This isn’t a photo from OUR garden.  We don’t have a lasagna garden.   But it’s so closely related to Raised Bed Gardening that you can’t help but run across it when you’re studying raised beds. First of all, you aren’t growing lasagna.   The name comes from the layering of materials, just as you layer a [...]

Filed under: container gardening, Soil Amendment, Uncategorized, Vegetable | 3 Comments »

For Sherry’s version, you only need three ingredients – the whey drained from active yogurt, water and blackstrap molasses. Oh, and a fourth thing that doesn’t really seem like an “ingredient” but I suppose it is – newspaper. It’s pretty simple and not much more work than using the storebought variety. I’ve read of people (with more land and food waste than us) making up a 100 pound batch of the stuff once a year. Anyway, these following accounts are very similar to Sherry’s process.

Filed under: Composting, Soil Amendment | 4 Comments »

I married a mad scientist. I swear that someday, whether it’s making beer or fermenting food scraps or heaven knows what, that someday she’s going to blow the house up. But I love this woman, and this is one of the things I love about her.
She’s started composting Bokashi style. Not that we don’t already have a compost bin and a compost tumbler and a worm bin, but only the worm bin is really for food scraps. And we want to throw out as little as possible, so….. Bokashi it is.

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First and foremost, if you compost dog waste, DO NOT use that compost where you’re going to be growing vegetables. Use it for your flower garden (but not where you have edible flowers that you might put on a salad). Along those same lines, put your doggie composting area at least 15 feet from your veggie garden (preferably on the downhill side), since you don’t want contaminates leaching over into your food. This is a CITY gardening post, but if anyone reading this has a well, make sure that you keep it from leaching into your well water. (I would say “Try not to think about it”, but thinking about it is exactly what we need to do. But hey, it beats stepping in it every time you go out back.)

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While reading an excellent website called the Yardstead, I learned about the Dervaes family – a truly remarkable story.
This is the urban garden on steroids. On a lot almost exactly the same size as ours (1/5 of an acre overall, with about 1/10 of an acre available for planting), they manage to produce 6000 pounds of produce per year. SIX THOUSAND POUNDS. They use 6 kilowatts of energy per day. The can, dry, freeze and ferment. They have livestock! AND BEES (wild bees, no less). They conserve water like crazy.

Filed under: Soil Amendment, Urban Gardening, Water conservation | No Comments »

Starbucks gave us worms. Indirectly. What Starbucks actually gave us was used coffee grounds, and putting used coffee grounds in the soil is an excellent way of building up your worm population

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People just don’t appreciate worms the way they should. Worms are glorious creatures. And life as we know it would be very different without them. Darwin called them the “ploughs of the earth”, and some scientists believe that earthworms are responsible for much of the rich topsoil of the U.S. and the world.

Filed under: Our Garden, Soil Amendment | 6 Comments »