Gardening in 3-D: Delight in Disorder

One of the most important strategies we employ is to encourage biodiversity. By doing so we can partner with a wide variety of organisms who will help us with pest control. Our farm looks like a mess to most people (including some of our neighbors). We have lots of wild looking "overgrown" areas. What appears to be chaos has an invisible order to it. These areas are home to birds, snakes, possums, toads, tree frogs, squirrels, rabbits, rats and chipmunks ( i believe my totem animal is a chipmunk). Yes, we have to share some of our bounty with them but we feel that overall we gain much more than we lose from their presence. In the past few years I have observed that birds in particular play an important role in keeping pest insects at bay. I see eastern towhees cruising close to the ground, scratching in the litter and mulch hunting for insects. I watched goldfinches eat the sunflower petals and then perch on the long beans and eat the aphids feeding on the beans. I have seen mockingbirds snatch tomato worms right out of the fruit.
We purposefully plant a wide variety of flowering plants that attract beneficial organisms including both pollinators and predators of pest insects. One of the first things we did when we got to the Funny Farm was to establish our bugscaping (aka farmscaping) beds. This spring we were able to divide the plants from that bed and spread them into other parts of the garden. Each year we have found more and different species of predatory insects working side by side with us. We help them by providing food and habitat and they help us by controlling pests on our crops.
This year I made a concerted effort to move away from the typical agricultural model of planting crops in rows. I wanted to mix things up to maximize diversity within my garden beds. Mother nature does not plant in rows. The goal was to make it harder for insect and disease pest to find their targets increasing the chances of our obtaining a yield. Here in the south squashes and zucchinis are difficult to grow organically. There is a large variety of insect and diseases that prey on them, the most devastating of which is the squash vine borer. When I planted my squash in a row the momma moth would cruise down the row happily laying her eggs on each plant. Soon one by one the plants would wilt and die leaving me squashless. We decided to try and outsmart her by confusing her. We planted our squash plants all over the place, between the tomatoes, among the zinnias, beside the pole beans, among the basil. This strategy worked pretty well. She found a few plants but through constant diligence I was able to find and destroy the larvae before they did serious damage and we had a decent yield of squash.
We also also made better use of 3 dimensional space in the garden by utilizing stakes, teepees and trellisses. We plant our tomatoes 4' apart and tie 2 vines to metal tee post that has a 8-10' tall bamboo pole attached to it. Our tomatoes grow up to the top of the poles and then cascade back down. The wide spacing allows us to plant lower growing plants between them. We mixed a lot of different things between them besides the squash; bush beans which fix nitrogen, basil, zinnias, sunflowers which attract pollinators and predatory insects. We wanted to emulate a natural system as much as possible. All the different plants give off different chemical signals making it harder for pest insects to find their favorite foods. We created a similar 3-d space to a forest edge with a canopy, understory and dense layer near the ground. I saw the towhees moving from the wild woodsy spaces into the garden spaces scratching in the mulch and eating insects.
We made teepees out of bamboo poles our friend Henry brought us and grew our cucumbers and melons on them (don't be fooled by Baker Creek Seed's description of a Tigger melon. They may smell good but the taste like crap) . Between the widely spaced teepees we planted okra to fill the void. the teepees were shaped like this ^ and the okra grows like this \/. Someone said the bamboo structures reminded her of Gilligan's Island. Seem like a good model of sustainability to me.
This summer was hot and dry. We had our share of insects and diseases. Some crops failed but most did quite well. All in all we are very satisfied with our new 3 dimensional strategy and will be refining it next summer.






Over 1800 lbs. harvested from June until now on 1/8th acre ain't too shabby.

Bugscaping Practiced Here

We like to encourage our friends to do our work for us here at The Funny Farm so we provide them with food and drink as an incentive to help us out. That's why we practice Bugscaping!. We grow specific plants to attract beneficial insects to do battle with the evil pestilence that comes out of nowhere to devastate our crops and piss us off. We're talking about flowering plants, particularly those whose flowers are in the form of umbels (you know shaped like an umbrella). Okay who has umbels? Dill, yarrow, queen anne's lace are some who do.  We want flowers with lots of nectar for the beneficials to feed on easily. Other good ones are goldenrod in the late summer (not an umbel), garlic chives, cilantro as it transforms itself into coriander. The key is to grow lots of different flowers and have something blooming in all seasons. We grow greens through the winter here in Georgia so in early spring we let some of the kale and mustard go to seed to feed the early appearing beneficials. We adapted this from Dr. Richard McDonald's farmscaping concept, scaling it down to garden size. He has a crazy but informative web site that explains the concept in detail and has lists of good plants to grow.

Whom do we want to invite to join our army? Wasps, flies, lacewings, beetles, bees, lightening bugs ( that's right they are predators too). And don't forget the birds. They eat lots of insects like beetles and worms. When we gardened in the city there were lots of mockingbirds around. I once saw one pluck a tomato worm right off a tomato and swallow it down. How cool is that? Birds need bushes and houses for nesting sites so keep some areas wild for them.

Who needs chemicals when there is a huge army out there just waiting to enlist in our army. Fight bugs not people!

Oh yea, the Nanking cherries are ripe. Yum!

Busy, Busy, Busy

We've been really busy, tilling, planting, pruning, harvesting, selling, learning, teaching and having fun. Where to begin..... Ok, remember that poplar stump we inoculated with oyster mushroom spawn last summer? Well we harvested our first mushrooms from it last week. Put them in an omelet. Yummm!

Speaking of omelets, I went on a tour of urban chicken coops sponsored by Georgia Organics. I saw 8 different coops and lots of different chickens and some goats too. My conclusion was that chicken raising is pretty simple so we should go for it. The hen house is done except for adding a roost and a latch for the door. All I need to do is add some fencing and we're ready for a flock. I think I'll start with 6. That seems like a manageable number.

Speaking of tours, last sunday we went on a tour of Spring Valley Ecofarms in Athens, Georgia. It is a research farm owned and operated by Dr. Carl Jordan. Dr Jordan is doing some interesting research in ecoforestry but what caught my interest was the experiments they are conducting using perennial legume hedgerows interplanted with annual crops. They idea is that the legume ( they were using mimosa and amorpha), if the roots are colonized by nitrogen-fixing bacteria, will share some of the nitrogen with the annual plants. It seems to be working they said. I decided to try it out in our garden. I have interplanted baptisia australis with my tomatoes. I am inoculating the baptisia with alll the different commercial rhizobium bacteria i can find in hopes of finding one that will colonize the roots. This is not a carefully designed experiment. I don't have control plots. How will I know if it works? I won't know for sure. I will examine the roots of the baptisia to determine if they have been colonized but i can't determine if the tomatoes have benefitted from the companion planting. I chose baptisia because their flowers are good cut flowers and the foliage can be used as greenery in arrangements so they have economic value to us. By harvesting the foliage, we will force the plant to slough off roots to compensate for the lost foliage. Those roots will get broken down by the soil microorganisms which should make any nitrogen in the root nodules (assuming they exist) available to the tomatoes. Anyway we know that diversity is good so we're giving it a whirl.

The next step is to figure out a crop rotation that will work with the perennial planting. I'm thinking cucumbers next year, then maybe greens....

One more thing. Michelle and William from the Weather Channel came out to the Funny Farm to shoot a couple of segments for a series they do called Forecast Earth. One of the segments is about growing worms and the benefits of wormcastings. The second one is about Bugscaping, growing specific plants to attract beneficial insects. We released 1500 ladybugs and played with the worms. Of course Penny the cat star had to get in on the action too being such a ham. Michelle asked me if we used natural cat litter which we do. She's also doing a segment on natural pet care so Penny got to pose for the camera and I got to pour corn based litter into her litter box. 

It was a fun time. The segments should start airing in Late June or July.