The Camel's Nose, or, How Gardening Grows on You

There is an old saying that says something about a camel wanting to “just put his nose in the tent” during a sandstorm. Pretty soon, his head is in, then his front legs, then…well, you get the picture. Before he knows it, the owner of the camel is outside in the sandstorm while the camel is in the tent.

I’m not sure that gardening in the backyard isn’t exactly like that.

First, you get a nice potted plant and it looks good on the plant stand in the corner or in the windowsill. You just do it for some 'color.' Then, you think that you would like to have some potted geraniums out front by the door just to dress it up a bit. Then the flowering plant in the corner of the yard. Then the flower bed along the fence or driveway. Then you think you might like to have a peach tree in that far back corner of the back yard. Just one, because you don’t know if you can grow peaches in your area.

Later on, you visit your neighbor and he has some nice, fresh, juicy tomatoes that taste so good you start to think that you should do that, too. So you plant one. Just one. After all, you don’t really have all that much time to garden. Mowing the lawn and trimming the bushes and pruning the now productive peach trees (you had to add another one for adequate fertilization) take up all your “yard time.” And you are surprised at how well it does. 11 cups of cherry tomatoes from one plant in one season. And they are sooooooo tasty, too, that you cannot remember how many of them actually made it into the house.

And in buckets, no less.

Then you decide that if your neighbor can grow those big, juicy beefsteak tomatoes, you can, too. So you plant several, not knowing which ones will do the best in your area. When they start to ripen, you can’t believe how easy it was compared with how expensive they are in the store (and how much better your own taste!) that you start to think about making salsa.

This year you buy the peppers and the onions and the cilantro to go with your tomatoes, and it’s good. But something just isn’t quite right and you realize that your wonderfully tasting tomatoes are being mixed with rather bland, tasteless “store-bought” food and you decide that you need to grow some of the other things. You don’t need a lot, just a few onions, maybe a couple of pepper plants and of course, you’ll only buy one packet of cilantro seeds. (How much cilantro can you grow with only one packet of seeds anyway?)

You absolutely cannot make salsa without cilantro.
To do so would not only be unthinkable, but possibly criminal.

Sweet red onions.

In the fall you plant the onions. In the winter you start the tomatoes indoors (you didn’t need all that stuff on those shelves of that rack in the garage anyway. The neighborhood thrift store can get much more use out of those things anyway.). And those light fixtures weren’t all that expensive, either.

Love those apricots.

In the spring you plant the cilantro and transplant the tomatoes outside. Come the middle of July, you begin to harvest the whole thing and you make your first batch of home-grown salsa. As you sit under the shade of you apricot tree (the peaches did so well you decided that a couple of varieties of apricot might be nice, too) and sip lemonade (who knew lemons could do so well this far North?) and dip your toasted kale chips (much better for you than fried tortilla chips and kale grows so well that you don't miss those silly shrubs along the fence) into your fresh salsa, you think to yourself “Now if I take out those shrubs and remove that lawn over there and …” you suddenly realize that the camel is in the tent leaving you outside.

Chard, not kale, but you get the idea.

But that’s really OK because that’s where your garden is.

Breaking it Down, Barrel-style

A long time ago, I listened to a farmer who said that we cook and prepare our food so that it doesn't resemble what it really is. If we can still tell what it is, we probably won't want to eat it.

Now, although I agree with him on the concept of shrimp (which I love to eat but get kind of grossed out when I see them) and liver (ditto), I don't necessarily agree with him on things like fresh fruits and vegetables. I really don't mind if a peach still looks like a peach when I eat it. I actually prefer that. But I have come to the conclusion that plants follow that rule themselves pretty closely.

If you put a pile of manure on a plant bed, it just sits there. The plants don't want it in that form (can you really blame them?). They want it broken down and reduced to forms they like. That's where the bugs and the worms and the bacteria all come in. They break down the manure and the waste materials into their component parts, add things to make it better, and then leave it for the plants to use. It's a great system, but it takes time.

We mimic and encourage this system with our compost piles. Here we pile up our grass clippings and plant waste and manures and kitchen scraps and then let them sit for a year or so while Nature takes its course. We keep it moist so it can work and we turn it periodically so it can breathe, but mostly we don't even think about it until we need to pile up some more waste.

I don't have the luxury of having a space that I can dedicate to the annual decomposition of materials so I have to make sure that I can keep my pile small and speed up the process. To do that, I "borrowed" some ideas from some commercial products and built a compost tumbler for myself.

Finished compost tumbler in its own stand.

We started with a 55-gallon barrel that at one time had held smoke flavoring for food products. We hosed it out a few times (didn't help, still smelled like smoke) and cut the top off.

By inverting the top, we were able to get a very good fit between the top and the sides of the barrel. It seems that the lid has a deep groove around it that just fits the sides, making me wonder if that was planned by some re-use engineer or if it "just happened that way."

The lid fits quite snugly.

We cut a hole in the center of the bottom for an aeration system. This is a 4" ABS plumbing pipe with a series of 1/2" holes up and down the shaft. Two screw-on adapters securely fasten it to the bottom of the barrel, one on the inside that is screwed to the one on the outside. We put a cap on the other end, and drilled a hole in it.

Standard plumbing components for the air system. If I were to
do it again, I would use a toilet flange instead and save a
couple of dollars in attaching the air pipe.

The axle is a pipe inside another pipe. The theory is that the outside pipe will act as the bearing on the axle so that the holes in the side of the barrel don't get bigger with age and movement.

The lid is currently held on with a ratcheting strap, but will soon be changed to some truck bungees as soon as I get them. It's worked fine all summer so far, and I don't seem to be in a rush to find the bungees.

Here's how it works. When the grass gets cut, the clippings get dumped into the barrel. Some water gets added and it is given a couple of turns which tumble all the stuff inside. Same thing when we add kitchen scraps, garden trimmings, shredded paper, manure, etc.  I haven't kept track of everything that we've thrown in there, but we have certainly put more than 55 gallons of stuff into it. I would estimate that we have put at least 600 gallons of material into it. I'll bet we would have had a pile the size of a small car with everything we've put into it. It just keeps shrinking the stuff down into really great compost.

It gets pretty hot inside there, obviously the bacteria are getting enough food, water and oxygen, and it has never stunk. It gets hot enough that the sides of the plastic barrel, normally quite rigid and firm, are soft and somewhat pliable. I think it gets hot enough to cook any smelly stuff because there is no smell. Not only that, there is only a slight aroma of smoke when you lift the lid. Certainly nothing like it was before. And the materials get converted in a matter of a few weeks, rather than months.

Here you can see the air pipe. Proper oxygenation is important
so that you keep you compost process aerobic. Anaerobic decomposition
stinks. Makes for bad farming neighbors.

I've only emptied it once so far. The strap slipped and the lid came of during one of it's tumbles (Of course it was while it was upside down. When else would it have happened?). So I took that opportunity to sift it through my 1/4" sifter and put the rest back inside to continue cooking. I had about 10 gallons of great smelling, black, rich compost to top feed my garden beds. (Soil amendment is almost a religion in the desert. At least you have to do it faithfully.)

It's amazing to me how much this thing can eat. 6 months of grass clippings, all the kitchen scraps my worms can't eat, all the plant waste from the spring garden and lots of tomato plant trimmings, several bags of shredded paper, and several 5-gallon buckets of horse nuggets. Although it fills up when we add the grass clippings, by the next time we need to add stuff to it, there seems to be plenty of room. It's like the black hole of the garden. It has worked so well this year that we are actually planning on building another one this fall to double the amount of stuff we can compost, although I'm not sure where we'll get the waste materials to put into it.

Recently, my son-in-law was eyeing the neighbor's grass, suggesting that we offer to cut his lawn for him in exchange for his clippings.

Come to think of it, it is looking pretty shaggy over there....

Beans, Beans, The Magical Fruit....

The more you grow, the more you begin to really like these things.

I know that doesn't exactly follow the old ditty, but it's close enough for my taste.

Earlier this summer, I had finished the lettuce harvest and needed another crop to sow in that bed. My grandson was out there with me, helping to turn and rake and supplement. When we got done with that, he asked me what we were going to plant in it. I guess it seemed the most logical thing in the world to him. We had just prepared a garden bed and now he wanted to know what we were going to plant. I didn't know. I hadn't thought that far ahead. The lettuce succumbed to the heat sooner than I thought it would and I wasn't ready for my fall garden yet.

I scrambled a bit and as I was walking into the pantry, I noticed a bag of beans on the shelf. Pinto beans. Next to them were some white beans, then some Navy beans (smaller white beans). In the freezer were some black-eyed beans that I had grown last year. I don't know how they got into the freezer, I don't freeze my seeds. I grabbed all of these and went back out to the garden.

I showed him how to broadcast them and get a nice even distribution. I didn't plant these with a lot of faith that they would grow. These were store-bought pintos intended to be eaten, not grown. The white beans we had dry-packed nearly 10 years ago intending to eat them. And the black-eyed beans had been in the freezer for who-knows-how-long? But, we sowed and then blanketed them with a mulch of straw. I showed my grandson how to water them and set him to it.

Amazing how much effort is displayed here. The seed halves have
not fallen off yet, and it has pushed up through two or three inches of straw.

He watered them every day as instructed. I checked the soil every evening after work. It was always moist and warm, two good things for germinating seeds. After a few days, I noticed an wonderful thing. Strong beans pushing up through the mulch.

First one, then two, the three hundred.

These guys just kept popping up day after day. I noticed a few one morning, then dozens the next, then too many to count on the next. It was magical.

A new neighborhood overnight.

The true leaves started to unfold and grow and the straw began to disappear. It went from a calm sea of yellow-brown straw to undulating waves of bright green leaves in the course of a week.

About two to three weeks after planting. A foot+ tall and no sign of the straw mulch.

Then the flowers came. Beans have weird flowers. They are flat and smooth and not really very pretty unless you consider their purpose. Then they split and the beans start to appear.

The beans a-bloomin'

These are strong plants, in spite of the fact that they are growing at about twice the "advised" density that the garden manuals say. I guess they like living that close together. Kind of like living in a city.

Look closely, you can see the bumps inside the pod.

My grandson got to show off his bit of the garden recently when his other grandparents came to visit. He proudly led them out to the garden to show them all the green stuff. He talked about planting them and watering them. If he had had any buttons on his t-shirt, I'm sure they would have popped off. His grandparents were duly impressed with his work.

The pods push the flower petal up and off. These grew in about 12 hours from flower to pod.

My daughter had the coolest comment about them. She used the same comment on my tomatoes earlier this year and it has become the standard comment about the plants in the garden. She said they were happy beans. Seeing the growth and the lushness of the plants, the flowers and the abundance of the pods, I'm inclined to agree. They must be happy.

And they're not the only ones.

Over the Fence, or, in My Case, The Wall

I live in Las Vegas and we don't have lot of fences that separate our homes from our neighbors. We have ugly gray cinder-block walls. They help with the wind we have here, last nearly forever, require absolutely no maintenance (except to over-paint the occasional graffiti artists' latest works) and divide us further from our neighbors.

My neighborhood is no exception. Since my subdivision is built on an alluvial fan of rock and sand debris from the nearby hill, my neighbor to the east is 3 feet higher than I am and my neighbor to the west is 4 feet lower than I am. It gets worse. My neighbor to the north, the one directly behind me, is 16 feet higher than I am. This is what gave me the berms where we built my garden beds.

The garden beds when they were first built. The one on the right is 2-feet wide, all three on the back are 3-feet wide.

These walls give us a sense of permanence and a feeling of isolation. I'm not a big fan of them at all. They hold heat in the summer and radiate it back to you at night. Not fun. (Kinda OK in the winter because it gives you more frost protection, creates an warmer micro-climate and assists in year-round growing.)

Recently, I was chatting over the wall to one of my neighbors about gardening and fruit trees and such and happened to causally mention what I've got growing and what my plans were for the fall seasons' gardens. I also happened to mention that I was thinking about raising garlic this fall. We talked about putting in some pomegranate bushes and he said that he was visiting his family in a rural town north of us and he would bring me back some cuttings.

The next day when I got home, my kids said that my neighbor had stopped by and brought some things. I expected to find some cuttings to root but he had brought some pomegranate jelly he made last year and a big bag of locally grown garlic bulbs. Nearly 5 pounds of garlic!

A most fragrant and wonderful gift!

I am so excited. I have been given nearly all of the garlic I will need to plant this fall. And since it has been locally grown, it has adapted to our climate and knows what to expect. Some of these bulbs are softball sized, nearly the size of elephant garlic. I'm not sure of the variety; looks like a porcelain soft-necked variety, but no matter. I'm very excited.

I can't wait for my sweet corn to ripen so I can return the favor.

Our block walls may keep out a lot of things, dust, wind, the neighbor's dogs, but they don't stop kindness and generosity.

Now, isn't that a great by-product of Stealth Farming?

I'm Not In It For The Money

I'm in it in spite of the money.

My wonderful wife and I have an ongoing debate about gardening and the whole stealth farming concept. We each take a different position on the subject of the cost of gardening. We each have what I consider to be very valid points and concerns. We each have considered our positions and feel that we are right. I see her points and understand them to be valid concerns. This is one of those issues where I'm right and she's...right, too. We're both right from our individual perspectives.

The idea that is the issue in the debate is whether or not it is cost-effective to have a garden. My wife looks at the cost of the seeds, paying for the city water, the time expense and the tools and supplies it takes to be effective gardeners in a harsh and unforgiving environment. (And it is hard to grow things here in the desert. When I lived in Missouri, you only had to have a thought of a seed and the dang thing would start to grow. You didn't have to coax them to grow, they just did. Not here, but I digress.)

My contention is that very little cost has gone into the garden for the yield it has produced. I harvest pounds of tomatoes for pennies of cost. A dollar for a pack of radish seeds yields literally $20 worth of radishes. Some sunflower seeds that I harvested from one of last year's sunflowers produces pounds of sunflower seeds to roast and eat, without buying another packet of sunflower seeds. I just planted another dozen sunflowers for fall from previously harvested seeds. That could potentially yield several pounds of seed yet again.

I save money by composting manure that I obtain for free. I met a great guy who has given me two full pickup truck loads. He even loads it into my truck for me. All I have to do is haul it into the back yard and set up the composting process. How much would that cost me?

I save money by using free straw that I got from an ad on CraigsList. This saves money on water by holding the moisture in the ground until the plants can use it. It also keeps the summer sun from baking the life out of the soil. The soil is 15 to 20 degrees cooler when it is shaded by the straw.  (How many of you have to worry about your soil being too warm?) After the crops are harvested, the straw becomes part of the soil, further extending its usefulness and getting another use for no cost.

I harvest seeds from peppers that I like, from tomatoes and tomatillos that are tasty, and I don't have to buy them. I use beans from the grocery store instead of the seed store. So far, the yield has been as good as the "seed" beans for far less cost. A pound of white beans or pinto beans or black beans costs much less at my neighborhood store than a pound from the seed companies.

With all those things in mind, I have spent quite a bit on soaker hoses, PVC plumbing parts, timers, way too many seeds for one year at a time, and I have to pay for the water I use. I don't have a well, a stream on my property and I can't harvest rainwater because it almost never rains here. That adds to what I have to pay for my garden. And I do spend a lot of time watering, weeding, planting, sifting compost, making worm food, tilling the soil and just looking at my plants. Time is the greatest cost.

Do I grow $20 tomatoes? Not yet, but I'm close. Would it be cheaper to buy the food from the market than to try to grow it at home? Without question. And it would be a whole lot less work, too. Plus I would save time.

But it wouldn't taste as good, be as fresh, provide me with good, healthy exercise, nor would it teach me as much as it has. What I have learned about the universe, about people, about nature and about myself by gardening has been far richer and much more beneficial than I would have expected. What I have enjoyed by sharing these experiences with my family have been my greatest gardening harvests. I don't think I could have had those successes any other way. And I'm certainly not done. I have many more goals to reach.

Money is cheap. I don't believe that I'll take it with me when I die. I do believe that I'll take the memories, the lessons learned and the deep and abiding appreciation for this wonderful life and its experiences with me when I die. To me, those are priceless and well worth the time, effort and treasure that they have cost me.

Planting the Yard by the Foot

I "invented" a new gardening device for myself yesterday. I took a 7-foot long piece of milled lumber about 3/4" square and measured off one-foot markings. With my friendly neighborhood sharpie marker, I made these marks on all four sides. With my newly made footstick (2 1/3rd yardstick), my fall garden plan printout and my carefully selected seed packets, I headed to the back yard to begin planting the fall garden.

I've not done a formal fall garden before. I've planted in the springtime and kept things going all year well into the fall many times. This was the first time that I actually planted in mid-summer for a fall harvest. I am very excited about the prospects here.

I planted two varieties of sweet corn, a yellow-white blend hybrid variety and a red variety. Until I found these seeds in the store, I had never heard of red sweet corn before. Looked novel so I'm giving it a trial.

The bed I planted is the second-level of my three-level garden. It is 3 feet wide front to back and about 75 feet long, give or take a couple of feet. I planned my garden using Mel Bartholomew's concepts in his wonderful book called Square-foot Gardening. This means that I planted four corn plants per square foot. This places them about 6 inches apart. Seems kind of close, but that's what he recommends. I planted about 24 feet by 2 feet in the yellow/white hybrid variety with white beans in front of them. The beans were planted at 9 plants per square foot. This also seems a bit close, but seeing how well the beans are growing on the first level at the same density, I have a great deal of confidence that this will be successful.

The middle section of the bed has 21 feet of giant sunflowers planted at one per square foot. The seeds I used for this are from the "volunteer" sunflower plant that I grew this spring. I am being quite possessive when I say that I grew it. I didn't even intentionally plant it. I am assuming that it grew from a seed left over from the sunflowers I grew in the same bed last year. They did great and the birds and I loved them. I let the seeds fully ripen in the head of this great plant and dried and saved them. I like the idea of free seed.

In front of these, I planted some yellow straight-neck summer squash and some gray summer squash. There are a couple of watermelon plants in front of these with beans interplanted among them. The sunflowers will grow up and form a nice backdrop. The squashes will grow about half as tall as the sunflowers and the beans will grow a little shorter than the squashes. The melons will cascade over the wall and hand down the three feet to the lower bed, just like they did last year.

The third section takes up the rest of the bed. I planted the red sweet corn here in the back two rows with melons and beans in front. I also planted a couple of spaghetti squashes in this section. This section gets the most late afternoon shade from one of our non-producing trees. Right now, I don't think that's a bad thing as it is still well over 100 degrees in the afternoon. When it starts to cool off a bit, the tree will lose it's leaves and the bed will be in full sun for the winter and early spring months. What a great system.

In his book, Mel Bartholomew suggests having a grid system permanently in your grow beds. This won't work for me for a couple of reasons. The most important reason is I think it looks dumb so I'm not going to leave a grid in my garden. I used the stick I made to help me measure and plant the seeds with the appropriate spacing. I would plant the squares on both sides of the stick and then slide the stick down the bed and repeat the process. When I got to the end of the bed, I picked up the stick and I was done. It took less than an hour and a half to rake the bed smooth, plant the seeds, press them slightly with the rake and cover the whole bed with about 2 inches of straw to act as a mulch. I still have to install the soaker system to water this bed so I'll be doing a bit of retrofitting next week when I get enough time. It took me about a half hour both last evening and this morning to water this bed down. I love the mulch. It really cools the soil down, holds the moisture in the soil and saves me a ton of watering time and water.

I have some goals with this bed. First, I love sweet corn. Steamed, grilled, boiled, whatever. It's great. Second, my wife really likes watermelon. Third, I like cantaloupe and other melons. Fourth, I want to grow a bunch of squash to give a bunch away. (Keeps the borrowers and the "Can I have one?'s" away if you shove squash or zucchini at them. Is that mean?) Fifth, I'm hoping the beans will help with the nitrogen for the other plants. Sixth, I'm hoping that with the corn and sunflowers in the back and the lower plants in the front that this will look really cool. Gardens should look nice.

I'm going to be putting in some other veggies in the other beds later this month and next. I wanted to get these in so they could take advantage of the heat and get a really good growth before it cools off. (I don't expect that to happen until November, although we have had some fairly cool late Octobers recently. Must be that global warming stuff.) I'm looking forward to a big patch of beets and some Brussels sprouts and some cabbage. I can't wait until it gets cool enough for lettuce and other leafy stuff. I won't be planting that until it is consistently in the lower 90's in late September.

Here's to year-round gardening in the desert. Amazing what you can do with a lot of sand, horse manure and sweat.

Gotta Love the Failures

I will be the first one to tell you that I'm a failure as a gardener. I say that because I've had many more failures than successes. More seeds die and rot in the ground than sprout. Fail! Of those that do sprout, more wither and die or get eaten by bugs or suddenly quit trying to grow in the desert heat than make it to maturity. Fail! Of those that actually make it to maturity, most don't yield fruit. Fail! Of those that yield fruit, most, well, a lot of it is not as exciting to eat (toughness, heat-induced bitterness, thick skin, small size) as one would hope. Fail!

Fail! Fail! Fail!

Why, then, do I keep at it?

I keep at it because I get excited about what I learn. For some reason, I was blessed with a great deal of optimism. I hope. Eternally. Continually. I get excited at the potential, at the prospect of success. I love the idea that I don't have to accept the fail as an absolute and that I can build on it to hopefully have another chance later on. I keep trying.

My mother taught me that no matter what I try to do, if I keep at it long enough, I will get better and better at it until one day I will succeed. (Maybe that's why I have 12 kids. Hmmmm.) She taught me that if I stick to what I'm working at, no matter how many times I fail, the only real failure is quitting.

She also taught me a love for learning. I love to see what happens if....

What would happen if I plant tomatoes in buckets?

Can you grow a tomato in a bucket? Who knew?

Tasty, tasty, yum, yum

What would happen if I took a bunch of 10-year-old pinto beans off the pantry shelf and planted them?

10-year-old beans, sprouting through the mulch. Who knew they would grow?

Same beans, three weeks later. Very happy beans.

What would happen if I planted these Armenian cucumber seeds?

Happy grandkids with two cucumbers.

What would happen if I placed an ad on CraigsList asking for someone to give me free manure?

Careful what you ask for. You may end up with a load of poop!

Grandkids make the best manure helpers.

What would happen if...?

My tomatoes in buckets were a great big success, for me. My wife didn't really like the tomatoes, too small, tougher skin than she likes, funny shapes and colors, whatever. But I proved to myself that I could do it. I learned about how to combat blossom end rot. I learned a great deal about amending growing media with garden lime. I learned that I can make a portable garden and have it actually produce. All that and I got to eat dozens and dozens of really great tasting tomatoes fresh from the plants. I got to share some of them with my coworkers in my office. And I had fun.

Did they all thrive? No way. Am I going to do it again? You better believe it. Was it more fun that it should have been? Absolutely. Many of them are just cruising through the hot months of July and August. Since I've placed them in the shade of some trees so they don't get fried by the merciless Southern Nevada sunshine, they've actually begun putting out new growth, very lush and very green. I'm hoping for a great fall crop when the heat breaks at the end of the month. That'll be fun, too.

I wonder if I can keep some of them producing until Thanksgiving. Hmmmm.

My family and I have been working on getting the beds ready for a great fall garden. We've been tilling in compost and manure and stuff. I've been working on the irrigation system. I've drafted a plan for planting and have purchased nearly all of the seeds. (I wonder where I'll be able to get 135 garlic bulbs. I'm gearing up for more than 2000 garlic plants, a real "farm crop" experiment.) And I keep getting more and more excited about the whole thing.

With all my failures (onions, birdhouse gourds, pumpkins, watermelons, beets, etc., etc., etc.) I could be pretty discouraged, but I'm not. I'm very optimistic. I can't wait to get back into the garden again this afternoon. I really spend too much time out there. It's cutting into my television viewing schedule. Fail!

Hope, springing forth.

As long as I keep plodding along, keep trying and don't give up, I figure I'll make it someday. Somebody will refer to me (in a favorable light, of course) as "that guy with the garden. Go ask him." That's what I'm looking forward to.

I'm even planning on coming up with a few entries for the County Fair next April. That ought to be a real hoot!

Happy Farm

This is kind of a different post. Among the philosophies that are embodied in Stealth Farming is the idea that you do all that you can do yourself. You rely on yourself as much as possible. You are the first person you turn to to get the job done. If you want you farm planted, you plant it. If you want your crops watered, you water them (rain notwithstanding). If you want your crops harvested, you get out you baskets and harvest them. It’s what you do.

With that being said, isn’t it nice to realize that we can’t do it all by ourselves? Isn’t it wonderful that there are people who can lend a hand once in a while (or more often!) and make the work easier? Isn’t it nice that you don’t really have to do it all alone?

I’m lucky in that I have a wonderful set of daughters to help out. I needed some help in turning a bed recently to get it ready to plant. My daughter Rebecca came to the rescue. She did more in less time that I could and did a great job. I don’t think she broke a sweat while my brow resembled a soaker hose on steroids.

I’m at work all day and some areas need to be watered and checked. My daughter Sarah came to the rescue. Since she’s home from school for summer vacation, she has some time available and has been doing Yeoman service in watering my tomato buckets and garden beds each day. (Only recently has she negotiated a $1 a day charge for her services. Silly girl, I would have paid it all along if she had only asked.)

I had been looking for a local supply of horse manure for my worm beds and garden beds for a long time. Everyone I asked, the local horse park, several neighborhood horse arenas, some folks who have horses in their back yards, all of them either used it (doubtful) or didn’t want me coming around and hauling it away or wanted me to pay for it. I just felt that someone wanted to get rid of it and my volunteering would actually benefit them.

I placed an ad on Craigslist last week and got several responses. All of them were either clear across the valley or wanted to charge me for the privilege of removing their waste products. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t seem carbon-neutral to drive 35 miles for a load of horse poop. I needed something closer to home.

About half-way through the unloading process.

Yesterday, I received an e-mail from a guy named Alex. He asked if I had found my manure and if I had not, to give him a call. I did. He has 6 horses. He hauls the stuff to the dump to get rid of it. He lives a mile from my house. He said I could have as much as I wanted as often as I wanted it because I would be doing him a favor. Plus, he had a tractor so I wouldn’t have to load my own truck. I almost cried.

My Grandson Benjamin supervising. What is it about manure and little boys?

I got my first load last night. True enough, he drove a little bitty tractor into the horse stalls and loaded my truck in about 15 minutes. My job was just to spread it around the bed of the truck so he could get more in. He didn’t want payment (although I’m going to have to find a more material way of saying thanks). He said to keep his number and give it to my friends so that they would have it too. And he said to give him a call and come back as often as I wanted. I’m going back next week.

As I got home last night, I started to off load my truck and wheel it around to the back yard. I got about half way through and my daughter Nicole noticed that I was working alone. She climbed up in the truck and began shoveling it to the rear of the bed. That made it really easy for me to load into the wheelbarrow. Then her husband Brian showed up and he took over the wheeling business. With Nicole and Brian shoveling and wheeling, I was out of a job. Then Nicole swept out the bed of my truck and swept up the driveway (to keep my wife and the neighbors happy) and the job was done.

The first pile in the backyard next to the bean patch.
Now all I have to do is sift it and amend the beds.

I don’t think I’ve ever been made as happy as I was last night over a load of crap. I met a really nice guy who wants my garden and my worms to have great food. It also helps him. I got some great help just as I was running low on steam and the work got done faster and better than I would have done it.  (My normal way of sweeping out the bed of my truck is to open the tailgate and drive to work.) And my plants are going to be so happy, I may need to name my farm “Happy Farm.”

Farming is hard work. I’m just glad I don’t really have to do it all myself.

Making Worm Food

I’m warning you right now, this post has a bit of an elevated yuck! factor. It’s not the prettiest of postings, but it is one of the most interesting to me. Read on at your own discretion. You have been warned.

Earthworms are the most industrious animals I know of. They work constantly to improve our soils and increase their viability and plant sustainability. Specifically, red worms or Eisenia Foetida, the manure worms or compost worms are the ones I am referring to. These guys come up out of the soil or bedding and eat organic materials and produce wonderful castings that are the best natural, organic and cost-effective fertilizing agent I’ve ever heard of. Plus, they produce worm tea which is a fabulous liquid fertilizer that I personally swear by.

I have a bin of worms, thanks to my son-in-law who happened to buy a couple of half-pound tubs at a bait store one day. We cut a 55-gallon barrel in half top to bottom and put in them bedding made of straw, shredded paper, a little manure and some ground up kitchen waste and the worms.

Over the next several weeks, we have fed them much more kitchen waste as well as coffee grounds from the office where I work and these guys have eaten it all. Not only that, they have begun reproducing at a phenomenal rate. I estimate that there are two to three pounds of worms in this bin right now and I’m feeding them three times a week.  It’s the food that I’m feeding them that this post is about.

It’s a proven fact that worms will eat just about any garbage you can give them. Since I don’t currently have access to a steady supply of horse or cow manure, that’s out. But what I do have access to is a steady stream of kitchen wastes, stuff that would either go down the garbage disposal in the sink or in the trash can to the landfill. Both of these choices are less than desirable.

My choice is to feed it to my worms, so that is what I’m doing. This post shows how I prepare these wastes and store them for later feedings.

First, worms will eat about any organic material. If their basic needs of temperature, moisture and organic bedding are met, they will eat and consume everything you give them. A worm will eat up to four times its own weight in food every week. That’s actually a lot of food. Think how much that would be if you ate four times your own weight in food every week. They don’t want meat, bones, pet or human manure or greasy or oily foods, so put those in the landfill container. They love watermelon and other melons, so I try to give them as much of that as possible. Avoid citrus peels in large concentrations as they have the tendency to make the bedding too acidic for the worms. And they don’t have teeth so worms need to have some grit to put into their gizzards (just like chickens) to grind the food. I use dried and powdered eggshells and they seem to like it. In a future post, I'll show you how I prepare the eggshell gizzard fodder, too.

You can put this stuff directly into the bedding if you want, but that can take a while to break down. I like to speed things up a bit, and my worms seem to like it. I make use of a food blender to grind the food wastes into a puree.

I save my food scraps for a week or until I have enough to process. I keep them in plastic tubs with tight-fitting lids. I don’t worry about mold growing or other fuzzy stuff happening or if they start to rot. I want that because that’s what the worms want.

A small selection of the next batch of worm food. Any non-greasy, non-meat kitchen scraps will do nicely. If it came from a garden, it can go back into the garden.

I start by cutting up the scraps into blender-capable sized pieces. Then I add them to the blender with the blades set on high speed. I keep adding food and juices from the tubs until the blender is full and it is all liquefied. Then I pour the liquid into forms made from the bottoms of gallon milk jugs. I cut the bottom two inches off of milk jugs for this.

Don't let your wife see you using her blender for this project.

Then I CAREFULLY place the food filled forms into the freezer compartment of my refrigerator and let it freeze thoroughly. I give it at least a full day to freeze. I don’t worry about covering it because I’m not too concerned if it dries out a bit. It’s usually pretty runny anyway.

Here you can see the scrap bucket, the blended food and the milk jug bottoms into which I will pour and in which I will freeze the food.

Once it is frozen, I flex the forms a bit a pop out the solid block of food. I store these in a cardboard box in the freezer until I need them. I wash the forms out because they would begin to stink really quickly if I didn’t and store them to use next time.

Ready to be popped into the freezer.

When it’s time to feed the worms, I simply take a block or two out of the box and place them a couple of inches deep in the bedding. I make sure that the new ones are not directly over where the last ones were because I don’t want to place a block of ice on top of some worms eating the last of the previous feeding. It takes a few hours for it to thaw and by the next day, it’s all liquid again and is covered with worms.

A good batch of vermi-entrees. 

I don’t add my coffee grounds to these block, I simply dump them in and bury them a couple of inches in the bedding. As the worms eat the stuff I feed them and their bedding, I add more straw and shredded paper. I make sure that it is kept moist by watering my worms when I water my garden. Keeping it out of the direct sun helps, too, as does the cover.

Frozen and ready for storage and/or feeding time. 

In spite of what you might be thinking, my worm beds don’t stink. They don’t have any odor at all. When I had a problem with drainage at first there was a smell to it, but once I put large enough holes to drain the leachate, there was no smell at all.

I store the completed food bricks in a bag in a box. I don't worry about freezer burn since they aren't in there long enough for it to be a problem.

In the two months that we’ve had these worms, I have fed them about 20 pounds of food. As the population grows, I’m sure that the volume of food will increase, too. Think about how much garbage is not going to the landfill now from my home. Think about how much junk the water treatment plant doesn’t have to take out of the water (and haul to the landfill) by not putting this stuff down the garbage disposal. Think about how much my garden is going to like to have these worm castings and how well it will grow once it does.

See, when you think about all of the good of this project, the yuck! factor just sort of fades away, doesn’t it?

In a future posting, I'll show you how I use these and how the worms are doing.

5 Questions Answered by an Urban Farmer

While I was dreaming up some reasons for doing what I do, I began to wonder why other people do the same thing. There isn’t anything new to what I’m doing. It’s all been done before. I read recently that about every 30 years or so, cultures go through a revamping of sorts where there is a movement both back to the comfortable and a surge into the new.

With all the current discussion about the quality and safety of our food, the current surge in urban farming is a movement back to the comfortable. It’s not unusual. Even the sub-irrigated planters were patented at the turn of the century, the 20^th century not the 21^st so that technology is at least 100+ years old.

And as far as producing food in the city, it has only been within my lifetime that it has become the exception rather than the rule. People always gardened, raised chickens and hung their clothes out to dry on a line. (Some homeowners’ associations have even banned clotheslines. How un-green is that?)

So I thought it would be nice to ask somebody who is fairly new to this business what her motivations are and what she has learned. I sent my daughter Rachel (mother of 2 of the cutest grandkids ever!) 5 questions about her gardening. Here is what she reported.

Question #1 “How long have you been growing in the city and what was your reason to get started?”

I started my garden at the beginning of spring this year- about March/April. I didn't start from seeds this year, so I guess I had a head start from Lowe's.

There were a lot of reasons for me to start the garden, but the main 2 are because my courtyard was really ugly with just the clay-type dirt and all of the pigeon poop that covered the ground. The second reason was so I could force myself to go outside everyday. I spend so much time indoors being a stay-at-home mom, they should call me the stay-in-home mom.

Question #2 “What is your main goal for growing food in the city.”

The main reason I wanted to grow my own food was so that I would have healthy, organic fruits and vegetables readily available to aid me in my quest to lose weight and become healthy. A plethora of reasons emerged after that, but that's the main reason I started the garden.

Question #3 “How important is the concept of urban farming to you and why?”

My sanity depends on this garden I have. So, yeah, personally, it's important. However, the concept of urban farming is pretty inspirational to me. I think the more we cultivate locally, the more independent our entire society becomes. When that happens, we open the door to all kinds of growth and advancement.

Question #4 “What kind of community involvement do you participate in and what kind would you like to see available in your area?”

I don't really have much to do with my community. I guess I do participate in a co-op program that supports local farms. But all in all, I don't really do much in the way of community activities. I don't really have a lot of time to invest into anything outside my own home just yet. In the future, as the baby gets a little less dependent on me, I will start to branch out. At that time, I suppose I would be interested in more of a farmer's market forum here. We don't have much by way of farmer's markets, and I have always wanted to go to one. I would be thrilled if we had something like that close by so I could get all my fruits and vegetables fresh, pick them out myself, and support local farms (which is entirely possible since we actually have farms here in Phoenix).

Question #5 “What is the best lesson you have learned by your involvement in growing food for yourself?”

This is by far the most loaded question yet. There isn't a lesson that carries any more weight than another. I have learned patience. I have learned to stop and take a minute to think. I have learned that not everything will turn out as I imagine, but that it's okay. I have learned more about spirituality and the makeup of this earth and more about its purpose. And by extension, I have learned more about my own purpose. I've also learned to let go a little bit and let nature do what it was put here to do. I have learned that God is the only one who can MAKE a plant bear fruit and I should quit trying to force it. And ultimately, I have learned to enjoy more that which was put here to sustain man (including the bugs).

So there you have it. Answers straight from a new urban farmer. Her reasons are a bit different than mine, but there is now right or wrong answer in this. There are as many good reasons for doing this as there are people involved in it.

Stealth Farming has at its core the fundament philosophy that we need to be actively engaged in doing as much for ourselves as possible. The more we rely on ourselves, the less we have to rely on the government, big corporations or on anything else. It puts us more in control of our lives and allows us to make appropriate decisions for ourselves, decisions which no person or committee in Washington or anywhere else can make for us. Stealth Farming is really taking back the right to do for ourselves what we want to have done to us. It’s the very personal realization of the Golden Rule.

Food Security

There needs to be some degree of food security and reliance in every country or their sovereignty is seriously threatened. Think about it for a moment: If a country must import the majority of its food, it is at the mercy of those countries from whom it obtains its food. Does that sound very conducive to a stable, friendly environment between nations? History is filled with stories of nations being overthrown or conquered simply because they could not feed their people. Hungry soldiers don’t fight well. That’s why General Patton in WWII was famous for his comment that an army travels on its stomach. It’s true.

The concept is the same for families and communities as well. When you don’t have to worry about where your food is coming from, you can focus on those things that could make your life better, like your work or your family or your hobbies. Having a supply of food is a wonderful way of removing that layer of worry and concern from your life. Having the ability to produce your own food provides a level of freedom that few people actually enjoy today.

On the internet, I see advertisements for companies that want to sell me all the food I will need to have for a year or two or three. It’s all packages neatly in #10 cans, sorted into boxes of 6 cans and stacked in nice, neat and convenient piles. Add to these highly processed (dehydrated, freeze-dried, powdered, etc.) products the bulk grains and legumes and things that you would need for the same time frame, and you have quite a pile. These bulk foods come in 5- or 6-gallon pails, gas-charged with nitrogen to keep out bugs and ensure a good storage life and lined with mylar bags. They seem almost bomb-proof.

Although I agree with the philosophy of storing a year’s supply of food and fuel, I disagree with the attitude that most of these companies take when they are hawking their wares. It is one of fear and doomsday and end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it. That’s a bunch of crap. I cannot stand fear-mongering whether it is done by left-wing political hacks or right-wing food storage purveyors. And the worst of these that I have seen are the ones that are selling the “garden in a can” or the “grow an acre of food” deals where people are selling seeds. I hope all of them go out of business if that’s the best they can do.

I love seed companies. I get their catalogs every year and read them cover to cover. I have learned more about growing food from a theoretical standpoint by reading seed catalogs than any course I took or textbook I’ve read. These are not only an intellectual treasure trove; some of them are nearly works of art in themselves.

The difference in the way seed companies market their products, which are not fundamentally different from the end-of-civilization folks is the fact that they are marketing their seeds and plants with a feeling of “you can do it!” They talk about success. They focus on what you need to do to make it happen. They preach possibility rather than disaster. They make you feel hopeful rather than all is lost (or just about to be). I hope the seed companies who do this make fortunes for themselves and their families.

The other day I was visiting a friend of mine who is an attorney. He’s not the most, well, hands-on kind of guy I know but he’s trying. He’s really smart and I admire what he has accomplished but he struggles with things I consider basic.

We were looking at his garden on my visit and discussing the possibilities of his yard. His fruit trees have some borers in them and he’s probably going to lose them. He’s had difficulties with his tomato plants but he’s probably going to save those. He’s struggling with his irrigation system and I’m sure he’ll either solve the problem or hire someone to do it. Either way, he is determined.

While we were talking, he mentioned his discouragement to me in the middle of discussing his plans for grape arbors, improved garden beds and the like. He mentioned that if he gets one cucumber from his plants (and he had a nice one growing) that his wife said it would probably be the most expensive cucumber in history. We laughed at that but it’s probably true.

I told him my philosophy that gardening wasn’t all about yields and success and outcomes but that it was mostly about the process. Getting better, overcoming challenges, improving practices, applying new ideas, learning from others and growing personally were all benefits of gardening that cannot be quantified by dollars and cents. My philosophy about Stealth Farming is that it’s more about developing the ability to provide that food security that we need than it is about the size of your beefsteak tomato or the yield of your grape vine. It’s the journey that’s the most important.

There is no such thing as security. It doesn’t exist. Think of all the planning and preparation that folks do just to have their homes wiped out by a tornado, flood, earthquake, political upheaval or other calamity. Didn’t they think they were secure? Could those things happen to you? Of course they can.

But what we need to have is the experience, the training, the practice of producing and providing for our needs. That is where the value of Stealth Farming comes in. That is what we produce in our backyard gardens. That can’t be taken from us. As long as we can think, we can duplicate our efforts, no matter the calamity which befalls us.

You can never market that product in a can. You can never scare someone into developing it. You can only help, encourage, inspire and lift someone to that point. You have to be positive. You have to see the possibilities or your effort will be in vain. You have to believe in yourself.

Believing in yourself. That’s the Stealth Farming way.

Tomato Bucket Update

My tomatoes have been growing in their sub-irrigated buckets for several weeks now. When I transplanted them, they were smallish, still very young and looked like this:

I had grown these guys from seed, a first for me. Up until now I have been a nursery gardener, buying my seedlings at the nursery. I always figured that I would get good stock, healthy plants and a fair selection if I did that. I’m over that now. I don’t know how good the stock it, I don’t know the growing methods they use and I can’t be certain that they don’t use synthetic hormones, growth additives, chemical fertilizers and the like. The only way I can know that stuff, and it is important to me, is if I buy my seed from reputable certified organic seed companies (and there are some great ones out there!) and grow the plants myself. Which is what I have done.

So, with only the regular waterings these guys have received, here is what they look like now:

I have them on the east side of my house. They are in a semi-protected area between two closely-spaced two-story houses. They get about 4 hours of direct sun each day, from 9:00 am to about 1:00 pm. The rest of the day they get reflected light off the two white houses. Our houses are about 25 feet apart, and I have access to about 15 of those feet.

 This picture shows the space that they are in. This area opens to the south so in the winter it still gets a good amount of sunshine. Just to the right, outside of view, my neighbor has a plum tree and an apricot tree. The back wall is blocked off so we don't get full force winds through there.

Some of the varieties are more spread out than others. This one has decided that it doesn't want to stay inside the tomato cage, no matter what I tried.

Some of them are broad leaf varieties, which I have never grown in the desert before. I'm really pleased at how much foliage there is. As you can see, there are quite a number of good looking fruit, too.

And when they start taking on that wonderful red color that shows their ripeness, I can almost not wait to bit into the fresh, juicy fruit. I've been looking forward to this for several months.

It's now the first of June and I will be picking the first tomatoes of the season this evening when I get home from work. At last count, there were more than 75 tomatoes growing on these plants with literally hundreds of flowers waiting to be fertilized. I don't want to count chickens instead of eggs here, but it looks like this is going to be a good year for tomatoes.

The whole sub-irrigated bucket concept was new to me before this year. I had never heard of it let alone tried it but now, as you can imagine, I'm a big fan and am recommending it to everyone I get to talk to about my garden. I know there are some folks here in the desert who will see the benefits of this system and some who won't. But with results like these, it's hard to see how anyone could argue that it won't work.