DIY Gardening

One Garden Plot, early May 2009

A little over a month ago, we started to re-plant our garden.

In magnitude, our garden lies somewhere between the biggest “serious” suburban gardens in Richmond and the small casual gardens. We grow mostly conventional vegetables and herbs, although this year we have a large (40+ bulb) plot of garlic! We have a few flowers and shrubs for aesthetic charm as well.

The technique we use for our main flowerbeds is called “Square Foot Gardening” from a book by Mel Bartholomew. SFG is a terrific technique for people with a small plot of land that want to maximize their yield and minimize the maintenance. (Our land parcel in southside Richmond is just under half an acre, I think, and most of that is occupied by our house.)

The underlying premise of SFG is that by creating a planned and organized garden, using square floot blocks as gardening units, you can increase your yield through maximization of space usage AND better rotation / re-planting throughout the year.

In reality, it’s much simpler than that sounds, though.

We use a hybrid solution — we have three SFG plots (raised beds, see picture above) divided into 16 square feet. Each square gets a different vegetable or herb. The number of vegetables or herbs you plant in a given square depends mostly on how big of a footprint it needs. For example, in one square you can do:

• nine Carrots
• OR four Romaine lettuce
• OR one cabbage / broccoli / pepper

Another vegetable plot, early May 2009

There are some meta-planting tricks as well, which factor into the “what do I plant next to what”, but you can get a substantial yield even without taking that into consideration.

Last year, we were harvesting a large colander full of purple pole beans (they turn green when you boil them) about every 2 or 3 days. We would get nearly a dozen white cucumbers per week, and enough lettuce & collard greens that we had salad nearly every night. This was in a TOTAL of 32 square feet (2 raised beds), and doesn’t include all the other vegetables we had (peppers, carrots, tomatoes, etc.)

The raised beds are super-simple, since I’m not, in any way, a carpenter. I took four 2 x 6 boards, nailed them into a square, dug a 4×4′ square 6″ into the dirt, and laid the wooden frame into it. We topped it off with a mix of peat moss and top-soil, and hammered nails at 1′ intervals around the frame (to attach string and make it easier to see the squares).

One thing that’s nice about the 4×4 plots is that if you have something that needs a lattice, you can put two sign-stakes (the kind they use for street signs — you can get them at Lowe’s for a few bucks, you can kind of see them in the inset picture there) on two of the adjacent corners. Then, create a lattice using cotton string. When the tomato / bean / cucumber plants get to be about a foot or so tall, start training them into the string lattice and they’ll take right to it! At the end of the year, just clip down the string and you’re done!

Garlic

Our garlic plot (~40+ bulbs)

Our garlic plots are GLORIOUS.

Last year, late in the summer, we bought 5 or 6 bulbs of garlic, a few different species, from an online supplier (Seedsavers, we think). We paid roughly $30-40 for the order, mostly because these bulbs were heirloom (guaranteed to be reusable after harvest).

With garlic, you buy the bulbs, just like at the supermarket, but you break the bulbs up into individual cloves and plant the cloves. The trick is, though, you have to plant the cloves in the FALL. They’ll sit in the ground, snug from the winter frost, and when spring rolls around, you’ll see beautiful green shoots poking up!

Rain Barrels

Rain Barrel, 50 gal, from Orscheln's

One last thing we’re doing is part of our sustainability strategy.

We picked up two 50 gallon rain barrels from Orscheln farm products (west side, just past EZ Pawn / Great Wall / CVS on Route 40). For just under $40 apiece, you get a strong plastic barrel with a lid and a spigot valve at the base. We bought some decorative rocks to both act as a rough filter (keep debris and bugs out) and also make it look pretty. A small 5″x5″ piece of black netting covers the hole to keep the rocks out.

We had a huge deluge today — BOTH barrels filled up and started overflowing! But when it’s all said and done, that’s 100 gallons of water that DIDN’T seep into the ground near our house and leak into our basement.

Since the barrels are up on cinder blocks, we can fit a 2 gallon watering can under the spigot and use the rain water to water our garden!

I haven’t done the calculations to figure out how much rain water we’d have to save to make up for the cost of two rain barrels, but it’s really not about the money. There’s just something intrinsically satisfying about watering your organic garden using rain water you saved from the last storm.