The 10-minute garden experiment

So just how much food can be raised in 10 minutes?

We tend to measure our gardens by the square foot – there's even a square foot garden guru, a PBS host and books on the subject. Recommendations of garden footage accompany garden tillers descriptions. Size apparently matters: one of the first things gardeners mention to one another is how much space they tend.

Yet there's no mention of people's most precious commodity – time. The reality is, when a person decides to garden, they envision a space but have no idea how much time that garden will require. That got me to thinking: just how much could I grow using only 10-minutes when the weather was fit to work outside? And I don't mean doing the dirty little 10 minutes-a-day average trick that would mean 70 minutes a week over the season. I mean, hey, I've got 10 minutes, the weather is good, I'll go do some gardening; what exactly would come out of such a plot?

It makes logical sense. Most gardeners don't have the time to spare. Let's face it, we live hectic lives and many gardeners like the idea of growing their own food, but don't want to live every spare minute in their gardens after working all day. That's why I hear way too many stories of people starting gardens, tilling up some measurable space, planting it, then by August weeds have taken over because they over estimated the time commitment needed for the space they tilled. They either scale down their space the next year or abandon gardening altogether because they remember the noxious unsightly weeds.

So how much can grow in a 10 minutes using nothing but hand tools? I'll be sure to let you know . . . maybe.

Raised garden beds beat row-crop gardens hands down

Whether you organic garden or use chemicals, raised bed gardens will out produce old-fashioned row-crop gardens. Garden beds save time, money and are good on the environment too.

In a raised beds you plant the area that normally would be empty between the rows. After the bed is prepared you get more plants in a small space by placing seeds the recommended distance from one another in all directions of the last seed planted, you fill the space solid with plants.

For example, up to 30 carrots spaced equally in all directions can grow in one-square foot of soil; compared that to the six or more square feet needed if they were planted in a straight row. The same is true for onions, radishes, beets or peas.

A row garden six-feet long would require empty dirt on each side of the row for cultivation requiring six-square feet of space to grow the same 30 carrots in one-square foot of a raised garden bed..

I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to weed one-square foot instead of six square feet for the same 30 carrots. Because beds are three- to five-feet wide, they are weeded by hand from each side.

Bed gardens:
Save water because you have less space to water. Plants form a leaf canopy that shades the ground and conserves water.

Shade the ground, making weed germination slow or stop. Any weed that germinates and grows through the canopy, it is easy to pull because it has a much weaker root system.

Use less compost or uses fertilizer if you use non-organic methods

Require no power equipment – you can use shovels and spades to till small high-yielding spaces.

Root systems develop better because hand weeding can be done from each side of the bed, keeping the soil loose because you never walk on and compacted.

Raised garden beds can be constructed from almost any material (video). As you plan your garden this spring, you really need to consider beds, especially if your space and time are limited.

If you've got rotten soil, check this out and get started fast.

Quick organic gardening fix to poor soil in urban gardens

Just moved in and want a garden this spring, but there is none at your new home? Here's a quick and dirty way – pun intended – to get a garden and you don't even have to till up the ground or remove the sod.

Step 1: Locate a sunny spot in the area of the yard you want the garden. Check it morning, noon and afternoon to see how the shadows of your house or other building around it might fall onto the area. It's okay if shadows fall, but you want it to receive light 70 percent of the time.

Step 2: Decide on the size you want. Sometimes it's wise to start small, building only one or two garden beds if you are starting from scratch. A no-till garden will have beds that are four to five feet wide and eight to 25 feet long. Once constructed, you never should walk on them, but will care for them by reaching in from the sides.

Step 3: Construct the frame of the bed. Any material except treated lumber can be used. Many gardeners will use stones or landscaping bricks to outline the beds. Others will buy lumber and make wooden frames – just remember, because the wood isn't treated, you will have to replace the frame every three to five years.

Step 4: Place several layers of newspaper in the bed over the grass. Be sure to cover the corners and edges as the newspapers will be what will kill the grass so you don't have to remove the sod. After the first year, the grass will be dead and you can use shovels or spades and turn the soil over in preparation for the next year.

Step 5: Buy 10 to 20 bags of top soil (not potting mix) and a bag of peat moss. See my story on how peat is a great fast start material. Mix the soil and peat on a tarp or in a wheel barrow and dump it carefully into the bed. Mix enough peat so you have a light fluffy soil mixture at least six to eight inches thick over the newspapers.

Step 6: You are ready to plant. Be sure not to dig too deep if you put transplants in so the newspaper will not be disturbed. Within 45 to 60 days the grass will have died and you can do anything you would with any other garden after that.

Top soil costs less than $1.50 for a 40 pound bag, so this is a quick fix to get anyone going on a garden bed or two. You can expand your garden in the fall by digging more beds and using your own compost to build your gardens – it’s the best route to building a rich garden soil and true organic methods.

Peat moss: rescues organic gardening and community sustainable agriculture

Peat moss has to be the organic gardener's best friend and the backbone of Community Sustainable Agriculture, CSA. Organic materials decay and become humus in the soil. It is so vital to good soil health, but when many urban gardens are born, precious little is around and that's when peat moss can come to your rescue.

The soil around subdivisions has been so torn-up by machinery, basement digs; backfilling foundations that most city gardens need organic material to build good soil. Compost is the very best way to add fiber to your soil, but until you get settled into a home, most organic gardeners just don't have a compost pile started or yielding much yet. So peat moss is a fast economic way to turn the hardest poorest soil into something more palatable.

It won't add a lot of nutrients like compost, but it will give you more till ability. There are many kinds of peat moss and peat bogs can be found in many states, but most of the Sphagnum peat comes from Canada today.

Its wiry texture creates space between the sand and clay particles in soil and that helps create a little fluff that helps water filter through the soil. The peat will also act as a spong – keeping water close to rootlets rather than draining rapidly through sandy soil or being baked out of clay.

I highly recommend organic gardeners have at least one brick of peat around at all times. It can even help your compost pile as you work toward building good soil in your little patch of urban nirvana.

For more info: catch my next article on another quick fix to turn crappy dirt into black gold

Safe watering techniques protect seedlings from erosion

Water can be a destructive natural element if used incorrectly. Gardeners starting their own seeds often lose a few because they water their newly emerged seedlings incorrectly.

Many gardeners use the pretty sprinkling cans sold in every gardening section of almost every Big-box store. The sprinkle head of the can appears to gently douse plants with fine streams of water. To a newly emerged seed, these seemingly fine streams of water resemble a July gully washer rain that drops two inches of rain in 30 minutes.

The smallest drop of water from one of these cans will leave a minor divot in the soil. If a seed is only an eighth or quarter inch deep, the droplet can burrow strait down and expose the roots.

Several safer methods of watering plants should be used until the seedlings have established a strong root system and stem. One method that many gardeners use is the emersion method – this waters the plants from the bottom up. For this method, the plants must be in a container that has drain holes. The container is simply placed into a larger container of water and the water is soaked up through the drain holds and into the soil. The gardener removes the container and the job is done.

I prefer giving my flats a spray mist sprits from a well cleaned recycled spray unit off a Windex bottle now attached to a smaller plastic bottle. It takes about 10 minutes a flat, but the spray is like a miniature rain more proportionate to the young seedling's size than the deluge of water from a sprinkling can.

Be careful, even the hand pumped sprayer if held too close to the soil will erode the soil. This method requires you to systematically spray the whole flat a section at a time then return after the surface is wet to add more water at least two more times over the entire flat so the water is absorbed well below the surface. If you only wet the soil's surface once, then not enough water will penetrate the soil and the roots won't form properly.

The misting method does something bottom watering does not – it strengthens the plant stems. One reason trays of transplants must be put out in a shaded area away from the protection of a greenhouse is to expose the plants to gentle breezes of the real world. The breezes tend to make the plant strengthen their stems. The gentle force of the mist I think tends to do this too.

There are other safe watering methods too. Container gardeners often use wicking to keep their container plants with a constant source of water from the bottom. I have not used this method but don't see how this wouldn't work too.
Soon gardeners will be thinking of starting some plants from seed, so now is the time to collect the supplies you'll need to safely water those young plants.

Heirloom tomatoes a must for sustainable living

Heirloom tomatoes should be on your seed list and in your garden plan this year. In the past decade the interest in heirloom seeds – plant varieties that were once grown from seed collected each year and no longer commercially grown – has continued to increase.

Unlike hybrids, the seeds from heirlooms can be collected and planted. The seeds of heirlooms will produce a plant like the parent plant. When you plant seeds from hybrids, you get something very different – usually one of the plants used in the cross to make the hybrid.

I've always grown one, maybe two, heirloom tomato varieties, but this year I dove in "whole hog" and plan to plant six different varieties or about 100 plants. Because the Italians quickly adopted tomatoes after their discovery in the New World in South America, many think tomatoes originated in Italy. If you haven't explored heirloom tomatoes, you will be astonished at the number of varieties out there.

Gardeners plant heirlooms for various reasons; some are ultraistic, like to extend the gene pool since commercial hybrids tend to narrow the number of varieties available. Some are gown because gardeners want to see if they can grow something rare. I grow them to experience the new flavors not listed in the typical hobby gardener seed catalogues.

Hybrids that you see in catalogues, and the hybrids planted by commercial growers, are the result of promotion and the need to pick and ship tomatoes great distances and they still be fresh in the market. The trade off has been flavor. Advertisers have stressed the "continuity of size" for display purposes. To machine pick a tomato that can be shipped from California to New York sacrifices taste for shelf life. Anyone who has visited a farmers market will already know that heirloom tomatoes will not always be uniform, but that the taste can be superior.

Unfortunately, the desire to have uniformity in size has resulted in seed providers to offer hybrids and sacrifice variety. Hybrids produce more consistent yields, but heirlooms can out yield hybrids in some years.

With heirlooms you have a wide variety of seeds from which to choose and after you collect the seed and replant them, over time you will develop plants that are acclimated to your climate.

As you explore the varieties, you will find some will produce in as little as 50 days and others, like Siberian varieties, will set fruit even when the temperature drops into the 30s.

I'd suggest you grow three or four varieties, collect the seed each year and add a few more until you find the three or four you want to grow regularly.

For more info:
http://store.tomatofest.com/category_s/31.htm