Mendolonium

This post is inspired by Karen (everyone say “Hi Karen!”) who commented on the previous post that she wanted to start gardening and composting but wasn’t sure how to go about getting started.  There are really only two things that you need to decide when you decide to start growing your own fruits and vegetables, what to plant and where to plant it.

What to Plant

When I first began gardening I made my decisions on what to plant based solely upon what I liked to eat and what produce I thought was especially better fresh picked as opposed to purchased.  For those first years that meant a few tomatoes, bell peppers, and some herbs.  And for the most part, I think that planting what you love to eat is the first and foremost rule to follow.  You will naturally take the best care of , become invested in, the foods that you love.  As you garden you will also find what fruits and vegetables are worth the effort for you and what grows best in the tiny microclimate of  your own yard.  I found that figuring out what works for me was best accomplished through experimentation and trial and error.  I found that gardening books were fairly useless for figuring out what I wanted to grow.  I quickly grew annoyed by the gardening books that touted broccoli as a great beginner crop.  Well, I got about a 20% germination rate with my broccoli and those that did grow were either eaten by rats or covered by a fuzzy blanket of aphids.  And most gardening books are written for places that truly have four seasons, not a season of wet and cool and a season of dry and hot.  My first season I made the mistake of following the advice of many a book to plant potatoes in the spring and ended up with potatoes that quite literally baked in the ground during a 100 degree plus May heat wave.  So now I grow what I love and what works for me when it works for me.  I certainly don’t suffer for a lack of diversity of crops (there are 16 different fruits and about three dozen different varieties of vegetables growing in our backyard at this very moment) but I do buy my broccoli at the farmer’s market.  And perhaps someday when the children are grown I will conquer broccoli, but for now I am quite content with our arrangement.

There are a few plants that are particularly kid friendly.  I can’t recommend berries highly enough – the boys literally squeal with pleasure at every ripe berry.  Although I am fastidious about weighing all the produce we produce and entering it in a spreadsheet I couldn’t tell you how many pounds of strawberries and blackberries have come out of our yard, the boys eat them as fast the plants grow them.  Berries are also perennial and require fabulously little maintenance.  Tomatoes and peas are great for being prolific producers so that kids can help with the picking.  Potatoes are great fun for kids to plant and to  dig up – buried carbohydrate treasures.  As Erin mentioned in the comments, beans and squash, with their large seeds, are great to plant with kids.  Even Theo, at just over two, can put a bean in a hole with a grin of satisfaction.  (He also loves beans so much that he eats one – dried – for every one he plants, but there are certainly worse things a two year old can put in his mouth.)

Where to Plant

You basically have three choices:  containers, raised beds, and/or in the ground.  I am not the person you want to trust with advice when it comes to container gardening.  Nearly everything I have ever planted in a container has died.  I’ve finally got a nice mature sage growing in a beautiful copper pot my sister gave me – hopefully I can keep it alive through the summer.  If you have the space, I highly recommend raised beds – for the protection they offer from kids (and dogs), your ability to have more control over the soil, and the ease of gardening.  If you are not handy there are many hardware kits that are sold to join together pre-cut boards or there are kits (made of plastic or wood) that include the boards and the hardware.  If money is an issue I see postings for free wood on craigslist every week.   We filled our raised beds with a 50/50 mix of plain old San Gabriel Valley dirt and compost.  Although nearly every gardening book you read will recommend that you test your soil for contaminants and optimum fertility I don’t know any home growers who have actually ever tested their soil.  Our dirt came from two sources:  (1) our backyard (when we removed the existing “landscape” and leveled the ground prior to our jungle to farm transformation we ended up with a rather large pile of dirt) and (2) free from craigslist.  Craigslist is a truly wonderful thing.  There are many people who are re-landscaping, putting on an addition or a garage, or digging out a pool that have many, many cubic yards of dirt free for the taking.  If the dirt looks bad, full of rocks, nails, pieces of concrete, then don’t take it.  I also wouldn’t take dirt from anywhere I suspected of being highly contaminated, say a golf course.  But there is plentiful, free dirt available, in fact, just last week I saw an ad on craigslist offering to pay $20 for every load of dirt that was taken away from someone’s yard.  For compost, you can make it or you can buy it.  If you are buying a small amount the bags from the home improvement store are fine.  One tip, if buying several bags purchase several different brands and mix them for a more varied blend of nutrients.  There are also many landscape and stone companies that will deliver compost relatively cheaply if buying a large amount.  Making compost is, to my mind, another one of those gardening tasks that needn’t be as complicated as some books make it out to be.  Jeff is the compost master on our farm and described his compost philosophy in a comment on the last post:

Compost: I love compost, it is a good excuse for a grown man to dig in the dirt and look at bugs.  The boys love searching for worms and grubs. One of Theo’s clearest expressions is “icky bug”.  I built mine [compost pile] out of chicken wire, and metal posts. I pile everything on one side of the bin, then when it is about two feet high, I turn it over to the other side. I repeat this every week. I have one of the hard sided prebuilt composters (from my parents’) and I fitted an old metal screen over the top. The openings in the screen are about 1 cm. I shovel the compost on top and shake it, until all the small stuff falls through, everything that is too big gets thrown back into the pile. The result is great compost.

I don’t mean to oversimplify, but I do want to encourage you to know that you can do it.  You can, little by little, (Jeff just chimed in twenty times more slowly if you have kids) grow your own food.   And growing your own food isn’t just a hobby – it really does matter.  Every tomato you plant is one less piece of ground that was plowed by a fossil fueled machine.   Every strawberry you pick from your own yard is one less strawberry that was harvested by an exploited farm worker.  Every orange that you grow is one less orange that was trucked to the grocery store.  I remember the overwhelming feeling of staring at our overgrown yard with the dream of a mini-farm and wondering if I was inspired or insane.  I think I was probably a little bit of both.

The questions I am most often asked about our garden are not, how to make compost, or protect against pests, or what the best variety of tomatoes are, but “How do you do it?”…”How do you garden with two young children…and a job…and school…and life?”  And my answer is simply, “That it is important to me, so I make it happen”.   But that answer doesn’t really help inspire new gardeners nor does it help those who want to garden but truly feel perplexed as to how to possibility fit growing food into their busy lives.  I think that those with young children feel particularly challenged; it can be difficult to see how a clingy baby, a toddler hell bent on destruction, or a whiny preschooler (or all of the above) could be compatible with rows of neatly labeled plants and sharp garden tools.  But I am here to tell you that gardening and children are more than compatible; it can actually be amazing to combine growing food with growing a family.  Today will begin an ongoing series of blog posts about how to combine growing food with growing a family in the context of our busy modern lives.  I  still have a great deal to learn about growing food (as evidenced by our large peach tree dropping every single one of its peaches prematurely this year), but I think that I have manged to do a damn fine job of managing a house, children, work, school, and a garden…and, for the most part, I have had fun doing it.  I hope that you will too.

I you have read this far, I am going assume that you have at least an inkling of interest in growing your own food.  Perhaps you already do, but are wondering how to grow more.  Maybe you don’t but would like to start.  To start off the discussion I give you my top three food growing directives:

No Excuses

Do not allow lack of space and/or time, your job, or your children to be an excuse standing in your way.  No yard?  No patio?  No community garden?  Everyone has at least a windowsill where they can grow a few herbs and greens.  No time?  Accept that you are probably never going to  have days or weeks of interrupted time away from work or family to set up your garden.  So start now.  Start small if you like.  One tomato plant can easily give you ten pounds of tomatoes.  One plant can be the beginning of something big.  Long before we turned our backyard into a mini-farm I began gardening in 2007 with two scrawny tomato plants and a couple of bell pepper seedlings.  I had absolutely no idea how to start vegetables from seed – I don’t think the thought of doing so had even occurred to me.  I had no idea how to preserve food nor could I have possibly imagined growing enough food in our yard that I would need to.  Just start growing food and the rest will follow.  I write this post on May 9th.  You still have time to go out and plant a tomato, a pepper, or a fruit tree this year.  And if you live in a warm climate like Southern California then there is something you can plant all year round.  The growing season here is 365 days year!  No excuses.

Accept Failure

Sometimes your plants will die.  No matter how long you have been gardening you will have some sort of failure every year.  A old girlfriend of my sister owns an organic orchard in central California.  She reported that she lost around 75% of all the peaches on her trees every year due to disease and pests.  And she is successful farmer turning a profit!  There is a huge amount of loss in food production; it is simply hidden from you when you see a pile of fruit in the grocery store.  As a home food producer you will see failure but that does not mean that you are a failure.  And that failure is tempered by the awesome successes you will experience; the taste of greens harvested five minute ago, the satisfaction of harvesting pounds of tomatoes from a plant you grew from a tiny speck of a seed, the joy of watching your children snack on fresh fruits and vegetables right out of their own backyard.  Failure is part of life and if you are gardening with your children the lessons of what it really takes to grow food and of failure and perseverance are valuable ones indeed.

Tend Your Space in the Time That Works Best for You

There is absolutely no rule that gardening has to be done at any particular time of day or day of the week.  While you might imagine serious gardeners spending hours toiling on weekends that is not the way things have to be.  If you are a morning person, try going out and pulling weeds/transplanting a couple of seedlings/hand watering a container or a bed or plants/harvesting some veggies for a few minutes before going to work.  Do you work from home or close to home?  Try taking a “garden break” instead of a “lunch break” every so often.  Do you enjoy playing with the kids or eating outside after work?  Play, eat, and garden until it’s time to go inside.  Use daytime hours at home for the gardening tasks that must actually be accomplished out the garden.  You can use your days away from the garden or your evenings to start seeds indoors or plan your garden.  You can order seeds at midnight.  If you can spare a few minutes at the computer, then healthy, organic seeds and seedlings can arrive at your doorstep in just a few days.  And if you have children, please do not limit gardening to nap time or when they are away at school.  In doing so you are limiting yourself.  Every child I have ever met loves to be outside.  In future posts I will talk about how to enjoy gardening with kids.

I hope that this is just the start of the discussion.  I  have a number of topics in mind, but I would love to hear suggestions about what you want to hear from me.  And please do not feel limited if you don’t have children, we all have challenges – from taking care of elderly parents to busy jobs and I think that many of the solutions that we discuss can be helpful to everyone.  Are there any gardening (or general life) directives you have found to be useful in your own life that you want to share?

I wonder if I sometimes give the wrong impression on my blog – that my garden garden is an urban oasis of  tranquility where children frolic in tune with nature, ripe fruit and vegetables spring forth in abundance, and ladybugs proliferate.  It’s true that there is a lot of frolicking, fruit, and ladybugs.  But it is also true that there is a not insignificant amount of fighting, squirrels enjoying said abundant produce, and sow bugs outnumbering the ladybugs.   The boys certainly cause their share of troubles.  Cases in point from the past week alone:  Theo throwing sand (quite purposefully) into Thomas’ face, Thomas poking Theo with sticks, Theo “re-organizing” all of my plant markers, Thomas flying a “kite” among the new fruit trees snapping off a delicate branch.  But, by far, my biggest source of frustration right now is the simple sow bug.  Sow bugs are decomposers – they go after dead plant matter and are part of the process of turning leaves, food scraps, etc. into valuable compost.  And although many garden websites will proclaim that the noble sow bug will not attack living plant matter, my strawberries, peas, beans, squash, and melons tell a different story.  We have a large patch of strawberries in our front yard under our roses and the boys and neighbor kids love to pick them as soon as the turn red.  But half the time they pick a berry only to find that it is riddled with tunnels and the sow bugs who made them.  I am quite sure that I have missed many a berry that the boys have picked and they have popped it into their mouths sow bugs and all.  (I just gave an involuntary shudder right now thiking about the horror.)  I had to plant about triple the number of peas this year as opposed to last just to ensure that a few hearty plants would survive the sow bug onslaught.  My beans last year had about a 50% loss rate to sow bugs.  And unprotected I had a 100% loss of squash and melons last year.  After multiple episodes of planting seeds and seedlings only to have them disappear overnight into the bellies of sow bugs I finally figured out that placing a relatively high (4 – 6 inches) plastic barrier with an open top around the seed or seedling prevents most of the sow bugs from climbing into to do their dirty work.  In our case, that plastic barrier is made up of old seedling pots or big yogurt tubs that I cut the bottoms out of and placed upside down over an emerging seed or seedling.  This year I used the plastic from the beginning, but there also seem to be more sow bugs than ever.  At night, when they are most active, I can turn over any unprotected leaf to find dozens of them writhing in an orgy of plant demolition.  I also have more seeds to plant and have run out of protective containers.  And although they are supposed to be dim-witted, small-brained creatures they seem to have a sense for squash.  Thomas noticed that this weekend as we planted squash seeds the sow bugs would come “running” to the newly planted seed, within seconds attempting to surmount my plastic fortresses.

The “traditional” garden solution would be to spread pellets of sow bug killer out among my beds, which I am assured, would result in a satisfying sow bug genocide.  But I just can’t contaminate the soil that feeds my family with poison.  Organic gardening has worked well for us and through crop diversity, rotation, and mulching we have managed to avoid most other problems that might call for the use of an herbicide or pesticide.  I am more than happy to sacrifice a few wormy peaches so that my other peaches can remain untouched by anything but water (although, I suppose, whether or not one should classify LA rainwater as “organic” is highly debatable).  I am quite sure that I spend less time weeding in our heavily mulched garden than I would driving to the store to pick up a herbicide and then apply it.  I love that I feel completely comfortable picking produce out of the garden and eating it without the bother of washing it.   But in this case our organic arsenal is simply not up to the task.  I know what the organic solution to my problem most likely is:  to call in the big guns or in this case the big girls of organic gardening – chickens.  I imagine that a few lovely laying hens turned out into the fallow garden, feasting on sow bugs is just the solution I need.  It would be the ultimate payback for the sow bugs – to be eaten and turned into delicious, healthy eggs.  Now I just need to get Jeff to work on that chicken coop.

Do you have an outdoor enemy and how do you deal with it?

Although we here in Southern California are not emerging from a winter of cold and snow (more like a winter of cool and damp) I still find myself almost giddy with excitement during these first few weeks of spring.

During the winter I drive home the in dark, looking out onto a seemingly endless sea of too bright headlights and red taillights.  In spring I can drive with sunlight streaming in through the windows and a view of the Hollywood sign.

During the winter I arrive home and stand in front of our door, fumbling for my keys in the dark, hurrying to get inside as if it was already past my bedtime.  In spring I can walk up to the door and go inside with no trouble at all and look forward to the daylight hours left for fun.

During winter the boys are always ensconced in pants, coats, and hats; never seeming to really get dirty.  In spring the boys fling mud, roll in the sand, dig through the dirt, and end up utterly and completely filthy – just as little children should be.

During winter I sigh as I prep dinner, realizing that I need one more carrot or a few sprigs of parsley, and I am loathe to go out in the cold dark backyard to retrieve them. In spring I pause in the middle of my prep to dash outside, not even bothering with shoes, to pull a couple of carrots, snip some green onions, or gather a handful of sage leaves.

During winter Thomas draws at a desk set next to a window.  In spring Thomas runs outside with a stack of paper and a fist full of crayons and draws on a dusty garden table while sitting on an over-turned bucket.

During winter my garden is quiet, a monochromatic green landscape of peas, lettuce, and carrot tops, growing slowly.  In spring my garden explodes into color with a frenzy of white, pink, and magenta apple, peach, and nectarine blossoms, the first exciting yellow tomato flowers, and plants that seem to grow noticeably bigger day by day.

During winter we carry reluctant, sobbing children indoors hours before their bedtimes because the light for playtime has run out.  In spring we carry exhausted, hungry children indoors for a quick dinner and bath in the few minutes between nightfall and bedtime.

This is the fourth spring for our little farm and it holds the most promise yet.  Just before spring arrived I armed myself with a tape measure, a map of the backyard, a pencil, the assistance of my favorite four year old, and plotted out each garden bed down to a six inch square resolution.  I then plotted the results electronically and printed myself a grid representing each garden bed.  The grids went into a binder with a case of colored pencils and now as work through spring planting the entire garden is taking shape in a beautiful rainbow of precision.  The mapping is not only deeply satisfying to my inner nerd but will also truly be invaluable for tracking potential soil borne disease, for crop rotation, and planning a more diverse garden.  When we first began to “farmscape” the backyard we had not a single fruit tree. We now have twelve fruit trees – eight of them new deciduous fruit trees planted in an intensive backyard orchard.  After an initial seedling debacle involving the use of unsterilized compost (which is why one rainy weekend in February found me baking compost in my oven) I have began transplanting tomatoes I started from seed at the end of March.  There are many more tomatoes and an entire flat of peppers, melons, and herbs that will be ready shortly.  This summer we hope to see our dreams of chickens, a wood burning earth oven, and bees turn from a fantasy into a reality.  We spent a wonderful spring weekend outside these past two days, planting dozens of seeds, trellising blackberries, building potato boxes, fighting monsters with the neighbor boys, looking for “icky bugs”, and cleaning up after all the late winter rains.  I never paid all that much attention to the seasons growing up:  winter was cold, summer was hot, fall and spring were neither.  Now I find myself enthralled by the change into spring (and later the change into fall).  I spend far more time outside now as an adult than I did as a child.  And I find that I am happy out in the sunlight, digging in the dirt, running around with my boys.

Is anyone else swooning over spring the way that I am?  What do you enjoy this time of year?