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“I hate dumb junk” is one of my favorite sayings from childhood. One of my biggest pet peeves is things that don’t do their job. If a tool was created for a single purpose and fails to do that purpose, it is worse than a failure.

My garden trowel frustrated me to no end last year. I’d really be digging in and instead of doing the job, it would just bend. Well.. no more!

I built my own. I call it The Apocalypse Trowel. It will take out weeds, or zombies.

	This is 1 inch square steel tubing as the handle, with 1/4 inch steel blade. The two are bolted together with 8mm bolts. I figured the bolts were stronger than a weld.. and since I don’t have a welder, bolts it is.
	This is a close up of the blade. I ground it down on my bench grinder.

One of the other things that I learned in 2009 was that buying your supplies, of any type (seedlings, fertilizer, or tools) from a garden supply or nursery center is amazingly expensive. I live just down the road from a well known residential nursery center and while they do carry anything I would need, they seem to want far more for it than I think is reasonable. In 2009 my garden was a hobby. Our house hold had two working adults, so money put into the garden wasn’t all that important. It certainly wasn’t an economically minded venture.

The end of 2009 brought a lot of change. First one of us was out of work, and a few months later so was the other. After 3 months of zero outside income, the amount of cash available to hobbies is now zero as well. The book “Gardening When It Counts” by Steve Solomon is my new favorite book all over again. Even though both of us are blessed with great jobs again going into the spring of 2010, the mind set as definitely changed from ‘garden hobby’ to ‘garden as low cost high quality food’.

Part of that is now reflected in the title of my page. No longer just a garden blog, but also a food blog. What happens to the vegetables from seed to stomach.

The biggest shift for me is thinking about my little 1,000 sq ft garden as if it were a for-profit farm. WWFD is my new gardening slogan. What Would a Farmer Do? A farmer wouldn’t pay $3 a pound for fertilizer like I did last year (Dr. Earth by the 4lb box, $12). He wouldn’t skimp out on cheap seeds with bad germination and poor genes either.

My first act of Farmer-ness is to make my own organic fertilizer. Thankfully my paperback-bound-mentor Steve Solomon gives a full chapter on soil amendments including his recipe for his ‘complete organic fertilizer’, which he calls COF for short. It is made of some interesting things I figured would be nightmarish to track down. Things like seed meals (mostly husks and byproducts from oil manufacturing, bloodmeal.. ground and dried animal parts (lovely huh), and various other things like lime, dolomite, gypsum and basalt. WWFD.. he’d go to the feed supply store. Turns out I have one right beside the nursery.

	The thing about farmers is they generally don’t just have 1,000 sq ft. They generally have a LOT of sq ft. As such, the best bang-for-buck per ingredient is the 50 pound bag. Steve’s recipe calls for 4 parts of a seed meal. Any seed meal will work (expect for coprameal, which isn’t as nutritious) DeYoung’s Farm Supply, where I got my stuff from, had two different kinds of seed meal.. Alfalfa meal and Cottonseed meal. I got 50 pounds of each. I put 2 parts of each meal into my first batch.
	This is what the alfalfa meal looks like. It has a very pleasant smell.. sort of like dried hay.. which isn’t far off.
	The cottonseedmeal comes in the same bag (both with a small tag stapled to the top describing the contents). The actual meal itself is slightly lighter in color and has roughly the same smell and texture as the alfalfa meal. A quick note about cottonseedmeal from Steve’s book says that cotton isn’t a food crop and can therefore be more heavily sprayed with pesticides not qualified for human consumption. He notes that during the processing of the cotton all of the oil residues (which include the pesticides) are extracted under extreme heat, leaving the meal entirely free of any pesticide residues. He also notes that these cottonseed oils that are extracted contain all of the pesticide residues… these oils ARE used in processed foods. Something to think about when choosing your next salad dressing.
	This is the blood meal. It looks like you’d think it would.. like dried and finely ground animal parts.. yummy. It smells pretty much like you’d think it would too, but thankfully, not nearly as strong as what I would imagine it would smell like if it were to get wet. Honestly though, once the whole batch is mixed together, it smells great. Like a fresh hay barn.
	This is the gypsum. There are 3 types of lime that are added to the COF, all of which provide calcium in one form or another. Gypsum is calcium sulfate.
	This is what the finely ground gypsum looks like. It doesn’t really have an odor.
	Another type of lime, and the one used most by volume, is your standard agricultural lime. It contains nearly 100% calcium carbonate.
	The final lime is Dolomite lime. Not to be confused with that great 70s movie, Dolemite. Dolomite contains both calcium and magnesium carbonates.
	Mixed all together you end up with your complete organic fertilizer. I bought 300 pounds of total ingredients, with taxes it came to $149. I think a farmer would be much more willing to pay 50 cents a pound versus $3 a pound for his fertilizer.

Steve does call for 1 /2 – 1 part of Kelpmeal for his COF. Kelp is super high in trace minerals, which are needed and used by vegetables Vegetables grown with available trace minerals provide a far superior nutritional content. Steve warns that kelpmeal is very expensive and you can get along without it. He wasn’t kidding. DeYoung’s had it in stock at $75 per 50 pounds. That is 50% of my total cost for all of the other ingredients, so this year I omitted the kelp. I’ll be sure and keep taking my daily multivitamin until I can afford the kelpmeal.

The main reason for starting my gardening blog back early last year was to keep notes on what worked, what didn’t, and what I would change for 2010. Since my 2010 Territorial catalog came in this weekend I guess it’s time for me to write the summary post on all of the things I grew in 2009.

First, though, the results of a few of my experiments from this year.

The stone bed really is good for plants that do better in partial shade. My tomatoes didn’t do well there. Spinach, lettuces, kale and carrots all did well there. Onions, bok choy and surprisingly enough, Chard, didn’t do very well. I guess it will be my ‘greens’ bed from now on. This works out well since it is elevated above the bunnies that would likely chow down.

I have several experiments planed for 2010. First of which will be to propagate my blueberry bush. Second will be the new garden itself. I’m going with Steve Solomon’s recommendation and moving away from raised beds towards low mounded rows. I’ll be doing a lot wider plant spacing in hopes of better water conservation. I have the 1/2 acre, I should put it to use.. and I will. This should allow me to run my in-ground irrigation system only rarely through the driest of summer months.

Now, on to the summary: