This weekend was eventful in the newbie gardener household. Friday night we partied with some neighbors, and before the party got out of hand I met a new almost neighbor that shares a lot of hobbies with me. She has a big garden, and she has chickens! I’m looking forward to getting to go meet her chickens and see her garden.
Saturday night we had a cheapie date night at Borders. I read through Steve Solomon’s newish book, Gardening When It Counts. It is all about how to garden super cheap. How to build the most efficient garden when the bottom line matters. This is important for me because I expect gardening to have a positive ROI. This isn’t a hobby for hobby’s sake.
Steve has recanted some of of his previous positions. For one, his new thought is that intensive raised bed gardening is too expensive. Mostly in terms of recurring water cost, but for me, also in terms of initial creation costs. His approach now is low mounded beds. He says that a 3” bed has all of the benefits of much deeper raised beds. 3” is easily attained without any sort of hardware, just pile up the dirt into beds. Once you have the beds, plant in much wider spacings. Steve did extensive investigation of root development patterns on just about every common vegetable. Based on this, he created optimal spacings. This is much wider than we do with intensive planting, but requires almost no artificial irrigation. He recommends 5-20 gallons of water –per year- for the Pacific Northwest for the larger plants, like tomatoes and pumpkins, given in 5 gallon waterings once a month or so.
On Sunday I pulled the last of the carrots and flashy oak and paris white lettuces. I added about a half inch of compost over that area and spaded it in and raked it into a fine seed bed. I planted four greens, all winter hardy crops that will be growing under the cold frames.
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Here is the book, Gardening When It Counts by Steve Solomon. Great book. I highly recommend it. |
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This is the winter bed. Nice and clean. The junk in the foreground is all of the uncomposted organic material. It will be outside of the cold frame so it should compost over the winter.
In the far side of the bed you can see the volunteer tomato, still going strong. Planted, in order from left to right: Spinach: Regal |
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I also made up a batch of Mountain White Bread from the Bread Bible book. It is a good generic white bread, good for slicing and sandwiches. Turned out really nicely. It has a few tablespoons of honey so it has a nice mellow sweetness to it and a dense crumb. |
Yummy!