The Thirst Mutilator

With square foot gardening, you're filling your raised beds with a special blend of vermiculite, peat, and compost. Bartholemew suggests 1/3 of each. Austin Natural Gardener lets you buy compost by the pound, which was helpful and cost-effective, though I had to fill the bags myself. I did some calculations, basing it on a 5' x 5', 8" deep square. For the specific types, I bought:

"Revitalizer" (sold by Austin Natural Gardener), an excellent, fine compost, and it is a mix of 5 types of their compost (it was self-serve):

Vermiculite:


And peat moss:

I had already bought two other types of compost, plus Dillo Dirt! at Home Depot because you don't want homogeneous compost. I also picked up some other soils for a few projects (more later). Here are my materials:

Mel suggests mixing the components on a tarp, however the amount I needed would mean that I would have to mix 6-7 batches in the tarp. I settled for 2 batches and I eyeballed 1/3 of vermiculite, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 peat moss, mixing them with a rake and then again mixing them in the actual box:

unmixed components

close-up of post-mixture soil

I filled the box, then made a lattice from the woven nylon cord:

The soil cost around $175.00 and, in retrospect I bought too much for my box. I ended up with a whole extra bag of vermiculite (4 cu/ft per bag), almost a whole extra bag of peat moss (3.8 cu/ft per bag), and about 5 extra bags of compost (about 8 gallons/ bag). What can I say...my math sucks. The peat moss I can definitely use for a bunch of things, including blueberries, the compost will also be useful, but the vermiculite will be tough to use up. Anyone have suggestions?

Early Starters

Before I get to the dirt, I've got something a little more interesting. I figure on roughly two waves of planting: late January and early March. I'll do the January plantings this weekend and post about it in a week and a half or so. However some of the veggies (the peppers and tomatoes) need to be started indoors and transplanted into the garden when they are a couple of months old, in March. As of right now, I am starting:

• Habanero pepper
• Jalapeno pepper
  
• Bell pepper
• An Anaheim-type pepper
• Hungarian wax pepper
• Pepperoncini pepper
  
• Roma Tomatoes
• Beefsteak Tomatoes
• Cherry Tomatoes

I bought a simple Rubbermaid 24 x 12 shallow container to hold the trays. I planted the seeds in peat strips which will decompose when planted (50 individual pots in 10-pot trays). Each 5 pot strip held one type of plant, in Ladybug Seed Starter mix, which you can see labeled on the side of the container:

This is about 2 weeks after planting. All the tomatoes have sprouted, just now the peppers, especially the Habanero, are coming up.

I also bought a grow light rig (which I am quite happy with) so I can make sure the seedlings are getting the correct amount of light:

Pepperoncinis are in the regular pot

I try to give them about 10 hours of artificial, direct sunlight daily. I keep the soil fairly most with a spray bottle. Shortly after I took the above picture, I began to snip the seedlings so that only the strongest-looking one survives in each pot. Then I will choose the strongest looking plant of the 5 pot strip to put in the garden. I will give the weaklings to friends to plant. pwn3d.

Placing the Boxes

While Square foot gardening basically makes the whole question of soil a non-issue, you still cannot get around the question of sun exposure. Basically, the rule is to put your garden in an area where it will get +/- 8 hours of sunlight daily. Though the box I made is, technically speaking, portable, once its filled with a couple cubic yards of dirt it will pretty much have to stay where it sits. So I've been watching as the sun goes through the sky and paying attention to which areas of the lot get sun and when.

To the right is a schematic of the layout of my lot and the path of the sun. It's a rough drawing, but hopefully it can help y'all (and me) visualize the duration and type of sunlight we get throughout the day. In addition to my kick-ass Microsoft Paint diagram, I also took some pictures of the side/backyard and backyard throughout a sunny day to see which areas get the best light. Here is the side/backyard:

9:00 AM

11:30 AM

1:30 PM

3:30 PM

5:00 PM

And, the backyard:

9:00 AM

11:30 AM

1:00 PM

3:30 PM

5:00 PM

One problem, which I freely admit may bite me in the ass later, is that because its winter all the trees are bare. I haven't been here in the summer (we bought the house in November), so I really don't know the shade/sun balance when the leaves are on all the trees. I seem to have a corridor for the sun which shouldn't be impacted too much by leaves, but who knows.

I also have plans for some fruit trees and bushes (more on them later) and will also have to take into account available sunlight for those, but because the box is going to be my highest yield project its going to have to get the best amount of sunlight. As you can see, the current location of the box (in the side/backyard photos above) gets pretty much constant sun, so that is where it will go, more or less. I'll have to take shade into account when figuring out the layout of the crops within the boxes so big, tall veggies like corn get the sunlight they need but don't end up casting their shadows (well there you are!) over the rest of the box.

After deciding where to put it, the first step was to dig up as much of the area under the box as possible (Riley is in the background, supervising):


Next, I took some ground cloth and laid it over the excavated area. It took me two strips overlapped about 2" in the center. I used some stakes to fasten the cloth to the ground, and I made sure the stakes would be covered by the finished frame:

Ready for dirt!

Box Out

For starters I decided to go with a 5' x 5' box (25 squares), so I drove to our local Home Depot ("more saving, more doing" and whatnot) to buy the materials. I am somewhat worried about the 5' x 5' box being too big to access the middle plots without stepping on the soil (one of Mel's big no-nos). I don't think this will be the case, but I may explore leaving the middle plot empty as a place to stand while tending and harvesting my bounty...

Anyways, my materials list was pretty short: boards, screws, a ground cloth, and some rope. For the boards, I bought 2 10" x 2" x 10' boards (non-pressure treated- you don't want any of the chemicals leaching into the soil) and had them each cut in half at the store, giving me the 4 sides of the beds. 10" deep was perfect- 6" is recommended by Mel, but because I'm trying to grow some root vegetables (more on them later) I wanted more depth. I also didn't want the soil to be right up to the top of the box, as it would be with a 6" board.

Deck screws are recommended by Mel, but instead I settled on regular screws because the deck screws had an ominous warning on the box about not using them within 5 miles of any body of water, or something like that. I used 12 in total, drove them in with a cordless drill, and all the sides looked like this:

I also dug around in the toolbox and found 8 "L" braces (I think they were left over from some IKEA contraption. Maybe our wobbly dresser?) which I used to reinforce the insides of the boxes:

This gives me a pretty sturdy box which I will be able to (potentially) move around in future seasons or depending on the area with best light (more on this later). I also measured off 1 foot increments all around the top of the frame and put in screws so I can tie off ropes to get the squares. Mel says that you should use a wood lattice because ropes aren't sturdy or durable enough, and he's probably right. I think, however, having ropes allows me to change up the grid for future plantings. I used a heavy duty braided nylon nautical line (to withstand rot) which I think will stand up, at least for a season.

PS- It was a good thing I made the box so sturdy. I came home the other day, puttered around for while, then realized the box was gone. I was utterly dumbfounded because I just couldn't figure out who, or why, would someone steal a 5' x 5' frame? Then I looked over and saw it lying up against the wall of our neighbor's garage. WTF? Turns out, one of our neighbor's daughters had come over the other day (I don't think her parents can speak English) and asked if I was going to use the "pile of wood" in the backyard and, if not, could she have it? I assumed she meant the bunch of fallen sticks and branches I had gathered from our yard, so I said sure. That wasn't what she meant. She apologized, and I dragged the box back around the fence and its none the worse for wear. They're probably going to spend the rest of the summer wondering why el gringo is trying to grow food inside a perfectly good bed frame...

The Method (with apologies to British Andy)

I've tried a few times before to start a garden and the biggest problem for me has always been the soil. Specifically, I didn't (still don't) really understand the whole soil Ph issue, and the thought of putting additives into the soil in specific amounts, then testing and re-testing the Ph until it hit some optimum demanded too much time and expertise. I did some initial exploration and discovered that our soil here in Central Texas is very clay-ey with a high (alkaline) Ph, so I figured that any soil enrichment would be a real pain in the ass.

By way of a solution, my mom suggested Mel Bartholemew's "Square Foot Gardening." The raised beds eliminate the whole soil Ph issue (because you just fill the beds with a specific soil mix), and the grid design maximizes space for crops, especially as opposed to rows. It sounded good to me, so I went ahead and bought Mel's book and decided to build the beds.

Lettuce in square foot beds at Austin Natural Gardener

By way of exploration I went to Austin Natural Gardener here in town to see what they had to say and, as you can see from the above picture, they had a few cool square foot gardens laid out. At my mom's suggestion I also checked out The Garden Girl, which turned out to be a pretty cool website. She uses the square foot gardening, but she also has some type of apparatus she puts over the beds to allow her chickens to pick bugs out of the soil and fertilize the beds when they are not in use. I would like to someday do that (it's apparently quite popular, thanks Don). One obstacle: the feral or semi-feral cats in our neighborhood. I'm sure the tyrannosaurus-sized one (judging by the piles of shit it leaves in our backyard), would be overjoyed to add chickens to whatever the hell else it eats.

eat mor chikin

Next: Building the Beds

What's This About?

I've always wanted to try my hand at growing my own fruit and vegetables, and now that my wife and I have a backyard, we'll give it a shot. I'm not a survivalist, nor am I too big on the various self-sufficiency, "locavore," or organic bandwagons. I'm just trying to grow something I can eat! I'll try to post pictures and describe the process as I choose a spot, select crops, grow them, and, inshallah, pick and eat them.

This is from the internet, not my garden.

But caveat emptor: though I'm usually pretty good at keeping houseplants alive I really don't know what the hell I'm doing. If you're here looking for advice then I pity you. However I've got some books, help from some of Austin's best garden stores, teh internetz, and, best of all, advice from mum. I don't know how this whole experiment will turn out, but hopefully this blog will be entertaining, informative, and maybe encourage a few other people to try growing their own food.