We just finished drawing a map for our 8 x 8 foot raised garden bed and the 4 x 8 foot bed we plan to build. Stand back and prepare to be dazzled, because this is high tech stuff we’re talking about.
We decided to nearly double the amount of peas and carrots from last year because they’re the most fun to pick and eat right there on the spot. They’re delicious. We also doubled the space for our zucchinis (or summer squash) because it’s so impressive to watch it grow into a huge plant and continually produce zucchinis. We reduced the space for beans and we’re not growing garlic. New veggies for this year are celery and broccoli.
It took a while to decide what to plant and where to plant it because some vegetables get so big they grow over other plants and block their sun; certain parts of the 8 x 8 bed don’t get any morning sun; and some vegetables grow best in the corners or on the sides where they can fall outside the bed frame. So it took a bit of juggling, but we got it. (UPDATE: We didn’t even know it, but all that juggling is part of the practice of intercropping.) We’ll see how well we stick to the plan come early June when the last of the seedlings go in the ground after the last frost. (Last frost in St. John’s, Newfoundland, is June 2nd.)
We tried using the Online Garden Mapping Tool to create our map, but it doesn’t allow for an 8 x 8 configuration (big flaw); some of its estimates were a bit optimistic; and it was quicker and easier to just map out the garden by hand. Still, it’s not bad for people starting up their first garden beds. This is only our second year, but we’re already relying mostly on our practical experience from last year.
We decided to pass on the potato tower this year, because filling it up with new good soil is too expensive; it requires more work than anything else; and it still might fail miserably. We plan to use its old frame to build two 3 x 3 raised beds instead. We’ll probably get twice as many potatoes that way. It’s a safer bet.
We might also build a small raised bed just for herbs, and of course we’ll grow as much as we can around the yard in various containers. I hope it’s a good year.
Next on the list: Start some of our indoor transplants so they’re ready for planting in about 10 weeks.
Here’s a slideshow of our 2009 garden bed from 3 different angles. There are better photos of the garden, but these are the only ones we happened to take from corner angles and a middle angle, so it plays out in time-lapse fashion. The whole things takes about a minute and a half.
If you have a raised garden bed like we do, you probably map out on a grid everything you’re going to plant before you plant it. Maybe you draw it out on a piece of paper like we did last year. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a simple low-tech method that works.
But if you’re a beginner and you want to get fancy and let a computer do all the calculations for you, check out this free online Garden Planner. It’s provided by a retail outfit that sells stuff you can build yourself for much less cost, but they offer all kinds of sensible advice for growing veggies in a raised garden bed, and they have this nifty little online garden mapping tool.
Read on . . . »
Here’s something I don’t have a clue about, but even if I had half a clue, it’s something I’d like to try. I know there are beekeepers in Newfoundland. There have to be because that guy who sells me fresh honey at the farmer’s market must get his honey somewhere. Setting up a small honey bee colony seems like a real Zen kind of thing, and I love fresh honey. Even if I only got a couple bottles of honey a year, who cares? I bet it would be fantastic. Check it out:
Via Living the Frugal Life and Backwards Beekeepers.
I found what might be a potato tower success story. (It might also be a potato box or potato bin success story. As far as I know, I came up with the term potato tower, but it’s the kind of phrase anyone could come up with, so I’m probably not the first. Most people seem to call them potato bins. That’s not nearly as cool as potato tower, though, is it? I didn’t think so.) Anyhow, Jaki over at Farming At Country Dreams managed to grow about 25 pounds of Yukon Golds in her potato tower. That’s not great, but it’s the best harvest from a potato tower I’ve found evidence for so far.
I would have liked to have seen photos of the potatoes in the tower as she was harvesting them so I could actually see how high they grew, and links to her online references would have been helpful too, but otherwise Jaki’s post is very detailed, showing how the whole project went every step of the way, from building the tower to harvesting the potatoes.
I found something in Jaki’s post that might explain why potatoes didn’t develop above the first level of my potato tower. Everybody pay attention now because this might be the magic trick that makes the potato tower work. Jaki got some of her info from the Gardening with Ciscoe web site. Let’s hope it’s correct. She says:
Read on . . . »
Photos of some of the potatoes we harvested from our potato tower can be viewed in our photo album, Potato Harvest 2009. The potatoes were excellent, but they didn’t grow above the first level of the potato tower. See Part 1 and this post for more info. You can check out the original article in the Seattle Times while you’re at it.
Potato Tower Results — An End to the Hype? by Rob over at One Straw provides a more realistic account of what it’s like to grow potatoes in a potato tower. He had about as much success as we did. The problem for us was that the potatoes simply did not grow above the level they were planted. They grew well within the first 10 inches of soil, but no potatoes grew in the other 40 inches of soil above that. We were supposed to get about 100 pounds of potatoes, but I’d say we got more like 7 pounds, probably less. We put a lot of time, money and effort into those 7 pounds of potatoes.
So what went wrong? Why didn’t it work for us? Let’s take a look at what we did first:
Read on . . . »
The big potato tower experiment was not a success. The original article in the Seattle Times makes it seem easier than it is. I haven’t heard of too many success stories so far.
We planted our potatoes around May 17th. We did our first test harvest 3 months later on August 17th. It looked like this:
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Here’s a time-lapse video of a lilac tree and some sunflowers growing in a corner of our backyard from May 3 to October 16 of this year. We took one photo just about every day. We stopped taking the photos when a storm destroyed all the sunflowers.
We’ll post more photos of our sunflowers later on.
This is what our raised garden bed (and everything else in our backyard) looks like today:
Not satisfied with a mere 8 x 8 garden, we decided to buy several plastic flower boxes (or window boxes) to grow some herbs like mint, chives, dill and so on, along with beets (for the greens), carrots and green onions. At the moment, we have 7 boxes, which we bought on sale for $5 a piece.
To fill these boxes, and to have enough soil for the next few levels of the potato tower, we bought a huge industrial-strength garbage bag full of soil from Ross Traverse. Ross is a well-known local horticulturist and his soil is his own special mix of compost, topsoil, peat and lime. I don’t know how large the bag is, but it’s huge and it has to be the best deal in town: $11. If you live around St. John’s, Newfoundland, and you need some good gardening soil, don’t go to any of the big stores — just visit Traverse Gardens because. We plan to go back to buy 3 or 4 more bags at least.
We got the idea for a potato tower from the Steel White Table blog out of Atlantic Canada (which links to this Seattle Times article). The concept is simple and very cool: plant the potatoes in a small raised bed. As the plants grow, keep adding soil, slowly burying the plants and forcing them to grow up even higher. Meanwhile, everything that gets buried develops roots. Just keep adding boards around the raised bed until it’s 4 feet high. All the roots beneath the 4 feet of soil turn into potatoes. In theory. The potatoes are harvested by removing the lower planks of the tower first and working your way up.
The construction of the tower was easy: 4 square poles screwed together by 4 planks. The corner pegs or poles are about 5 feet tall. The original blueprint for the tower calls for 2-inch thick lumber covering a 4 x 4 area, but we passed on that and made due with 1-inch planks and a 3 x 3 area. We bought two 6-foot long planks (untreated, cheap knotty pine, $5.50 each), 1-inch thick, 10 inches high, and cut them into 3-foot lengths. I found four 5-foot long poles in my shed, 2 inches by 3 inches. We screwed the four sides together around the poles — nothing to it. Done. (Note: I would hate to do this without a powered screwdriver, or in our case, a drill jury-rigged with a screwdriver bit.) We placed the tower on the ground over some cardboard boxes. The boxes will eventually rot, but the tower has to be rebuilt every year, removing the soil each time, so we’ll just replace the cardboard every year. The total cost of all the materials if you had to buy them from scratch is about $25 or $30. But making due with what we already had on hand: $11.
Continued in: Potato Tower Failure (Part 1).
Our 8 x 8 raised garden bed, 12 inches high, holds about 64 cubic feet of soil, approximately 2,400 litres. We asked around about what kind of soil to use. One gardener told us to use nothing but “black earth” and peat. Another gardener told us topsoil and peat with lime. So we bought one 28-litre bag of peat (photo) and fifty 25-litre bags of topsoil (photo), some of it enriched with compost, at a cost of about $70. Hauling and emptying the bags was a drag, and it only filled about a third of the garden.
Then we spoke to a local organic farmer, Mike Rabinowitz, who told us all we need is composted soil and a 10-pound bag of lime. He gave us the lime for free and we bought 3 backhoe scoops of compost from a local contractor for $200, including delivery. We had to haul the rich, soft, dark compost from our driveway back to the garden with a wheelbarrow, which was a bit of work (mostly because the wheelbarrow had a hole in it and a flat tire), but the compost completely filled the garden bed and there was enough left over to fill in the first level of our potato tower (which we’ll get to later). The last step was to thoroughly mix 5 pounds of lime into the soil. Mike told us to add another 5 pounds next year, and that would be enough.
We won’t go into the planting process. It’s pretty basic. You draw a map (photo), put some seeds in the ground, cover them with soil and add water. We’ll post a more detailed but concise summary of the entire process, including dates for planting and harvesting some time in the fall. Until then, just check out our photo album once in a while.
UPDATE: Photos were added to the slideshow as the season progressed. There are now almost 200 photos in the our Garden (2009) photo album, most of them with descriptive captions, beginning on April 25th when we built the garden bed frame, ending 6 months later on October 24th when we sprinkled some lime over the soil and goodbye until next year. As a automated slideshow, it takes about 9.5 minutes to watch the whole thing if one was so inclined.
After discovering that the soil in our beautiful field is full of lead, we decided to build a raised garden bed. We searched YouTube for “How to build a raised garden bed” and found several instructional videos. We learned most importantly never to use pressure-treated wood. We don’t want any chemicals in our veggies. Besides that, there isn’t much to it. Just screw 4 planks of wood together in whatever shape works best. Use square wooden poles or metal braces in the corners to hold it all together. Here’s what we did:
We bought 4 planks of untreated knotty pine, 1 inch thick, 12 inches high, 8 feet long. $12 per plank. (2-inch planks are better, but at more than twice the cost, we said no thanks.) We found a piece of 2 x 2 lumber in the shed (basically a square pole) and cut it into 4 pieces, each piece about 14 inches long — they would become the corner posts. We bought a 100-pack of untreated screws (photo). Then using a power drill with a screw driver attachment instead of a drill (our drill isn’t designed for this), we screwed together the garden bed frame one corner at a time. We had no drawings, no measurements. We pieced it all together first, then carefully held each piece in place as we drilled in each screw, 2 screws for every plank end we had to attached to the little poles in the corner. It’s the first thing either of us has ever built. It took about 90 minutes. (We haven’t included blueprints for the raised bed because we didn’t use any, and it’s easy to see what we did by looking at the photos.)
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Click image to view all photos of our raised vegetable garden bed from 2009.
We then cut up some thick plastic that was left over from when we had a couch delivered a while back and spread it down on the ground and placed the frame over the plastic. We could have used cardboard boxes, too, but cardboard eventually rots and we want to keep whatever lead may be in the soil down in the soil, away from the veggies. (Not necessary if you know you have safe soil underneath.)
Total cost: About a $50 (Canadian).
Next up: Filling a Raised Garden Bed with some good composted soil.
We hoped to start up a vegetable garden in the big field behind our house this year (2009). Then we discovered the lead content in the soil is 460ppm, which is at least twice the amount considered safe for growing vegetables. We might plant some sunflowers in the field; sunflowers supposedly remove lead from soil. But what we really need is a backhoe, a bulldozer and 20 dump truck loads of composted soil.
Why build a raised vegetable garden bed? With a field full of lead, what else can we do?
And so it all begins with a field full of lead…
Shots of our backyard mostly, with tomatoes near the end.
NOTE: This is our old backyard, but our friend who still lives there let’s us use his greenhouse from time to time.
It’s as exciting as it sounds. We recorded this video on our Sony Cyber-shot digital camera (not a video camera). The picture and sound quality are poor.
The tomato plants have been in our greenhouse for 6 weeks (since about the end of May). Before that they were tiny transplants we put out in the greenhouse during the day and brought in at night for two weeks. We didn’t take photographs of our tomatoes this year, but we’ll come back in a month and record another stimulating video to document their growth (if we don’t forget). In the meantime, here’s another video recorded a few days later with a video camera. The quality still isn’t the best, but around the 2:50 minute mark there’s a good demonstration of how to prune a tomato plant.
NOTE: This is our old backyard, but our friend who still lives there let’s us use his greenhouse from time to time.
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