What's In The Garden, Anyway?

Time for a role call...

Tomatoes -
Early Girl x4
Yellow Pear x2
Bloody Butcher x2
Mr. Stripey x1
Yellow Cherry x1

Purple Pole Beans
Kentucky Pole Beans
Sugar Peas
Salad Bowl Lettuce
Bibb Lettuce
Raddichio
Spinach
Red Beets
Yellow Beets
Crookneck Squash
Zucchini Squash
Sweet Corn

Basil
Oregano
Thai Basil
Sage
Thyme
Cilantro

Weed Gehenna

My eleven year-old son Reid is the anointed "hole-digger" of our household. If I need a hole dug, Reid is "da boy". All I need to tell him is where, how big, how deep, and a few minutes or hours later, it's dug (He also pockets a little cash in the process).

Last year, I built five planters. Four were built and put into service - the fifth was built later in the season, and actually a little too late to be useful. But in preparation for the planter, a hole needed to be dug. Reid was in business!

My planter installation goes something like this. The planters I build are uniform, and are 4' x 8' x 12" high. I use two 2" x 6" boards for the siding, which gives me an effective planter soil depth about 9" above ground level. Since certain plant roots can penetrate the soil beyond the 9" depth, I dig out the soil about 18" below ground level and mix my amendments (compost, pre-composted plant material, sand, etc.) in with the native soil. This gives me a nice, deep loam for those deep rooted plants.

Well, the location of the fifth hole Reid dug turned out to be too shady to make a decent planter... so I ended up with this nice little pit near my fence line. Hmmm. What should I do with this? It was too far away from our back door to be a cozy fire pit - our neighbors have a great fire pit, where they roast hot dogs and marshmallows, but it is less than 20' from their back door - this hole was a good 100+' from mine, and it was in a garden area, not a patio. Should I fill it back in? I wasn't sure I wanted to pay to fill it (cheapskate!), and I certainly didn't want to do the back-breaking labor myself for naught. Besides, the soil exhumed from the hole is sandy, and could be used for filling one of my other planters if need be.

As I was weeding my non-growing areas over this past weekend, I noticed I was creating a nice bale of weed debris, and then it struck me - I could use the hole to make a "weed gehenna"!

What is a "weed gehenna"?

In the gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verses 43-48, Jesus is talking with His disciples about hell, which He used the word "gehenna". In hell [gehenna], "the worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched" (verse 44, NASB).

The word "gehenna" was derived from an actual place outside of the walled city of Jerusalem, whic was a refuse pile for trash, dead animals, etc. In other words, it was a dump. The fires of gehenna burned on, smouldering and seemingly without end, and the worms helped the decomposition process along. You could say (or at least I could!) that gehenna was like a giant compost pile.

I like compost piles. You can take plant matter, manure, a little moisture, and after a little time has passed, voila! Compost! In layman's terms (since I couldn't give a biological explanation, anyway), the moisture causes the plant and other matter to heat up (the microscopic things start a feeding frenzy, eating away at the food source), and when things cool down, the worms get involved, also eating up the food source. The heat and the worms digest the vegetation and other matter, turning it into black gold - nutrient-rich compost.

So, my hole is a "weed gehenna" - a compost pile, where the worm does not die, and the fire (heat) is not quenched!

The Inland Northwest vs. The San Joaquin Valley

Comparisons are inevitable. In basketball, it's Kobe vs. LeBron. Football - Peyton Manning vs. Tom Brady. Gonzaga vs. Wazzou. Marsha Brady vs. Laurie Partridge.

(huh?)

As far as gardening is concerned, how do I compare my current home (Newman Lake) with my old one (Fresno)?

What I miss about Fresno:

1) The early Spring - February (Believe it! On some occasions, plum trees would be blooming in January! One year I kept a journal, and I was picking tomatoes at the end of May! Up here, I'm lucky to plant my tomatoes by the end of May!)

2) The hot summers that really kick the squash, peppers, and melons (Last year in Newman Lake, I grew - well, tried to grow - cantaloupe and watermelon. I ended up with tennis-ball sized melons!)

3) The Fall (Sometimes, Fresno gets an Indian Summer where October doesn't turn cool until late and stays in the 80's and even the 90's. Gardens keep on producing.)

What I don't miss about Fresno:

1) The air (whoops, not a gardening topic! Let's try again.)

1) Hardpan (I don't miss the feeling of the shovel head stopping like it hit concrete 6" below the surface. I don't miss the barren alkali soil that can't grow anything but scrub brush, either).

2) White flies (I almost forgot about them. They are little moths that are smaller than mosquitos, but are everywhere. They coat everything with a sticky goo that is awful, and actually causes millions of $$$ of damage to the cash crops. If a hard freeze doesn't hit, they live happily through Winter, too.)

3) Regular flies (I hate flies. In October, in Fresno, when the weather starts to change, the flies start congregating all over the houses, literally walking vertically and upside-down on the walls and eaves, and not flying. It's like they know Armageddon is coming. Ugh.)

4) The lack of winter (Because there isn't a hard, lengthy freeze, the bugs never go away. And, it just gets foggy. Snow can be fun. Fog is not.)

What I like about Newman Lake

1) The Summers (This is cool crop paradise - lettuce and other leafy greens thrive here. And, it is pleasant to work in the garden when it's not 100 outside.)

2) The soil (The sandy soil is easy to work with - once you get the rocks out! - and you can build it up with amendments. No comparison to the dreaded hardpan.)

3) The Summers, part II (It gets light at 4am, and doesn't get dark until 9:30 - plenty of time to work on the garden.)

4) It Rains! (Yes, it rains up here, giving you a reprieve from watering. It almost never rains in Fresno.)

What I don't like about Newman Lake

1) The short growing season (Unless you are greenhouse-equipped, you won't pick a tomato or a pepper until late-July or August)

2) The lack of flies (Kidding!)

In terms of straight miles, Spokane is about 760 miles from Fresno - it is driveable in a day. But in terms of gardening, it is amazing the effect this distance has. I wonder what kind of growing season they have in Hay River in the Northwest Territories (due North of Spokane by about 920 miles)? By comparison, Lancaster is about 900 miles due South of Spokane, and not much different climate wise from Fresno.

Maybe Newman Lake has a lengthy growing season after all...

I Wanna Rock! (Well, no I don't)

In the words of the immortal Dee Snider, lead singer of Twisted Sister...

"I Wanna Rock!"

Well, Dee, you never lived in or around Spokane, did you??

Rock, around here in Spokane, means rocks. Everywhere. The soil is full of them. Big rocks, medium sized rocks, small rocks, pebbles. Drive around, and you see stacks of rocks. Rocks lining the landscape. Rocks are the landscape. There is even a place on Harvard road and Trent that sells rocks! Even Calvin the Manure Man's compost is full of them!

(Calvin is a real farmer just down the road from me, and he boards horses. He has a pretty good supply of manure, and he works it in with green matter, turns it, and it makes really nice compost. However, his compost has a few rocks in it. Like everything else that resembles dirt around here.)

Last year, when I blended Calvin's compost into my planter boxes, I pulled out the bigger rocks (those that were 3" and up), and lived with what I had. This year, I decided to clean up my boxes and screen them out.

I built a 2x2 screen using 2"x4" redwood and 1/4" hardware cloth. The screen worked great - it filtered out all but the smallest rocks, as well as any other foreign matter, and it fluffed up the compost too.

BUT, screening out one 4'x8'x12" planter worth of soil is quite a job, much less for five planters!

"Organic-Like" Gardening

I am an "organic-like" gardener. What on earth is "organic-like"? It's 100% organic, but I can't prove it's "certified organic", so in deference to those who are "certified organic" , I'll be content with calling it "organic-like".

I use composted manure as my soil supplement. My redwood planters have a soy-based stain, so there is no leaching of whatever back into my garden soil, and I would NEVER use pressure-treated wood (or old railroad ties) for my planters. I strategically plant catch-crops to attract certain bugs and repel others. I have a literal worm garden in each of my planters that carried over from last year. I only use natural and organic fertilizers (bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion). I don't use any herbicide in my planters (I do use a little Roundup on the perimeters of the compound to get rid of rhizome grasses, but most weed reduction is done mechanically). I don't use ANY pesticides in my garden area (and am not really fond of them for other uses). Someday, I hope to have an organic, thriving lawn - I'm in my first year of experimenting with a Microclover (R) mixture planted in a small area, and if my wife approves, I'll re-seed everything.

Living in the San Joaquin Valley as a kid in the 60's and 70's, there was no such thing as organic. Farmers sprayed, and sprayed, and sprayed. And it worked... sort of. The bugs went away. Weeds disappeared. Ground spraying, aerial spraying, hand spraying, you name it, they sprayed it.

When I was about 3-4 years old (circa 1965), we had bugs everywhere. Dragonflies, praying mantis, ladybugs, stink bugs (beetles). We had an irrigation canal next to our house, and canals tend to spawn all kinds of bugs. One of my favorite activities could be called "whack-a-dragonfly". Armed with a flyswatter (there were lots of flies, and my mom must have had a dozen flyswatters in the house), around dusk I would go out to the front yard. Dragonflies were buzzing around everywhere. I would chase them, flailing my flyswatter at them to knock them down and step on them. It was truly a noble sport for a 4 year-old! (It probably led me into my youthful passion for tennis a few years later).

I don't know just when the spraying began in earnest, but it wasn't long after that when I noticed the dragonflies disappeared. By the time I was 10, I don't remember any at all. And the mantis were disappearing, too. I used to see their egg-cases everywhere, and in the springtime, these TINY mantis would crawl out and start looking for gnats to eat. It was cool!

By the time I was a teenager, only the flies were left, it seemed.

One time my dad, growing weary of all of the flies around the house, came up with a unique solution to rid them.

We had a field next to our house (probably alfalfa) that was in need of crop dusting. Alfalfa attracted butterflies, which would lay eggs in the alfalfa, hatching furry caterpillars that loved to eat the alfalfa. As a young boy under 10 years old, I remember seeing those caterpillars everywhere, and they were really cool to squish because they had these greenish-yellow innards that were alien-esque. From a farmers perspective, though, they were more than a nuisance - they were lost profits. The answer? Spray, spray, spray!

Back to the flies. Whatever pesticide they used to kill the caterpillars, it wasn't selective - it killed many-a-bug. Even the good bugs, like praying mantis, ladybugs, it didn't matter. The mindset then was KILL 'EM ALL!

So my dad's reasoning probably went something like this:

1) The crop duster will be spraying the field for bugs;
2) Flies are bugs;
3) The house is next to the field;
4) The crop duster flies over the house;
5) The crop duster can release the spray over the house;
6) The flies die!

That was how it was in the 60's and 70's (well, maybe not the aerial spraying of your home - although Gov. Jerry Brown did order aerial spraying of the dreaded Medfly in the San Jose area in the early 80's). Shell Pest Strips hung on the eaves of the house (I think we even had some inside the house, too). We had metal hand pump-sprayers that held Raid with DDT for household spraying. We didn't know any better.

It's no wonder we have had such an explosion of cancer, kidney, liver and other chronic diseases in the post-WWII generations.

So, thanks to reading some of J.I. Rodale's (and others) literature about ten or so years ago on organic gardening, I decided to "go organic". Or in my case, "organic-like".

Raised bed Genesis - The Summer of 2008

I had planted conventional gardens over the years - till the dirt, form the rows, plant the seeds (or baby plants), water the rows, weed, Weed, WEED, and eventually pick my bounty. That's gardening, or so I thought.

We moved up to the Inland Northwest in 2003, to Coeur d'Alene Idaho, and in 2006, we moved to Newman Lake Washington (a mile or so over the Idaho border). We moved into a large home on an acre, and the prior owners had this really cool chain-link fenced-off area they used for a garden. Because deer and other critters tend to munch on anything that looks good, the old owners wisely set-aside this area and critter-proofed it.

Our first summer here, my daughter Emma hankered for a garden, so she went forth a-planting. She made rows this way and that way, planting vegetables and flowers from seed and small plants. The morning glory and all the other indiginous weeds grew as well, competing with the good plants for food and water. Soon, the garden was overgrown and the battle was lost. I do recall eating a couple of pear tomatoes that summer, but not much else.

2007 was a gardening sabbatical for us - my job held a lot of travel and I was in the thick of working on a Master's degree, and no one had the burning desire to plant a garden (or really, weed, water, weed, Weed, WEED).

2008 was a new year. I had a new job with no travel, my Master's was finished in April, and I had the gardening bug, but this time I was introduced to the idea of RAISED BED GARDENING! That's right, container gardening! What a great idea - build some wooden beds, add soil, and grow plants without weeds! NO WEEDING! GARDENING COULDN'T GET ANY BETTER THAN THIS!!!

So I started Googling "raised planters" and found a design that looked great (from Sunset Magazine, I believe). 4' x 8' redwood planters. Just build 'em, stain 'em, fill 'em with soil, scatter seed and plant plants, and all was good. During a warm spell in May, I built four of them and stuck them in the compound, bought some tomato plants and some seeds, and made me a garden!

The problem was that Winter hung around too long, Spring really didn't come until late June when Summer was supposed to show up (it snowed on June 1st), and Summer didn't come around until mid-July. My poor tomato plants looked miserable until after the Fourth of July - they were purple, had little growth, and just didn't look right. Excepting the HoopFest weekend in late June (and it always heats up in the 90's for HoopFest), the temps were in the 60's and rarely got above the mid-70's during the whole month of June, and the nights were still in the 40's! Bad, bad BAD for tomatoes and most everything else I was trying to grow. Only the lettuce was really enjoying this "global warming".

I finally picked a regular tomato in August, and considering all of the plants I planted, I had a pitiful harvest. In fact, many of the tomatoes I planted from 4-packs didn't even produce a single ripe tomato! The best results came from those plants that were in 4" and 6" containers (so this year, 2009, I only bought 4" and 6" tomatoes). I ended up picking and ripening quite a few green tomatoes, as things were shutting down by early October.

The Summer of 2008 is now known by all local gardeners to have been one lousy growing season, one of the worst on record. Fortunately, that first season did not break me, as I regrouped and started with great visions of a bountiful 2009!

More to come...

A Farmer Has to Farm

I enjoy farming - more so now that when I was actually a "farmer". Once upon a time, I drove tractors, set siphon pipes, raked and baled alfalfa, drove a pickup (well, still do), pruned trees, picked fruit... you get the picture.

Over my post-farming life, I have planted a few gardens. Why? Because there is nothing quite like the taste of a vine-ripened tomato. But what about those "vine-ripened tomatoes" sold at Safeway (or Albertsons, or Save Mart, or Yokes)? Ha! They are NOT even close! And turnips? Ohhhh, there is no comparison. Every turnip I have bought at a store is the same - large, woody, dried-out and quite frankly, not very good. But taste one fresh out of the garden... tart, juicy, YUM!!!

Corn is sugar-sweet when it's fresh-picked. Peas - oh BABY! Squash are buttery, mild and delicious. The list goes on and on...

Growing a garden is one of those glorious hobbies that most anyone can do, it's not particularly hard as long as you plan things out, and you reap rewards that you can eat.

This blog is about my journey as a raised-bed vegetable gardener in the Inland Northwest. I'll share my own experiences, hunches, and opinions about farming in 4' x 8' redwood planter boxes. I'm also very interested in hearing from other "4 x 8 farmers"!