Large scale gardening for the small suburban yard!

Gardening is fun! And it's much more fun when you don't have to weed, mulch, hoe, and double-dig. How do we get around that, you ask? It's simple! Square Foot Gardening!

This is a beautiful little design based on the idea that planting in rows (for the gardener, not the farmer) is for the birds. In short, it wastes valuable soil space and makes way more work. And who wants that? So instead, you cordon off your garden into chunks. In his book, aptly entitled "Square Foot Gardening", my buddy Mel uses 4x4 foot beds. Mine are 4x8. The basic idea is that you don't want your bed wider than 4 feet, so that you can reach into the middle easily (unless you have arms built like an orang-utan, in which case go as wide as your hairy arms can reach).

Then you divide up your bed into square foot sections. Dear Mel has already gone through the hard work of figuring out how many plants you can put in each square foot.  So in a traditional garden, you would make a long furrow, dump in a random amount of carrot seeds, then thin the extras. In Mel's method, you make 16 little holes in the ground, put one seed in each hole, et voila! Perfectly spaced carrots. 

It's amazing what you can fit in 1 square foot. You can also fit 16 beets, 9 beans,  or 1 tomato or broccoli plant. Large plants like zucchinis tend to be little piggies and require at least 4 per plant. Technically in my 3 beds I could fit 1536 carrots. With that, my night vision had better be laser-sharp! Or 96 tomato plants. Bring on the salsa!

Here are 4 benefits of square foot gardening.

1) It looks spiffy. Maybe that's a little obsessive, but it really looks way cuter when all the cockleshells are neatly lined up in rows!

2) Less weeding. Because there's no transition space (like paths), there is little opportunity for weeds. And I've found the weeds that do make it through are easy to pull out because the ground isn't compacted from being walked on.

3) Less seedling wastage. As per the earlier thinning example, you don't waste as many seeds. Also, this makes it easy to decide exactly how many seedlings to start or buy. I know I have 96 squares, so I can plan accordingly.

One thing I do differently from how it's normally practiced, is that I don't use a permanent latticework to make the squares. I like to be able to incorporate compost and dig up stuff easily in fall, which is a job fit only for the truly insane when you have to do it one square at a time. So my magnifique husband put together this little setup:

I have to re-string the twine every year, but it only take 10 minutes. 

And that's the square foot garden. You can officially say you know what it is now!

Diary of a Garden Mosquito

May 1: 
Happy May Day! I emerged from my pupa this morning and boy do I ever feel GREAT! Mom named me Female #135, or F135 for short. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the number 135, isn't that the perfect name?!! My mom is so sweet. And my brothers and sisters absolutely swarmed me when I came out. There is so much love here. 

May 2: 
I am suddenly incredibly hungry. Mom says I need to leave home and find some food. We had a really emotional parting, in which we touched antennae and said that we'd remember each other for our whole lives and she promised never to name another daughter F135. So I zoomed off with a tear in my compound eyes.

May 3: 
Almost got murdered today!!! I had found this luscious piece of skin to pierce and was pleasantly enjoying my meal, when WHAMMO! This giant beast came out of nowhere and just about turned me into skin-kill! I just about jumped out of my proboscis. It's a good thing I was able to disengage quickly and zoom away or there's no telling what that animal might have done to me and my beautiful body. 

May 4: 
I'm getting really hungry. There's so much deet around here, I can barely breathe! Everytime I get the scent of a juicy carbon-dioxide emitting human, I lose it in the confusion of the deet smell. It's horrendous. 

May 5: 
Heard through the fruit-vine that there's better pickings down south. More people + less deet = munchies for mama! I'm really feeling the itch to start a family, and I NEED some serious bloodmeal. 

May 7: 
Made it to Mexico! Or at least I think it's Mexico. The people here are much easier to spot. WAY less deet interfering with my radar. 

May 8: 
Found a free lunch today! This little human was just laying around, so I grabbed a few meals off of it. Such delicious blood. Think I might mate tomorrow, getting kind of excited, but my wings are a little sweaty and I have a weird feeling like something is walking around in my stomach. Or maybe that's from the little human I was feeding on today. It really did not look well, hope it didn't make me sick. 

May 9: 
Mating was fun. 

May 10: 
Found another little human to feed on. Boy are they easy targets - they don't hit back nearly as quick as the big ones do! 

May 12: 
Almost ready to lay my eggs! I'm going to be a mother!! I'M GOING TO BE A MOTHER!! So.excited. I hope I have a little female I can name F135 to carry on the name my mother gave me.

May 13: 
While I was flying around scoping out a good soggy spot to lay my eggs, I spotted the little human from 3 days ago, and now that one was just laying around too. So weird, cuz I didn't think fed THAT much on it. Hope it's ok. I would feel terrible if my little mosquitoes got sick, so I'm sure that little human's mother is feeling sad too. 

May 17: 
My eggs have hatched into the most ADORABLE larvae you have ever seen! Seriously, SO cute.

May 18: 
Went back to my little human lunch buddy today and couldn't reach it! There was this terrible screen in the way, and there was no way around it! The little human looked like he had a lot more energy too, so I was disgruntled to find my favourite picnic spot inaccessible. 

~~~~~~

So. Mosquitoes. I don't know anyone that likes them and I just read online (so it MUST be true) that lots of scientists think that it wouldn't even make a negative difference in the world if we eradicated them completely. Here in Canada, they're merely an annoyance, and rarely do they carry any major disease. I hate them when I go out gardening in the evenings, but really, I can avoid them just by going inside. We also have the option of about ten thousand various deet products to help confuse mosquitoes and keep them away from us. 

But in countries where it's warm year-round, mosquitoes can be deadly. Perhaps you recognized in the little story that our dear F135 had picked up malaria from one child and passed it onto another. This happens countless of times every day, all over the world. This disease is preventable and treatable, yet it kills 655 000 children every year. Yes, that's over half a million children. Children who are loved by their mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, and communities. 

Why is that, you ask? Why can't they just slap on some deet or buy a mosquito net from the corner store? 

That, my friends is poverty. Unable to get the products you need to prevent your own children from getting and dying from diseases. Is your heart bleeding yet? Mine is! 

So here's what you can do. Go to Compassion Canada's Malarian Donation page, and make a donation. $5, $50, $500, whatever you can do. The money you donate goes towards Compassion's efforts to educate about, prevent, and treat this disease. 

And here's an unexpected benefit: female mosquitoes require blood for their eggs. Perhaps if we frustrate enough F135s by covering every child with a mosquito net, they'll die off without creating further generations! Slow extinction baby, slow extinction.

PS, if you do make a donation, would you pop back here an leave a comment so others can be encouraged? You don't need to share how much, just that you did it!

Memories of grade 9...

There is still a ton of snow in the backyard, but I don't care because 

I can see my dirt! 

Dirt, dirt, wonderful dirt. Or not-so-wonderful in this case. The soil in my original two raised beds seem to be turning into a lovely loamy soil, but the stuff I bought to put in my new bed last year was TERRIBLE. Note to anyone who is considering buying the soil from Canadian Tire - don't! I had looked it up and based on the description, it seemed very nice and was a good price. Unfortunately, what it didn't say on the bag was that it was mostly peat moss, not the nice soil mixture that I had been led to believe. 

After putting in my 30 bags of soil, I therefore ended up with a whole bed full of nutritionally-defunct, environmentally debatable peat moss. Ugh. Barely anything grew there last year. I had corn that was 1.5 feet tall, lettuce that never passed an inch, and pumpkins with horrific powdery mildew. 

So now that I can dig in the soil a bit, my son and I did some science experiments! We did PH and Nutrient testing this weekend with the little nutrient test kit I picked up. 

Low and behold, the PH was under 6 (meaning it was quite acidic) and there was little-to-no nitrogen or phosphorus. This was compared against my test bed (the older one), which had a PH of 7 (neutral), and generally sufficient amounts of each major nutrient.

This is the better one. Isn't it pretty?

So I guess it's time to get some lime (for the PH) and then a nice big load of compost! The new bed gets so much sun, I'd hate to waste that space for another year. 

On another note, here's my 20-month-old who finally was allowed to use the coveted watering can. :)

Little guys can help too!

Fertilizer fun, part 1

For the longest time I wondered what the big deal was about fertilizers. Sure, pesticides are harmful chemicals that can do untold damage to our bodies, but honesty, nitrogen is nitrogen no matter whether it comes from organic compost or MiracleGro. What's the big deal with fertilizers?

I wondered, that is, until I started seeing something over and over. Fertilizer run-off from farms is killing life in our waterways and lakes. I heard on CBC news last month that Lake Eerie is, for the second time since the 60s, being pronounced dead. All the fertilizers from nearby farms were leaching into runoff and accumulating in the lake, which caused massive algal blooms. This algae takes all the oxygen out of the lake in order to grow so much, which causes all the original plants and animals in the lake to die of asphyxiation. That leaves us with a lake of slime. Sounds delicious doesn't it?

I'm not the only one to notice this trend. The UN recently had a forum based on exactly this topic - how mass inputs of fertilizers have "caused a web of water and air pollution that is damaging human health, causing toxic algal blooms, killing fish, threatening sensitive ecosystems and contributing to climate change." The UN itself is suggesting that whole world improve their "nutrient use efficiency" by 20%. That's pretty big.

But why should I care if fish are dying in a lake on the other side of the country?

Why should I care if the produce I buy causes irreversible pollution to a waterway far away in Chile?

Why care? Because this affects PEOPLE. My fellow human beings are unable to catch fish to supplement their incomes and diet, which means they are less able to feed themselves. It causes them to become dependent on food programmes and other subsidized food sources, which not only takes resources from other parts of the world, but it degrades them and takes away their self-worth because they are no longer capable of feeding their families.

That, my friends, is POVERTY.

So what can YOU do about this web of destruction that causes others to live in poverty?

You can encourage the growth of organic farms by buying organic whenever possible. Organic farms don't use chemical inputs, and their whole way of looking at farming is (generally) quite different from a "normal", monoculture farm. You can vote for change with your dollars.

Because sometimes the food that is cheapest is not the best - for you, for your children, for the planet, or for our fellow human beings.

I realize not everyone can spend a couple hundred bucks extra a month on groceries. But you might find that there are other things you can do without, leaving you a few extra dollars for things like grass-fed beef, organic produce, and other food choices that have a positive impact on the world, rather than a negative one.

I plead with you to give it try.