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OK, so you say you want a garden next spring. And you say you’ve tried to do it before and you just never got around to it…and this makes you feel worthless and unambitious and un-American?
Well, bucky, today’s first lesson is for you.
Any one with a piece of paper, a pencil, a phone directory and access to a phone can do this. Or, access to teh internets(which you have already proven you have because you are reading this). For those of us who crave human interaction, pick up the phone directory and check the front or back colored pages for ‘your government’; they are usually categorized into federal, state, and local and under local, into county, township(or whatever sub-county thingy you live in), city and village.
Find the numbers for: Town Office and the County Landfill(or, if you can’t find that, just the county offices and start there with the lovely receptionist).Call those numbers and ask these questions:
Question 1: Do you have a composting facility? If the answer is yes, go to question 2.
Question 2: What are you composting there? If they give you a long list that includes "sludge from the sewage treatment plant" go to Question 2A.
Question 2A: Do you keep the yard waste separate from the sludge? If the answer to that is ‘yes’, it’s time to pop a cork on whatever drinkable you have. You are ‘home free’. Go to question 3.
Question 3: What are the days of operation and hours that I can get in?
Question 4: How much compost can I take away per trip?
Now, if the county/town has a web site with a page on their composting facility/landfill etc., you may be able to find the same info on that, but I’m all for getting to know my local government, so i like calling because..it IS your tax dollars at work.
OK…so you know you can get composted yard waste at either your township or your county landfill(or, in my case, BOTH, but I’m lucky that way) and you know you can go this Saturday and they will either let you have as much as you can haul away or whatever amount they will let you have. My township is on the ‘whatever you can haul’ end; my county landfill is on the however many garbage cans you can fit in your personal vehicle end(to prevent the local landscapers from coming and taking dumptruck loads).
How much of this are you going to need?Well, how big a garden do you want? Here’s Toby’s first and most important rule of gardening: Never build a garden bigger than what you can take care of in one trip out. Ripping up huge amounts of lawn so that you can preserve a year’s worth of tomatoes sounds terrific and Laura Ingalls Wilder and all that…but I can guarantee you that you will end up with…weeds. Better to start small..very small, and add. So, what do you think you can handle?
One bed. 3 feet by 10 feet. That is a good size and you can actually grow a whole lot in that. You are going to need enough compost to cover that piece of territory by 6-8 inches. You may need to make more than one trip to the composting facility, but that is how deep you want it.
How do you do this? You are going to need big cardboard boxes. It doesn’t matter what kind of stuff has been delivered in them(though I would avoid detergent or chemicals of any sort). Driving down a street that has bars on it in the early morning is a good source(liquor boxes are good and thick); grocery stores are good – toilet paper boxes are huge and cover lots of territory, too. Bust out the bottoms and tops and flatten them out. You need enough flattened boxes to cover 3 feet wide by 10 feet long, two flattened boxes deep. You will also want to over lap the boxes as you go, so throw a couple extra boxes in there for good measure.
So, what are you going to do with cardboard boxes and compost? You are going to build a garden sandwich: cardboard on the bottom, compost on the top. No digging. No digging. No digging. Just find a place that gets a lot of sun near your house. Mark out a 3×10′ oblong, lay out the cardboard and empty the compost out of the garbage cans/bags, whatever full of compost on top. Do this now – in October..you can even put it off until early November if you have to, but now is best…because….Homework: Done.
Your garden bed is now ready for the winter. From a ‘get started’ standpoint for the spring growing season, you are done!! Now, didn’t that feel good.
Homework assignment: check out used book stores (brick and mortar or online)and find a copy of "Crocketts Victory Garden". Yes, there are more modern books; yes, it’s out of print. But, it’s got great color photos(I’m all about great color photos of veggies), it’s based on a calendar(so you know, ‘oh, it’s January, so I should be doing this NOW, which helps the process NOT get away from you), and Jim Crockett built a garden in what was left of WGBH’s parking lot. If he can grow all that stuff on THAT, think what you can do in your yard???
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Now for the bad part: Crockett’s Victory Garden is NOT organic. He talks about organic method; even shows how to do things organically, but he also talks about and uses chemicals. I like the book for the pictures and calendar feature – I don’t use chemicals. Yes, I grow organically; yes, I believe in the method and not polluting the earth or hurting the unborn. I am also cheap. Chemicals cost money. They are made from petroleum. If you are concerned about lowering the over all amount of petroleum you use in your life, keep them out of the garden. So, for an organic gardening calendar, here are two nifty resources – the first one over the internet.
http://www.organicgardening.co…..30,00.html
or a printed work:
The Calendar of Organic Gardening, A Guidebook to Successful Gardening Through the Year(this is from Organic Gardening magazine also; you can get it through Amazon, etc.)
The secret to growing organically, in my experience, is this: Make the soil so soft, well drained and nutritious(and you’ve got a great start by using composed yard waste)that the plants just take off and jump right out of the soil. They will be able to fight off the bugs. Rabbits and ground hogs are another matter(and we’ll talk about them later – but it is important that if you want a garden this coming spring, then you get it going NOW).
For all of you folks living in Southern Cali, ARizona, NMexico, Texas, LA, MS, AL, and Florida – greetings — you guys have probably already started your fall/winter season gardens. If you can get your hands on some compost – now’s the time to side dress and mulch with it. If you don’t have a garden yet – you can follow the method I put above – the only difference is that you guys will be able to put in seeds this fall for greens, etc.(I’m not really familiar with growing in your areas — check the above organic gardening site – their calendar is by region and you’ll be able to get your instructions for what to do right now there)
Thank you, Toby. My homework is get a truckload of yucky sh*t and spread it in a 3 x 10 foot sunny area in my yard.
Good, I thought I was going to have to exercise and get thin thighs.
I’ve been threatening to start a victory garden.
You’ve got me thinking…a dangerous thing, I know.
have to agree with you about Crockett — the calendar format is ideal.
Demi – when you spread compost, you WILL get thin thighs, believe me — I’m sneaking in a little bit of weight lifting and aerobic exercise (spoon full of sugar, etc.). The goal here is to break down the ‘I want to have a garden’ thing into easily done things(esp for people like me who have short attention spans), handle-able stuff. People who can get this assignment done this fall…will have a garden bed all done in the spring. All they will have to do over the winter is: dream, read some seed catalogs(or go to seed co. sites and read there)and get ready to choose either seeds to grow OR plants to get at the garden center in the spring. I’ll talk more about doing that later on, when it’s time to do those assignments.
As for ‘a truckload’ – no – you won’t need that much for 3×10 feet. Six garbage can loads should do that amount of space. A truckload of compost is about 5 cubic yards(that’s a small truck)and that will cover SIX beds that size, and I think deeper than 6-8 inches. Also, you are bringing up a point that I did not discuss: Where is your compost coming from? One of the problems with commercial compost is that you don’t have control over where they got it from or what they are putting into the compost pile. That’s why I suggested calling the landfill or composting facility and asking. Compost that has sewage treatment plant sludge in it can have everything from heavy metals to Godzilla tomatoes(tomato seeds that will not die, even under the high heat and action at the treatment plant). I’d rather go with yard waste to start with. Next spring, we will(oh, joy)learn the fine art of starting our own compost pile(and making friends with your neighbors because you will be taking their garden waste and leaves away…for free…mwa-haha).
TobyWollin,
Thanks for all your posts. I recently took classes through the American Community Gardeners Association. They are a great resource and they are now headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. They have a campus for community gardening going in at the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus. A big idea promoted at the campus is bringing as many people as possible back to sustainable gardening.
Crockett’s book is a treasure. I also like the Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.
An added idea…We have a huge animal problem in our neighborhood due to being close to a river. enclosed composting works best for our neighborhood. Sometimes local soda bottle facilities sell their 50 gal syrup barrels at a very low cost which can be used for enclosed composting.
Here’s a link to the ACGA:
http://www.communitygarden.org/
Should read:
Sorry. Need more coffee…
klynn — thank you so much. Yes, you can have critter problems; I used to think it was only if you made the mistake to put bones in the compost heap, but you can get other critters too. Enclosed composing works well; but in this case, we are using ‘all done’ compost – so there will be nothing which will attract critters to this newly done garden bed.
Yep. I do my own composting to try and save on trips to the local compost heap because it is about 20 miles away. But for a “get the garden going,” one trip to the local compost heap is best and fast. Then one can use their own composting for regular garden feeding.
Call your local power company too. Many of them will deliver mulch made from shredded trees right to your house from trees that are in the way of power lines or downed by storms. It’s worth it for the power company to give the stuff away rather than have to store it somewhere. You may have to wait awhile,but you can get a good sized dump truck load of mulch for absolutely free. Put your name in now and hopefully you’ll have mulch delivered before winter.
Mulch from wood chips is a great idea – but not to start a garden bed with. We use it for paths inbetween the garden beds, but not ON the bed itself. They need to be composted a long time and there is a whole science to putting them together with other things to come up with a compost that is good for. Here’s a detailed description of what you can do with wood chips – as you can see, they say you can use them, composted, if you mixed it 1:1 with grass clippings or manure and added lime. By themselves, raw wood chips will generate a lot of heat and will lower the soil ph – veggies need a neutral ph, so using raw wood chips is a no-no, but if you can get it and set it aside with other materials to compost for a year, then next year you are good to go!!
Gophers: If you live in an area where you are, um, ‘blessed’ with gophers, and you are starting a garden, just cut to the chase and do this extra step now: Dig out the soil of your bed (or before you fill your bed with this yummy compost Toby is talking about) and line the bed–the whole bed–with hardware cloth, the square wire fencing material that you might use for rabbit cages. I lined my beds from the sides of the beds to the other sides, creating a two to three foot basket under the soil.
It was either that or end up sitting up nights with a shotgun and a flashlight duct taped to the barrel. There’s nothing in the world that gophers like better than fresh veggies…
Mark — hehehe…Oh,I do know gophers..and ground hogs and rabbits. I’ll snitch your hardware cloth idea a bit(because I’m trying to make this brain-dead, fall off the log easy for those folks who talk and talk and talk all winter about ‘doing the garden’ and then somehow it gets away from them):
OK — FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE CONCERNED WITH CRITTER TROUBLES, BEFORE YOU PUT DOWN THE CARDBOARD, GET A PIECE OF HARDWARE CLOTH(ALSO CALLED SCREENING). Make it more than 3′wide(I don’t know how wide the rolls come..just make sure you’ve got 6″ on both sides – for a total of 4′ wide) and 11 feet long. Unroll it over where you will put the bed – do this firs. Bend 6″ over along all sides and push those 6″ parts into the soil. Now, put the cardboard on top and the compost on top of that.
Oh, yeah..and get a cat who likes to hunt outdoors. We never had any issues with gophers, rabbits or wood chucks when we had an outdoor cat. They all…disappeared.