New Experiments In Gardening

As you may recall last year I tried to tweak the three-sister's guild of plants into something that I would actually enjoy eating.  It was a little less than successful, but I think the concept is still sound.   I did learn a few important things about gardening though. One lesson was, "don't dig the soil when it's wet, or else it will turn into cement and all your plants will die". Another important lesson I learned was "don't buy cheap starts late into the season, they will suck and half of them will die."*

I want to be good at gardening,  hopefully a couple rather obvious insights a year will help me to be passable by the time I'm a grandmother.

Josh and I weren't exactly sure if we'd still be in provo over the summer, so I didn't sign up for the community garden this year. I also don't really plan on having a lot of time on my hands this summer **.  At first I didn't plan on having a garden at all, but a couple days ago I realized that having plants is important to me.

So here I am,  a little too late to start seeds, no money budgeted for this project and a hair-brained scheme which may or may not fail based on my lack of experience alone.  My poor husband is left trying to balance encouraging me and cautioning me not set myself up for failure.

To be fair, he puts me in the same position at least as often.

Before I fill you in on my experiment let me give you some background information.

Straw bale gardening is a method where you fertilize a bale of straw, allow it to decompose for a few weeks, and then plant directly into it.  This way the bale serves as both planting medium and container.  The straw decomposes over the season and all your plants benefit from the releasing nutrients.  It's suppose to be equally effective on the earth or on the concrete of somebody's balcony.

This method is appealing because of it's apparent ease, however, it does have some drawbacks.  First, to fertilize a straw bale organically (with bone and blood meal) would be prohibitively expensive. Second, as the season wears on a decomposing straw bale becomes butt ugly.  This second thing is only a problem because I care too much about appearances. If I were to try this method out this season, I would just stick the bales in a container.

Sheet mulching is a a way of preparing a garden bed with very little effort.   You essentially pile on the components of a compost pile in layers and then let worms, micro-organisms and fungi do the rest.  You can plant immediately,  but the bed is most fertile the second year onwards.

Both of these methods deal with planting in undigested compost,  so I'm going to take that theme and run with it.  At first I thought I would just do the straw bale method, except that I would stick it in a container. Then it occurred  to me that I wouldn't need to keep the bale intact, and so I could use other sources of nutrients besides the blood and bone meal.

I plan on layering alternating layers of nitrogen and carbon rich materials in a container  and then planting directly into it.  So, basically sheet mulching in a container. I plan on using straw as my main carbon rich material because, according to the book on the straw bale method, it's suppose to remain light and fluffy throughout the season.

I'm most worried about my plants becoming water-logged by all of the organic matter.  Just because either parent method doesn't have a problem with root rot doesn't mean it wont be a problem in a container.***

In the interest of pretending that this is a scientific endeavor here is a hypothesis for the season: Sheet mulching in a container is an effective and affordable means of gardening. In fact, it's awesome.  All of my plants survive and I suddenly become a gardening goddess.

On my balcony I'm going to try and grow: strawberries, cantaloupe, sugar snap peas, scarlet runner beans, and a couple different flowers.  I started seeds today.

I really want to make this container for both the strawberries and the cantaloupe. Unfortunately that's dependent upon me finding free wooden pallets.   I would try and construct them from regular ol' lumber, but I'm trying to do this on the cheap. 

Go here for instructions

I have less-ideal plastic crates that I can reuse anyways.

In other news, I have a couple friends who offered to let me come play in their garden this summer.  So it looks like I'll get some "normal" gardening experience this year as well.  I'm really excited, and I hope it all works out. 

It's good to have a scheme again.



*These two might actually be confounding variables
**I had a baby, I may tell you about it later
*** containers suck that way.

Lessons Learned

I've had a couple really good learning experiences in the garden this year.  This is honestly just a nice way of saying that I killed a lot of plants.

To start with, the community garden was fed by a drip irrigation system;  the first mistake that I made was to assume that this irrigation system was efficient enough to reach every corner of my raised bed.

It wasn't. As a result, some of the corn I planted didn't germinate because I had shoved them into the corner.

In addition to this assumption, I completely forgot to check to see where the irrigation system was actually dripping.  So, I had some plants that struggled with being over-watered and some that were under-watered.

I also assumed that the soil wouldn't have as much clay as typical Utah soil.  My thought process was that if I was constructing a bunch of raised beds I would use the Lasagna method to build up the soil with plenty of organic matter.  However, I think that the administrators of the garden simply bought some topsoil and filled the beds with it.

This assumption was a problem for me because when I planted transplants, a few of them drowned in their own soil, while water pooled around them and wouldn't diffuse into the surrounding clay.  In fact, I wasn't able to get the cantaloupe going at all, because of this issue.

These two problems of mine lead to a rather spotty and sad looking garden with only a few living plants.

If you remember, I was really excited about using an altered version of the three sisters method in my garden.  I planted peas as soon as I planted the corn and the pepper transplants.  This meant that the peas sprouted before the larger plants were established, and most of them didn't grow up their supports at all.

I guess I just got too excited.

I also used substandard seed and transplants,  which I'm sure only added to the problem, since everyone else's plants seem to be much bigger than mine.

Next year, I'll add organic matter to the bed immediately.  I'll also play more attention to the micro-environments in my little plot, and put things where they would be watered the proper amount.  I'll also do things in the right time-frame and get better starts.

In other news, I was able to get one good handful of sugar snap peas from my garden last week. I'm really happy about this.

Honestly, it was barely enough for a snack for myself but I'm still really pleased.

I grew these!

My goal for the season was to grow some of my own food, and I've officially done just that. Of course, I still have the peppers and the corn to go, so maybe I'll even get up to a single pound of food for myself and my husband.

Maybe in a few years I'll be up to a hundred pounds, or a thousand.

I'm not very good at this yet, but I like gardening, and the idea of sustainability way too much not to be good at this someday.

Garden Update

I'm really good at growing weeds...

The seedlings were doing pretty well up until two weeks ago, when finals happened and I got pretty sick.

Now there are four left.

Two of them are little bitty bell pepper plants,  one is a cantaloupe seedling and the last is a moonflower.  I don't think the peppers were started early enough to go into the garden but maybe I'll stick them in pots on my patio as a consolation prize.

I also finally got to work in my little garden plot today.  I've changed up my plans a little bit since I last blathered about it, in order to incorporate some of what I've learned about gardening in the last month.

I've read this book as well as a couple others on permaculture which were really exciting.  It's all about how through proper gardening techniques you can contribute to the health of the soil, provide a proper habitat, and nurture yourself from your landscape. 

They mainly deal with perennial plants but some of the same principles can still be applied to my more temporary situation.

So, instead of having homogenized blocks of plants I'll be doing a variation on the "three sisters" tradition.

As I'm sure many of you know, the "three sisters" refers to the Native American practice of planting corn, beans, and squash together.   The attributes of these three types of plants work together to provide themselves a better growing environment.  The Legumes are nitrogen fixers, making the soil healthier for the other plants.  The corn acts a trellis for the legumes and provides some shade to the more delicate plants.   The squash is a good ground cover and inhibits the growth of weeds, as well as conserving water.

This is a system that has proven itself over thousands of years and works by providing the needs of some plants through the natural qualities of others.

I'm going to mess with it and hope that it still works.

As you can see, I'm letting the weeds mulch in place.

The main change that I'll be making is to the squash.  I don't specifically remember ever trying squash and I don't really want to plant a lot of something that I wouldn't know what to do with.  Instead I'll be using cantaloupe which is actually a relative of squash, so I think that It should work just fine.

The second change I'll be making is to use pepper plants in half the plots, instead of corn.  Although not quite as tall as the original component, I think that the peppers should provide a good trellis for the legumes.

For the legumes I'm using sugar snap peas, mostly because they're a variety I recognize.

Although, it occurs to me that I should check to make sure that they're a vining variety rather than a bush type.

Yesterday I planted the corn, peas and cantaloupe seeds in little round mounds.  Although I'm not entirely certain that they will be enough time for the cantaloupe to produce fruit and ripen properly.

Is there such a thing as cantaloupe starts?

I'll wait another week or so before putting the peppers in,  mostly because I will have the money to buy the starts then.

I also might try to find some nasturtium seeds, which is a type of edible flower that I'm interested in trying.   If I understand it correctly it's also another type of ground cover which should also attract insects.