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.

Get a Soil Test Dammit!

We knew we had nutrient deficiencies. We could see the symptoms in the plants. Our production was good in some beds but not in others. I had read many articles that spoke of the need for large scale re-mineralization of soils. We knew we could increase our production with the addition of needed nutrients in the correct amounts. A friend told me he used International Ag Labs to test his soil. He liked that they emphasized biological farming and growing nutrient dense food. We sent them a soil sample from our back field.
We were correct in our assumption that we had deficiencies. We followed their recommendations and had a custom blend of soil amendments prepared for us and applied it at the recommended rate. This was last spring. The results were quite obvious as the crops started to grow. Throughout the summer season we began to notice we had less pressure from disease and insects than in the previous year. The plants looked super healthy; dark green leaves and thick strong stems.

When we first started the garden we prepared the front field differently than we did the back field and we got better production. We used more compost initially. After we determined we had a deficiency of magnesium we applied dolomitic limestone to add both calcium and magnesium. We saw some improvement but we felt were not getting maximum production in that field either. We sent in a soil sample from the front field about a month ago. As you can see the results are quite different than those we got in the back field.

Notice in particular that test shows excessive levels of phosphorus and potassium. The folks at International Ag labs have found that excessive use of manure based compost can cause this. We believe that is why we our levels are excessive. We applied a whole lot of compost that year. Note that they recommend not applying compost or manure of grass clipping or wood chips until the excess has been used up by the plants.

Notice all the notes i wrote on the pages of the test results. They are answers to the many questions i had about the test and recommendations. I love that I can call Jon Franks and he will patiently explain what the meaning of the test results are and why they made the recommendations they did. If you look at the test for the back field, it shows that the levels of copper and manganese are very high yet they recommend adding both to the soil. I asked Jon why that was. He said that the desired level for plants is lower that that required by the human body for maximum health so they recommend higher amounts in the soil to boost the nutrient density of the plants. Our goal is to grow the best food we can for ourselves and for our customers so we followed their recommendations.

People regularly ask me in my workshops and lectures what brand organic fertilizer i recommend. My answer now is always that i don't recommend any particular brand. I explain to them that without a soil test you cannot know what nutrients your soil needs. Plants need different nutrients in the proper ratios. The calcium to magnesium ratio should be 7 to 1. The phosphorus to potassium ratio should be 1 to 1. If you are continually applying a balanced fertilizer without knowing what the ratios are in your soil you can throw the balance out of whack. The result is that the uptake of other nutrients is blocked. You might be creating excesses of certain nutrients with the same results. That is the situation we see in our front field.

"But it is expensive" is the comeback i often hear. A soil test can actually save you money. Once you get the results, you only need to purchase and apply the nutrients your soil needs. And I can testify that, assuming your soil food web is healthy, your production will go up markedly. In 4 months we have produced as much food as we did all last year. I a couple of weeks we will have harvested a ton, yes 2000 lbs. of food since the beginning of June. On 1/8th of an acre.

Get a soil test dammit!

p.s. if you want to study these results more closely you can find them here on scribd.com

A Recap of what has been going on at The Funny Farm these past few months

Our goal for this year is to double our production compared to last year. We produced 1600 lbs. of fruits and vegetables last year. We record our production from June to June since that was the month we started going to our first farmers market in 2009. When we harvest for market and for Vegetable Husband this Wednesday we will surpass our total for all of last year, 4 1/2 months into our 2010 harvest year. We have much more growing now than we did at this time last year. We will be using row covers much more extensively this winter so we can keep production going all winter with a little luck. I am encouraged that we are on track to meet our goal.

We have employed several strategies to reach this rather lofty goal. I will give an overview here of what they are and I will explain in greater detail how we implemented them in future posts. I promise...really I will!

• First on the list was getting a soil test. We knew from observation of our crops that we were deficient in magnesium. We were not getting the production we thought we could get. The results of the test confirmed our suspicions. This will be the subject of our next post
• Increasing biodiversity was next. We worked on improving habitat for beneficial organisms both above ground and in the soil food web. This helped us by reducing insect and disease pressure. We did much more intercropping to take advantage of 3 dimensional space and to try to confuse potential insect pests minimize the spread of disease organisms.
• We refined our choices of crops and varieties we would grow to find better matches for our particular growing system.
• We utilized some more marginal spaces to increase our productive area utilizing methods gleaned from permaculture.

As expected the sum of all these efforts is greater than the parts if they were applied individually. We have a systems approach driven by the permaculture paradigm. Much of what we are doing now is going to provide yields in the future for us and for whomever comes along behind us. While I am fond of saying that I do not believe the future exists and that tomorrow never comes, I will not stop my efforts to prepare for a future anyway.

I could be wrong!

Cabbagegate Update

Many of you have no doubt heard about Georgia farmer Steve Miller being hit with a $5000 fine for growing too many vegetables. If not, you can read Deborah Geering's report on the situation. Deborah and I have been following this case for a year now. Steve is, or was, one of the vendors at the Decatur Farmers Market where I am the manager and also a vendor.

I spoke with Steve a few minutes ago. He went to court this morning. He said that he is going to be punished for his "crime" one way or another. He and his attorneys are trying to negotiate a deal so he can perform public service rather than pay a fine. Steve has offered to give free vegetables to the needy. That proposal was rejected. Now he has offered to teach organic gardening and sustainable landscaping to satisfy his public service. This is all still being worked out between the judge and his attorneys.

I will report back when I know more.

Fall Organic Gardening Workshop

Our fall intensive organic gardening workshop will start on Sunday September 12th and go for 4 weeks, ending on Sunday October 3rd. It meets from 1-4 p.m. here is what we will cover:

Week 1 - Organic Gardening Foundations - Soil Food Web, composting, worm composting and nutrient cycling
Week 2 - Garden planning- What to plant, When to plant it and How to plant it
Week 3 - Pest control strategies - putting Mother Nature to work to control insects, diseases and weeds.
Week 4 - Incorporating Permaculture Strategies in your garden- Food forests, growing edible mushrooms, edible landscapes, rainwater harvesting

You can register by going here: http://fallorganicgardeningworkshop.eventbrite.com

Space is limited to 10 so don;t delay.

Planting Taters - Funny Farm Style

What do you do when you need to plant potatoes and the bed you need to plant them in is covered in weeds and sopping wet from the rain we've had every 5 days for the last 5 months? Why you resort to the Ruth Stout, lasagna, cardboard mulch, straw cage with a Funny Farm twist mashup method of course.
Here's what we did. First we made some cages out of some 2' tall chicken wire we had lying around. I wanted them to be 18" in diameter so using my math skills and what's left of my memory I dredged up the formula for the circumference of a circle and determined that we needed to cut 5' long pieces of wire. C=π d where C is the circumference and d is the diameter. See you school garden critics, you can learn math in the garden. Then we laced string that used to hold pinestraw bales together through the holes to make a tube of wire.

Next we spread horse manure lightly over the bed and covered it with cardboard to smother the weeds.Then we placed the wire cages on the cardboard in 2 staggered rows. We staked down every 4th one and tied all the tops together so they will remain in place. We didn't have enough cages to cover the whole area so I decided to plant a potato between each cage as well as inside each one. I reasoned that the cages will help hold the mulch even on the outside.

Next we cut a cross into the cardboard everywhere we wanted to plant a potato so the roots can go down into the soil below. We pushed a potato into the cardboard. Then we covered the potatoes with a shovel full of compost.


Finally we covered everything with 3-4 inches of leaves and pine needles my neighbors so kindly bagged up for me and put on the street. As the potato plants grow up 6" above the much I will add more mulch, leaving the top 3" of foliage exposed. This will stimulate the plants to produce tubers along the covered stems just as hilling with soil does. Being in the cages, it will possible to cover more of the stems as they grow producing more potatoes. Since we didn't have enough cages we planted half of the bed directly into the cardboard. We will be able to compare yields between the 2 methods.

We got our tubers from Your Dekalb Farmers Market a huge market nearby that stocks pretty much every kind of food available from all over the world. They had 6 varieties of organic potatoes. I got red, purple, Russian Banana fingerlings, French Red fingerlings and Buttercream. We left them on the shelf in the pantry for 5 days before planting and they were starting to sprout or chit. They were obviously eager to get on with the growing.
We shall see.

I Had a Heart Attack last Wednesday and I'm Glad I Did?

Yep, that's right I am glad I had a heart attack. You see, heart disease runs deep in our family. My mom had one. My grandfather had one. My uncle died from one when he was 45. My father died from one when he was 47. They call it a genetic predisposition. (They all smoked, drank, ate crap and never exercised however).
Starting when I was about 40 I began to live in fear of the inevitability of my dying of a heart attack in my mid 40's. Every time I had a touch of indigestion I would panic, feel my pulse expecting to fall over dead any second. I drove Robin crazy with this behavior. I went to a doctor and got a physical to see where I stood. I had high blood pressure and high colesterol. I also spent a lot of time in bars, and ate crappy food. I didn't smoke though (not yet anyway). I went on the standard regimen of drugs to lower my blood pressure and colesterol. I went to an alternative doctor who was a purported expert in nutrition to get some help. He took a lot of blood tests and sold me a bunch of expensive vitamins and other "nutritious" pills. After a few months I decided that the vitamins and stuff were not worth the expense so I stopped taking them but I continued on with the medicines.

And I continued to live in fear!

In the year 2000 I had my 47th birthday. Wow, that was a cause for celebration. As the years went by and I was still kicking the fear began to subside. But I have always thought that one day I would have a heart attack. (keep in mind that in 2000 the internet was just beginning to grow and access was primitive so getting good information was not easy at all). I continued getting yearly physicals and taking the prescribed drugs. I would start an exercise program for a while and promise myself to eat better but I was never committed to it.

I think it was in 2005 Robin and I started frequenting a new bar after work. This was a late night place so we were usually the only people there early so we got to know the hot young women who were the bartenders. Robin liked to smoke when she drank (I was always a vocal opponent). The bartenders were given Zippo lighters and when you bought a pack of cigarettes from them they put on an elaborate show of packing them, opening them, handing you one and lighting it for you. Great customer service! Who could resist that? So I would smoke a couple when we went there.. Long story short, I eventually became a smoker... with a pack a day habit.

So add smoking to my risk factors to complete the list!

About this time we started the community garden so my eating habits improved some and I was getting some exercise working in the garden. Then we moved to the Funny Farm and improved our eating habits even more. I was working hard in the gardens. I convinced myself, (got that? convinced myself...) that I could control my blood pressure and colesterol without the drugs. The drugs we causing muscle aches and fatigue. By 3 o'clock in the afternoon I needed a nap. It really sucked feeling like that every day so I decided that I would rather feel good and die early that feel like crap for 20 more years. So 2 years ago I stopped taking them and pretty soon I was feeling great. I decided that since I wasn't going to take the drugs there was no point in getting a physical any more. Shortly after that our business closed, we got different insurance through Robin's work so I had to find a new doctor which would be a pain in the ass so I didn't do it. This was a year ago.

Life was good!

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how I might actually live to be an old man. My best friend just had a baby and I was looking forward to experiencing her grow up. Some of you read my post a few weeks ago about the lessons I supposedly learned from Ma Nature as result of the closure of The Urban Gardener. Well, I obviously did not learn that lesson very well so Ma Nature decided she needed to resort to stronger measures to get it into my thick head. "Tomorrow never comes and the future does not exist".

So last Wednesday I had a heart attack. Why am I happy about that? I did not die! As I said, I always expected to have one and I always figured it would be horrible, mostly likely resulting in my death. I had a total blockage in a very small artery and partial blockage in a major artery going into my heart. They performed 2 angioplasties to open them up. In the large one they put a metal tube called a stent so now I have bionic parts. At night I'm pretty sure I can hear the voices of the others in the hive. "Resistance is futile" they are saying. No one discussed any options with me. They told me what they were going to do and then they did it. I did have a conversation with my sister who is a nurse and who had to deal with our mother's heart attack. I had told her of my decision to stop taking the drugs the year before. This time she told me to let them do whatever they thought was best so that's what I did.

Oddly I was never afraid during the whole ordeal. I felt I was in good hands at Emory Hospital and that I would most likely survive but if not there was nothing I could do about it. Right before the first angioplasty I did have a moment when I thought 2 things, one was that I might not get to experience Annabel growing up after all, and the other was that Robin hasn't completed my 6 week organic gardening workshop yet so she might not know how to grow her own vegetables.

After the procedures I was talking to my sister about it and she said I was like turning the clock back 2o years. What she meant was that it took a long time for those arteries to clog up so now that they are open it will take a long time to clog them back up again.Everybody in my family has always worried about the possibility of my dying of a heart attack so I guess this is kind of a relief for them in some ways too and hopefully a wake up call for my brother who is 11 years younger that me, fast approaching the magic number 47. And no Ma Nature I got the message now and I will changing my ways. And I know I could die from any number of causes at any time so I promise to live in the moment as much as possible.

It has been a week since this mess started. Physically I feel perfectly fine except for a fog in my head. I am back on those damn drugs again. I will take them for a while at least. I will consult with my doctor to figure out how to get off of them ASAP. I have a plan to develop new habits that will make it possible. Some parts will be easy, some harder.

Thank you family, blood kin and not blood kin, for putting up with me for all these years. I will try to do better.
And thanks to everyone else in the physical and virtual worlds for all the love and support you have given me through this.