I’m finally utilizing the egg cartons I’ve been saving for the last year. Today’s batch includes red leaf and romaine lettuces, tai sai chinese cabbage, sorrel, spinach and golden chard.

Now the question is, how am I going to plant all this stuff? I have a couple of beds that could take some things as soon as it warms up a bit, but I’m hoping to sheet mulch about half my lawn this year. I’m guessing I need four yards of manure, two yards of topsoil, about 20 bales of straw, and maybe another two yards of ground bark mulch, just for aesthetics. There’s a feed store in the neighborhood so I thought I’d ask there first for who’s selling manure and straw. Otherwise there’s a small dairy operation not too far, and plenty of horse farms. I figure I can rent a UHaul pickup, now that the Kidney Foundation took the old Nissan pickup.

I also want to put in a few shallow swales before mulching the beds. A swale is basically a ditch on contour, with a small berm on the downslope side. The ditch is then filled with mulch or gravel. As water flows downslope, it sinks into the swale and gets stored in a plume underground.

I figure I’ll rent a rototiller and till these contour lines as soon as it dries out a bit- been pretty wet the last month or so. I’m thinking I ordered red clover to plant on the berm-lets, but it must have been back ordered, because it didn’t come with the other seeds. I have a fairly flat lot but there is still an advantage to swaling here I think. I’ll put paths on the upslope side of the swale and plant these in clover as well, and mow them with a push mower.

The stuff we are talking about- home, urban and communitiy gardening, food, pattern, integrated landscapes, victory gardens, ecology, edge, small farming, relocalization- is suddenly mainstream. Allison Arieff blogs on these and other topics on the front page of the New York Times website.

On Sunday, Sharon Astyk wrote at Casaubon’s Book about Victory Gardens. We must all be tapping into something here. There are a couple of links to sites that are promoting a new brand of Victory Garden, probably as part of the Relocalization movement. I’m going now to read the whole thing and maybe post a comment.

Hat tip to Energy Bulletin.