Making great compost-it’s easy and free!

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spaghetti squash 080413Sorry if this picture looks a little dark-I snapped it this evening and should probably have taken it tomorrow morning in sun.  But it’s been over a week since my last post.  I’ve had a lot of friends and neighbors who have struggled with their gardens this year.  Even SFGers.  Of all the basics of the SFG, getting the soil right is probably the most important.  After the initial purchase of the mix ingredients you won’t ever have to buy them again-if you make your own compost.  Besides being a great medium to grow in(actually the best), a good blended and finished compost also helps you to control other things like bugs and critters.  It’s not the total answer but it’s just another resource of things you can do to help in that area.  Making compost properly at home will be better than anything you’ll ever buy in a store.  It won’t even be close.  You can notice the rich black soil that I’ve just added to this box.  You can see why they call it “black gold.”  It hasn’t been watered at all in this picture.  Even though the pepper plant(left hand corner)and the spaghetti squash plants are doing fine, this added boost of fertilizer will make it grow even bigger and stronger.  There’s not one tablespoon of dirt in this soil.  It’s all kitchen scraps, straw, horse manure, spent garden produce, and leaves left over from fall.  If you’d like to learn more of the specifics of my compost operation, I cover this topic in my ebook which you can find on my site.  I think my results speak for themselves.

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Vertical gardening

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banana squash at farm 072413A friend of mine let me use some land of his so I put together 10-4X4′ boxes. The best part of this was that it was all free, which I’ll talk about at a later date. This is banana squash grown vertically. Right now there is a huge squash in the lower left corner-it must weigh 15 pounds right now. There’s another one on the lower right hand side that’s not quit as big yet. Half way up, right in the middle, you can see another squash beginning to form. My guess is that I’ll have 4 or 5 squashes that totally around 60 pounds. It’s all held up by nylon netting that I’ve never had to replace. This location gives me an additional 80 squares for growing. We’ll end up storing this for the winter and it will last us until the end of February or mid-March.

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Summer lettuce, lettuce, and more lettuce

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july 20, 2013 lettuce mixI’ve written a lot about growing your own lettuce right through the hottest months of the summer. Here’s a picture of a nice mix of salad greens that’s been grown in temperatures of 95+ for the last 3 weeks. If you do nothing to your lettuce in this weather two things will happen. First, it stops growing-almost in hibernation stage. Second, the plant will turn bitter. I’m working on my second ebook in which this will be the subject-how to grow great tasting lettuce in hot weather. It’s almost complete and should be around 20-25 pages in length. I’ve had great success doing this for many years using 4 or 5 techniques which I’ll be sharing. All with nice looking picture along the way. This thing about paying $2.50 or more for an organically grown head of lettuce doesn’t have to be. I’ll show you how to do it for pennies, and how to do it right through temperatures that otherwise make it virtually impossible to do so. It will be very cheap-$3.99. That’s a small price to pay to learn how to do it right. I’ve found some good practical advice on the internet about this, but I’ve been able to add 2 or 3 additional techniques that I do to make it even more likely that you’ll produce a non-bitter tasting head of lettuce during the summer months. I hope you’ll give it a look when it’s here.[ois skin=”below post”]

Fall planting schedule-what, when, and how?

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cross view of covered garden in summerOne of the best ways I’ve seen in figuring out what to grow, when to start it, and what to plant is the crop scheduler from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Besides having the best things on the planet(personal view), they are outstanding at support. Just plug in your average first frost date and you’ll see when you should start, what you should start, and how to do it-either with transplants or direct seeding. You can read all about it here.  You’ll see the planting calendar on the right hand side of the page.  By planting the right crops for the right season you eliminate a lot of headaches-like trying to grow tomatoes in weather that’s too cold.  Or spinach in the summer.  Cold weather and frost isn’t too far away-it’s time to start planning if you want a great fall garden and harvest.  I’ve still got plenty of lettuce(in terribly warm weather)coming on, along with chard, tomatoes, peppers,  zucchini, squashes, carrots, basil, parsely, chives, corn, and beets among other things.  All of these-with the exception of lettuce-love the warm weather.  I’ve had to do some extra work with the lettuce to keep it from tasting bitter(more on that the next post), and going to seed, but it’s easy work.  I’ve got some fall square foot garden classes to teach coming up in the next few weeks in order to help others get ready for the fall season.  I hope you can experience the success and the taste of a fresh brussel sprout pulled right off the stem-along with all the other great fall crops.

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Growing zucchini vertically

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vertical zucchini 071013We all love zucchini. If we let it, it would become a huge plant that takes up a lot of space. Though this is a vine variety(black beauty)I train my up to grow vertically. I’ve been doing this for years and the greatest part is that it takes up only 1 square foot. Last I counted, I’ve got 3 black beauty plants growing-one right next to a different kind of squash. I might have made a mistake on that one, we’ll have to wait and see. We’ve been able to harvest about half a dozen zucchini’s so far and it’s just now starting to really produce. I think they taste better when they are smaller so I pull mine when they are about 8 inches long. If you look close enough you’ll be able to see a zucchini sticking straight up in the air. This particular plant is growing up on a green t-post, but other squashes and zucchini are growing up on all kinds of things-from electrical conduit to PVC. It all works…

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