Filed under: Soil
My dirt didn’t start out as dirt at all. When I first moved in, the sidewalks were surrounded by tree mulch and chips. Through much hoeing and cultivating, I’ve been able to combine the soil underneath the chips into fairly friable soil. The triangle out back has had the least amount of mixing and it shows. The front walk and margins have the best soil. My dirt tends to be very rocky and this is a result of this land having been a single home on a plot that got turned into six townhomes. Much of the old cement was simply just buried as landfill when the sides of the townhouses were put in. I regularly make loud !chnk! noises as I work the soil and hit a block of concrete that no one ever thought would see the light of day again. The largest piece I’ve removed was a 2′ x 2′ block that was several inches thick. I’ll have a post at a later time which will show some handy re-uses for detritus of this type.
I use E.B. Stone’s Tomato and Vegetable food as my only soil amendment. It’s an organic product, and while I’m not a strict organic gardener, I have yet to put anything non-natural or organic on my soil and plants. I guess I’m organic by default. The fertilizer from Stone’s is quite good and it’s helped my soil become healthier.
I do a lot of cultivation of my soil before and after planting. You can regularly find me out working up a sweat chopping up the dark matter. My garden has a tendency to become solid due to drainage issues, so I have to keep working it loose or I’d end up with concrete as my garden, not just under it. Regular cultivation isn’t supposed to be good for a garden, but during the off season, I find it helps the water to find a different place to settle. When it’s spring and summer and the garden is full of plants, I taper off my hoeing, mainly to reduce the chance of damaging my crops, but also to just let the soil do its job and feed the plants.
I have my own compost heap, but it’s rather young yet, so I haven’t gotten much out of it; so far only about 4 quarts of friable soil have come from my compost heap.
I went out and worked the soil today. I pulled a lot of new rocks up, but didnt’ do much else. I replanted some of my heirloom mint to a different location. Mint’s sneaky and if you’re not careful, the only thing you’ll be growing is mint cause it likes to spread when it finds a home it likes.
Filed under: Light
I mentioned before that I have a light problem. O! that I lived on the south side of the building! They have beautiful exposure up there. Of course, they’re also closer to the street, kids skateboard where I would plant, and I’m sure a homeless person or two has slept under their porch. Since under my porch is a boggy compost heap, I’m not real sure anybody’d want to sleep there. I digress.
Light is essential to all life here on earth (as I’ve recently learned in my biology class). Plants use light to make their own food and in that process, to make food for us. If a plant can’t make its own food, it darn sure won’t make yours.
The best gardens get at least 8 hours of sun a day. I usually get 6 and sometimes can squeeze a seventh in there. Because of the size and shape of my house and the narrow pathway that is my garden being surrounded by houses, I don’t get 6 hours of full sun per day, I get sun “light”. Har har. In mid-summer, the sun generally comes up over the trees and mountains and starts hitting my little patch at about 9 in the morning. At this point, it’s only hitting the southern part of my garden. As it creeps ever higher in the sky, the light will illuminate more and more of the garden and at noon, the full thing is lit up. As the day fades, the northern parts of my garden get the most light while the southern reaches descend into filtered light that’s just a hair above “shade”.
Until an ice storm thankfully knocked a big limb off of it, a large willow tree in my neighbor’s yard blocked much of the afternoon light on the triangle patch out back. We’ll see this summer if the missing limb will let more light filter into my back garden. If so, that triangle might just be the boon my garden needs to feed me and the family!
Filed under: Talking
I think we need to take a moment to discuss what I have at my disposal for gardening. First off, let me make it clear that, since I don’t own my property, I asked permission to grow my garden. You should do the same. Don’t assume that your landlord wants you to be digging up his or her land for your squash. I have an agreement with my landlord: I’ll keep it tidy and I’ll clean it up when the growing season is over. This garden is my responsibility and I take that very seriously. This attitude serves me well, both in keeping the peace with the person to whom I pay my rent, and also in growing crops.
I have a pretty awful location for my garden, but I make do. My apartment is the back of a stack of three townhomes that are arranged perpendicular to the street, so the front of my home is facing the back of the property. I’m on the northeast corner of the lot. This means that I don’t get a huge amount of sun (my electricity bills in the summer are surprisingly low, thankfully, since it never gets very hot from the sun back by us).
My main garden borders a sidewalk and is about 18 feet x 3 feet. It’s an L shape, with the base of the L at my main stairway indoors. Behind my main garden is my strawberry patch (more on this later). There is a margin on the property on the other side of the sidewalk that is about 8 inches wide and I’ve grown many things there too. I added another growing area behind my house that is a triangle of about 12 feet x 10 feet x 8 feet. I further have the margins of the lawn which border a fence at the very back of the lot which is also about 8 inches wide. In the northeast corner of the property there is a fig tree that messes with my garden plans every year and then gives me fruit and wood for stakes, so I tolerate it.
Under my deck/front porch is my compost heap. I try to make sure it looks like it’s mostly dirt both for appearances sake and also to keep the flies/pests at bay.
Filed under: Talking
Why would a person in an urban area (and yes, contrary to popular belief Portland is an urban area) want to grow a garden. I think the typical response you’d get is, “I want to get back to/closer to nature”. EcK! Blecch! Here’s a can of responses, please open it for me. Gardening is not nature. Gardening is the exact opposite of nature. Gardens are order, planning, working, scheming, hoping, reveling. Nature has none of these things. Nature is nature and it takes care of itself. Nature has no plan except eat and reproduce (so that you can eat and reproduce).
I’ll tell you why I garden: I can probably count on one hand the number of things in my life that I have control over. I have a clean kitchen; I have my own car. I don’t own my own home. I have to work for someone else to make my living. Gardening is freedom to make something happen and to tell other people to leave what you’ve done alone. Got an urge to control life and death? There are weeds and slugs over which you can play God! Gardening is my Frankenstein’s workshop. What I want my garden to be is what my garden is and if it isn’t, I change it, or I roll with it if I can’t (for I am a lowly part of nature, too).
The purpose of my blog is multi-faceted. I intend to document the tasks that I perform in my garden this year (1). I hope to share some insight into gardening in an urban setting and in general (2). I hope to teach others some tricks I’ve learned throughout the years.
Let’s start with a little about me. Why does this guy think he knows anything about gardening? Well, for starters, I was raised on a real farm and grew my own vegetables for dinner. I never knew what a store bought tomato was until I went to a friend’s house that didn’t have a garden. I also didn’t know that fresh tomatoes were available in the winter. All my winter tomatoes were in jars on shelves in the basement, or in my grandma’s case, her root cellar.
I’m from central Illinois (no where near Chicago) in a place that the locals like to call the nausea-inducing name, “the Heartland.” The name is as corny as the fields. I grew up surrounded by corn and soybean fields. As I stated earlier, my family grew our own vegetables in our garden. We planted everything from strawberries to indian corn to zucchini to spinach. I hated almost every bit of it for many years. Oh, sure, I thought it was cool when my dad would get the tiller from Grandpa and turn up the hard cool soil that had languished under the midwestern winter for six months and I loved putting in the tomato and pepper starts we’d bought at “Jack’s” discount store, but I despised weeding. The very bane of my existence was pulling weeds, especially the little ones that crowded in things like carrots and lettuce shoots. What an utter drag.
In about my 12th year on this planet, though, something wonderful happened: my family decided that to preserve the soil in the fields beyond our house, they should set aside the land in a government program called “the set-aside” program. We planted native grasses on hundreds of acres of land around my house, so that suddenly, what had been corn and grains and rural planning was grass and trees and deer and snakes and every kind of nature you can imagine. This is the exact moment when my heart filled with the poetry of all that grows on this green earth and my mind turned towards my once dreaded nemesis: our garden. It’s like that moment that many boys experience where they suddenly realize that girls are not terrible, after all. In an instant, rather than wanting to avoid weeding and planting and other garden chores, I wanted to tend to crops and nurture life and pull her sustenance from the earth like so many potatoes.
I love gardening and the most miserable times I’ve had in my 36-1/2 years on this planet have been in the absence of gardening. I wish us all the best of luck in our green endeavors this year and hope earth is fertile
