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!