Author: sjct

In previous diaries, we have discussed what to plant, when to plant and how much to plant. Today’s topic is where to plant. It’s time to pull out a pad of graph paper (or open a graphics program) and diagram what goes where.

In a row garden, it’s easy to figure out what goes where. Generally, the rows are laid out on an East/West axis and the tall plants go in the North and the short stuff goes in the South. It’s an orderly progression from corn to pole beans, tomato plants to bush beans, on down to onions and carrots in front. There’s a tidy linear logic to it but problems arise from always putting the same plants in the same rows year after year. Various grubs, nematodes, bacteria and fungi build up in the soil just waiting for their annual feast.  Also, different plants deplete or nourish the soil differently and start out needing different types of soil mixtures. Uniformly, tilling and fertilizing the whole garden bed to a 6.0-7.0 pH doesn’t take into account that potatoes, for instance, prefer acidic soil more in the 5.0-5.5 range. Rosemary wants a dry soil while lettuce wants its roots to stay moist.

The organic gardening solution is to put plants in beds, preferably deep and raised, group plants according to their affinities and rotate the beds annually. John Seymour uses four rotating beds:

Plot A for Miscellaneous plants like squash, tomatoes, peppers, and salad greens

Plot B for Root crops like carrots, celery, fennel, and onions

Plot C for Potatoes

Plot D for peas, beans and brassica (the “cabbage tribe” that includes Brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, turnips and such).

To round out a self-sufficient garden, one would also have permanent beds for perennial vegetables like asparagus and globe artichokes, a bed for small fruits like raspberries and blueberries, a perennial herb bed and a small orchard if you have the land.

The rotation moves A to B, B to C, C to D, and D to A. Seymour has some sound reasons behind his scheme. Peas and Beans “fix” nitrogen in the soil, that is, they build up the soil’s natural ability to generate its own. Potatoes crave nitrogen so sending them in after the beans makes sense. The Miscellaneous plants deplete nitrogen so putting in the peas after them balances the soil without requiring too much added compost.

Eliot Coleman in The New Organic Grower has a much more complex rotation model that involves a ten year rotation. He goes from beans to carrots, onions to greens, potatoes to corn, peas to broccoli, squashes and cucumbers to tomatoes and peppers and on back to corn. He uses index cards to keep it all straight in his mind!

Mel Bartholomew of Square Foot Gardening fame makes it all so much simpler by saying you just don’t plant beans in the same place you just harvested beans because of seasonal limits. “The Blocks that held summer crops are the ones that will be ready for fall soil preparation and early planting next spring. Blocks that still hold fall crops won’t be ready for planting until next summer, so the same crops will not be planted in them.” He shuts the whole garden down during the winter with a crop of rye grass and tills it under in early spring.

Personally, I tend to combine Seymour’s groupings with Bartholomew’s patchwork approach because I always want more Miscellaneous goods than Roots and cabbages. If I devoted an entire bed to Roots I’d have more carrots and onions than I could ever use.  So it’s important for me to keep a record of what goes where, anticipate its harvest date and then decide what goes in after it. This brings me back to graph paper…

I used Corel Draw to lay out diagrams of my eight beds divided by a grid marked in six-inch squares. I shrunk this down to fit on a letter-sized sheet of paper. At the top of the page the “Time Period” is stated.  Referring to my Excel-generated Planting Schedule, I see that during the first period, from 2/7-2/16, I should be putting in onions, turnips, collards, and starting staggered plantings of spinach and peas.  Converting row yields to Bartholomew’s square foot plantings, I know how many square feet of each plant I need to supposedly produce the yield I want. For example, I figure 8 squares of onions planted 16 per square ought to give us enough onions to make it thru until the winter onion harvest early next spring.

Plot A will host the spinach seeds and will later be joined by lettuces. Plot B will get the onions at one end; carrots, shallots, garlic, and leeks will be added when their time comes. Plot C will get potato slips during the second planting period. And Plot D will be set up with mesh fencing to support the peas as they are planted. I’ve planned and printed out the ten sheets for the first hundred days of my growing season. After the Early potatoes are pulled, the tomato plants will go in after them.  After the peas are harvested, squashes and peppers will follow them. These ten sheets are now in a binder and will be scrawled all over when I’m done with the names of the varieties I use, the actual plant and harvest dates and any notes I make about the pests they attract and what I did to control them. This information will be vital when I sit down to plan next year.

Construction Update: Even with the use of heavy machinery, there was a lot of manual labor involved and we only dug six beds and got one truckload each of topsoil and manure. We partly framed three beds and have three more to go. The rain held off and by Monday morning we were two tired old people in extreme muscle pain. We’ll try to finish the framing in the evenings before the rains come again this weekend. Hubby is going to build a frame with hardware cloth to shift the topsoil and mix in manure before we add it to the framed beds. I don’t really need the last two beds until the end of March so we may do them manually if the weather allows.  Or, we may rent the digger for a half day and do both of them without hurting ourselves as much. It really depends on whether the rain lets up enough to dry out the soil…  And, we all know that come July, I’m going to be begging for rain. Gardeners are never satisfied with the weather.

Thru the weekend, as we worked, we discussed whether or not we really, truly have to cut down the pecan tree. It will block the morning sun but the afternoon sun, for at least five hours, shines on the beds. That will not be good enough. We also discussed the prevailing winds, which come from the southwest at 10-15mph and sometimes gust over 25mph. So the current decision is the pecan tree is coming down but we will replace it with a line of ten Leland Cypress along the southwestern corner of our property. These will break the wind but be far enough away from the garden to not be a shade problem for, oh, twenty or thirty years. We’ll be dead by then, of course.

It rained almost every other day last week and all of this weekend. After two dry days in a row, I went out last Friday and tried to trench another bed. The ground was still so wet that it was like trying to move half-set concrete. Every little shovel load weighed 20+ pounds. It had not been this hard to finish the bed DH had started — an area two feet by 12 feet long! After an hour and a half, I only trenched an area four feet by three feet and was drenched in sweat. I felt like a wimp but I knew I couldn’t do it. On February 7th, I intend to start planting and need more beds. When the asparagus roots arrive next week, I’ve got a place for them. But where will I put my onion sets and peas and spinach and the potatoes after that?

It finally stopped raining yesterday and is not expected to rain again until Saturday or Sunday. DH decided to take Friday off to help me get this job done.  It is possible that the ground will be dry enough by Friday for us to dig. It is not possible that two old people can dig seven beds in one day…

Most of you should have realized by now that DH is a jack-of-all-trades. So tomorrow morning we are renting a Kubota B21 back-hoe with a box blade front loader. It’s a wicked earth-mover that will scrape the sod off of a 4′ x 12′ bed in one pass. The back-hoe will trench the same area in two passes.

After trenching the beds and lining their bottoms with sod, the topsoil will be box loaded on top. After that we will load up the Kubota on its trailer and drive down the road to a pile of topsoil offered by a neighbor. We need to fill in a couple of low-lying areas in the yard and around the house and may need extra topsoil for the beds. DH will use the Kubota to load the back of his pick-up truck, we’ll drive it home and shovel it into a pile and repeat until DH thinks we’ve got enough.

Then, we’ll head over to our friendly stable owner and collect the remainder of his hills of decomposed horse manure in much the same way, driving back and forth with the truck. Whatever doesn’t get used in the beds will be added to our compost pile.

We’ve got a few high-powered halogen lights and DH is prepared to work after dark, if need be, dumping alternate box loads of topsoil and manure into the beds. The Kubota will not do all the work. Both of us will be shoveling out the truck beds full of topsoil and manure that the Kubota loads as we make those numerous trips back and forth. It’s going to be a marathon and when it starts raining on Saturday we will probably take to our bed and not get out again until Monday morning.

Here’s an image of the Garden Before…

Off in the background you can see our neighbor’s house and outbuildings. He’s the fellow who owns the catfish ponds behind us — and many more acres of cotton and cornfields. DH’s long-term dream of owning a milk cow depends upon leasing the cotton field behind us and turning it into pasture.

You’ll also notice a lonely pecan tree at the back end that needs to be cut down before it leafs and throws a large shadow over my garden ambitions. It lost its mate a few years ago and now only produces tiny “stints.” Fortunately, DH has a chain saw and knows how to cut down trees. Besides, on the other side of the house, we have two other mated pecan trees that still produce huge, healthy nuts. The wood from that one pecan tree will keep us in firewood all of next winter.

Here’s an image of what the “Construction Zone” looks like since I’ve staked out the beds.

I took the liberty of photo-shopping the stakes red so they can be more easily seen. I may have to do this in real life as well — with a paintbrush — for my husband’s benefit. The asparagus bed is in the foreground, left. We still haven’t put the ends on it because there will be more tilling to do. After adding the horse manure the soil now needs some lime and potash to get back into that magical 6.0-7.0 pH window. Since the frames aren’t bolted together, we will always be able to remove the ends when we need to till. In theory, that shouldn’t be too often but DH does love his machine and will insist on using it.

Tomorrow, I’ll try to get images of DH and the Kabota in action if I’m not too busy, dodging sod clods. Certainly, by next week I should be able to show what we accomplished. I know this industrial solution may seem at odds with my wholesome, organic goals but we can’t see any other way to get a full start this year. And who knows what next year will bring?

Never plant anything that you don’t like to eat except some crops planted for your animals. In the wintertime, kale is a supreme fresh green for chickens, rich in iron and vitamin C, but it is too bitter for my tastes. My husband and I don’t eat a lot of corn but we’ll grow some for our chickens and also because our neighbors will think we’re weird if we don’t grow a few rows like everyone else.

The first step in planning a garden is making a list of the vegetables you want. Then you need to figure out how much of each vegetable you want. And finally, you have to make a Planting Schedule so you’ll know when to sow seed or put in transplants.

Figuring out how much you want is more difficult than you may think. With varieties of lettuce, you need to seriously ask yourself if you’re going to eat a salad every day. There aren’t many ways of preserving lettuce. DH and I like fresh mixed greens and will eat a salad every day when they are in season. So ideally, I would like five different kinds of lettuce to mature every week. Romaine and Bibb take 75 days to mature, Butterhead takes 60 days and Loosehead types and Mesclun mixes jump up in 45 days. So starting on February 27th, I’ll plant just a few seeds of Romaine and Bibb and continue to sow just a few more every week. On March 14th, I’ll start doing the same for Butterhead and Looseheads. And on March 29th, I’ll start staggered plantings of the fast-growing greens. By the end of April, I should have a steady harvest of mixed greens. Even before that I can pick the outer leaves on the older varieties and have pretty glorious side salads. I’ll explain why I start on 2/27 below the fold.

Other vegetables like potatoes, onions, and carrots can be preserved for very long periods without processing. So they are grown not only for immediate consumption but, for use into next year. Check out this Vegetable Planting Guide prepared by the Virginia Cooperative Extension. Scroll down to Potatoes and look across. Under “Approximate yield per 10 foot row,” they say 10-20 pounds and under “Approximate no. of row feet to plant per person,” they say 75-100. Do the math. They are suggesting that  the average American consumes 100-200 pounds of potatoes every year! This could be true, I guess, but can you imagine storing 800 pounds of potatoes for a family of four! It would take up most of your basement, I tell ya’.

We enter every grocery store receipt into an Excel file, so we know for a fact that we consumed only 65 pounds of potatoes last year between the two of us. So I plan on planting a 20′ row of Early Reds and another 20′ row of Yukon Golds. In the Fall, I’ll put in 40′ of Irish Whites and we’ll be able to harvest them as we need them after we’ve consumed all the Reds and Golds. I may be underestimating our need but I can correct it next year.

Other vegetables like beans, peas, tomatoes, squashes and spinach can be processed and either canned or frozen. Unless you have a huge freezer, canning is the way to go with most of these altho I have a personal preference for freezing spinach because it gets slimy when it’s canned. Properly canned vegetables will stay good on a cool, dry, dark shelf for 8 to 18 months. If I end up with a surplus, I’ll box them up and ship them off to my children who have foolishly chosen to live in inner cities.

Last year, DH and I consumed a whooping 150 pounds of assorted beans and 50 pounds of peas so obviously I can plant as much as I’ve got room to grow. And I do so love towering teepees of pole beans! I’m going to try out three different varieties of peas to see which one does best and produces earliest because I love baby peas and want to show up my neighbors by having mine come in first.

The yields shown on the VCE table are based on shallow-tilled row planting. John Seymour in The Self-Sufficient Gardener suggests that much higher yields can be gotten from deep bed methods. For example, instead of getting 3-4 pounds of asparagus, I might get 10 pounds per 10 feet. Instead of 6-10 pounds of pole beans, I might get 17-30! Well, we’ll see. Given the ideal soil and growing conditions I have in my back yard, this will be a real test. I intend to be quite scientific about it, weighing and recording everything I harvest from my garden.

So how do you figure out when to plant? This Vegetable Planting Schedule shows how the professional growers do it. Look across the top heading and you will find a 0/0 column. If you print this out, you should write the average date of the last frost in your area above the 0/0 column. Each column to the left and right of the 0/0 represents a 10-day period. So counting back from March 29th, the average last frost in Eastern North Carolina, I arrive at planting peas, onion sets and spinach starting on February 7th. I shouldn’t plant beans, squash or tomatoes until after April 8th.

Really big, fat tomatoes take 85 days to maturity so if I waited until April to plant seed I’d be waiting till July for a tomato sandwich. If I want tomatoes in late May, when everyone gets a hankering for them, I will have to start my seed indoors by the middle of February and put out half grown plants when all danger of frost has passed.

To simplify my planting schedule, I re-entered most of this data into an Excel file listing only the vegetables I want and putting them in order of planting instead of alphabetically.  A corner of this spreadsheet looks like this:

Each planting date actually represents a 10-day window so that accommodates weather interference and I won’t be trying to plant eight kinds of seeds on one day. I’ll also check my Farmers’ Almanac and Astrological calendar to see the best planting days during any given 10-day period.

This week we picked up a load of horse manure and covered the asparagus bed with a six-inch deep blanket. We’ve left it to the earthworms to dig it in. Instead of getting the fresh horse apples we expected, we dug from an older pile that was already decomposed – pure gold for free! And there’s plenty more, at least another few truckloads.

The remainder of the manure went into building a compost bed. We had gathered some large piles of fallen leaves and pine straw from the yard. We started with pine straw on the bottom, put leaves on top of that, a layer of manure then, pine straw again and so on. Because of the acidity in the pine straw and manure, I’ll be adding some lime to the mix.

Now if it will just stop raining every other day, I can get back to digging beds!

Looking at the dirt in our backyard, DH said, “Hey, I just figured out why North Carolinians are called Tarheels.” The dirt is black, black as tar. It’s black from the decomposition of prehistoric swamp millennia ago. The guy at the Southern States Farm Cooperative said the soil hereabouts is so rich, “You can throw a rock on it and it will grow into a boulder.” They’ve been growing cotton for decades, maybe centuries, on the field behind us and have only managed to deplete it to a rich cocoa brown. In the mind of a gardener, black soil is nutrient-rich soil, ready for seeds and plants. But, I don’t trust this black color and we’re going to add manure just to be sure the dirt has what vegetables need to put out high yields. I can always throw in lime later if I’ve overdone the nitrogen.

And I can’t tell from looking at it whether it’s alkaline or acidic. DH put a bit of it on the tip of his tongue and declared that it’s alkaline and we’ll have to add some sulfur. I always wondered how ancient farmers tested their soil balance. DH’s Daddy showed him this trick and his Daddy must have shown him, on back.

I bought a pH meter anyway. The pH scale measures the amount of hydrogen (acid-forming) ions in the soil. There are cheap little pH test kits but they aren’t very accurate and you would have to buy one every year. So it’s better to invest $13.49 in a gizmo that works all year, every year. I stuck it in all over the yard and it read 7.0 no matter where I put it so I thought it must be broken. Inside I dipped it vinegar and the needle slammed over to acidic.  Wow! We’ve got sandy loam and nearly perfect pH!

Almost all vegetables thrive in a pH between 6.0 and 7.0 which is the neutral middle of the scale. Like Goldilocks, they want a meal that is “jussst right,” not too acidic and not too alkaline. Plants need more than hydrogen to thrive however. There are 16 elements that are essential to plant growth (in order of importance): Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, zinc, boron, copper, iron, chloride, manganese and molybdenum.

You can see how growing plants got twisted into a chemical experiment and people thought it didn’t matter where you got these elements – hey, we can pull them out of oil! The numbers on a bag of fertilizer stand for the percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potash (potassium chloride) contained in them.  A bag that reads 5-10-10 is telling you it’s got percentages in a ratio of 5% Nitrogen, 10% Phosphate and 10% Potash. The bulk of the bag can be fillers like sand or ground up corn cobs so you look like you’re getting a lot of something and don’t spread it too richly and burn up your plants.

Again, there are relatively cheap kits that will sort of measure the first seven, primary elements in your soil and from there you figure out whether you need 12-6-6 or 6-18-6 to bring your dirt into an ideal balance.  I have collected soil samples from the four-corners of my garden and given them to my local County Extension Service who will send them to the state agricultural lab and send me back a complete detailed analysis of my soil – in four to six weeks. This service is FREE! And I’ll find out if I need to sprinkle some 20-Mule Team Borax (boron) or Epson Salts (magnesium) on my beds.

Every chemical component in store-bought fertilizers can be introduced into your garden soil with perfectly natural and/or cheap stuff.  Make a pile of dried-up leaves (carbon) mix with animal manure (nitrogen), add water (oxygen) and the stack heats up and makes its own hydrogen. After sitting for a while, it is called compost and you mix it with your dirt and don’t worry about burning your plants by applying too much of it. Potash with some phosphate is literally the ash from your fireplace or the bottom of your barbecue. I’ve never worried too much about the exact ratios of the elements I’ve added to the soil. I’ve thrown in compost, manure, ashes and either lime or sulfur and thought it was good enough. In heavy clay, I’ve added tons of dried leaves. But, DH is obsessed with this aspect of growing and as I learn more from him I’ll pass it on.

Adding nitrogen organically means adding manure. All manure is not alike; directly applying chicken manure will kill most plants because it is high in ammonia. Chicken manure needs to be mixed with carbon (leaves, hay, grass clippings) and allowed to sit until the ammonia has burned off.  Using chicken manure in your compost pile makes great fertilizer; the ammonia breaks down the carbons and makes hydrogen quite speedily. A chicken scratching-yard with hay on the floor is a compost factory. Rake it out every week, throw in more hay and you get a steady supply of compost to nourish your vegetable beds.

Cow manure is less toxic than chicken manure and doesn’t need to age as long or be mixed with carbons before it can be applied because the carbons (grass) have already been mixed in the cow’s stomach. Horse manure it rated even better and can be directly applied to garden beds without aging to provide a rich nitrogen environment for plants like potatoes and beans that crave that element. Horses, apparently, poop out the equivalent of compost. You can still see hay in their droppings! Think about old-time farmers with horse-drawn plows – they were fertilizing their fields at the same time they were tilling them! What a concept!

Sometimes you may find a dairy farmer who will give you cow manure for free but most of them have caught onto the idea that they have a value-added by-product and sell it. “Gentlemen Farmers” with horse stables can’t be bothered with such lowly profit ventures, so we’ve made arrangements with one of these high-class guys.  We’re leaving a utility trailer outside of his stable so his stable hands can fill it up instead of building a bigger pile. When it’s full in a week or so, we’ll go over and drive home with a load of premium manure.

It stopped raining long enough for us to dig and frame one bed. Only seven more to go before last frost in March.

This has already gone on too long so I’ll cover planting amounts/expected yields and schedules next week.  I have to be out most of this morning and have a lot of work to do when I get back so I won’t be able to follow comments and respond as promptly as I did last week. Perhaps some of you will share your adventures with dirt…

For many years I have dreamed of having a self-sufficient garden that would produce an abundance of organic vegetables. John Seymour’s books on the subject and Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew have inspired me. I now have a nearly perfect opportunity to manifest that desire. Our backyard has a 100′ by 70′ flat area with southern exposure and the soil is black sandy loam. Ultimately, using deep bed methods, I could produce enough vegetables, fruits and eggs for 50 people. Imagine coop members paying me $100 a month and you begin to see my business plan. But, I’m going to start by trying to provide vegetables and eggs for only my husband and myself with a surplus that can be distributed to our family, friends, and neighbors.
My first goal is preparing eight 4′ x 12′ raised beds in an area measuring roughly 28′ square. This allows a 4′ wide walkway down the middle with four beds on both sides and 2′ walkways between the beds. We will frame the beds for a number of reasons: They will be 12 to 18″ deep and 10″ above ground level. Framing will prevent erosion yet allow good drainage. It has rained every 2-3 days since we arrived so drainage is important. The 2″ by 12″ boards will be buried in the ground 2-3″ to prevent the centipede grass on the walkways from invading the beds. I can also add 2×4’s around the top rim of the frame and give my tired old butt a place to sit down while I tend the plants.

The back yard is covered in centipede grass and that’s the first problem. The traditional method for dealing with sod is called “bastard trenching” and involves digging a series of trenches, one after another.  Each trench is 1′ by the width of the bed. The top 3″ of sod are cut into cubes, lifted off with a spade and put aside. Then dig down 6″ and put that dirt aside. Dig up the next layer of soil down to the sub-soil and put it in a pile. Then, using a spading fork break up the sub-soil.

The next trench is started right next to the first. Lift off the sod and lay it grass-side down in the first trench. Dig up the six inches of topsoil and shovel it into the first trench. Dig down to the sub-soil and toss that on top, break up the subsoil and move on to the next trench. And so on until you fill the last trench with the sod and soil from the first one. It is backbreaking work but the good news is that you only have to do it once and you never have to fight the grass returning in your beds.

Of course, Dear Husband resisted this guaranteed way of avoiding weeding out the centipede grass all summer long. He is accustomed to the method being used by our neighbor across the road.  Last weekend, they poured gasoline on the grass that had returned in their garden area and set fire to it. Unfortunately this approach does not kill the grass roots below the top two inches. Later, in June when the summer heat sets in, our neighbor will be out their hoeing and clawing sprouting grass from her rows of beans and corn.  

She won’t be building raised beds either. Her brother will come over with his big tractor and till the entire garden area to a six-inch depth in under an hour. He’ll change out the tiller for a plow and lay out two-foot wide rows with the soil between compressed by the weight on his tractor tires. All of this looks so damned easy until you look ahead to the centipede grass choking the bean plant roots and all that hoeing in the hot sun. Also, the row method and shallow tillage will mean her yield will be one-fourth of what I will achieve in a smaller area.

But DH had to try to avoid that digging somehow and came up with what he thought would be a shortcut. The first bed I need to plant is a permanent bed for asparagus and the literature on the subject is adamant about not allowing a root of grass to survive in the bed or it will ruin the whole investment in time, labor and money. DH’s plan was to run his 8hp Troy-Bilt tiller over the bed and chop up the grass to a depth of three inches. I would then rake off the grass and underneath would be root free soil that could be tilled and tilled again with added manure.

Instead of digging in 3″ the tiller danced across the tight mat of centipede cutting slits about 1″ deep. DH complained about needing to replace the belts on the motor and after making three passes with similar results told me to start raking away. I did and ended up with a berm along the side of the bed of top grass mixed with rich soil. I noted that we were scraping away good topsoil and there were still roots visible in the bed. DH decided we should let the bed dry out for a day and then it would be easier to rake out the roots without taking the soil with them.

That evening, DH considered why his super tiller had under-performed — it was the mat of centipede! Now that it was gone, he could till down 6″ then set fire to the bed — that would surely kill all the grass roots. “And fry those pesky earthworms, too,” I added softly. DH fell silent, mulling his schemes to avoid digging.

The next afternoon, the dried out soil still clung to its grass roots and DH got his post-hole digger to see just how far those suckers went down. I saw the look of surprise on his face when the blades of the hole digger cut thru the sandy loam like it was butter. In all of his prior gardening and farming experiences, the soil had been hard, red clay and his resistance to digging was based on that. He was accustomed to grass that grew no deeper than three inches. The first plug he pulled out showed that — given an ideal sandy loam — grass roots go down 6″!  The next plug came up rich, root-free soil and the next brought up pale sand sub-soil at its bottom.

Experimentally, he chopped a cube of grass mat with a square-pointed spade then lifted it and flipped it over with a spading fork. “That’s too easy,” he muttered. Then he dug down another six inches, the depth of a spade shovel, and lifted out the root-infested topsoil and set it aside. The next spade depth brought up root-free topsoil and scraped the subsoil beneath. “Sweetheart,” I purred, “You’ve just started your first trench. After we’ve inverted the soil in all the beds, you can use your tiller to mix in the manure.”

“This soil is so soft,” he declared, “You could do this!” Then, it started raining again. We haven’t had three days in a row without rain since we moved here. Tomorrow is supposed to be dry, followed by two sunny days over the weekend so we hope to get some beds dug “my way” this weekend. I’m not panicking yet because the first plants and seeds won’t go into the ground until the first week in February.

Please use this diary as an open thread for your garden plans, preparations and problems.

Next Week’s Installment: Soil Samples & How to Devise a Planting Schedule

Here we are getting ready to drive down from VA to the suburbs of Atlanta to do the final move-out on a house we expect to close on 9/9. Last night I read a diary on dKos by dbratl reporting on panic gas buying in Atlanta. This morning there are reports that the Gov. in NC is asking people to conserve because of shortages and that gas stations in TN are closing because they are sold out. Good Lord, folks! Is the rolling thunder of America’s interstates about to grind to a halt?!

I realize our dilemma pales in comparison to the hell Katrina survivors are going thru. So I’m certainly not asking for sympathy. Instead, I’d like this thread to be a pool of info on gas availability up and down the eastern US. Are the reports of shortages just rumor-mongering? Are there long lines where you live or does everything appear to be okay?

Bottom Line: Is there enough gas along I-85 for us to get to Atlanta and back?!

Why is blonde bimbo subbing for Keith instead of the smart black chick? Keith had a week’s vacation already so why isn’t he on tonight? Is he sick? Or sick of dealing with abusive bosses? If he’s been fired, I might as well cancel extended cable ’cause there’s nothing to watch except movies I can rent at Blockbuster.  

I’m really freaking out about this. Was it his anti-smoking campaign? I’m a 40 year smoker so there’s no hope for me; I’d get lung cancer even if I quit. But, I wasn’t bothered by his efforts to dissuade younger people. I wasn’t offended by him saying he’d like to smack me. Heck, I laughed out loud about it.

Keith is the only news reporter I trust to give me both sides of any story. If I’ve lost him, I’ll feel like… I don’t know, going to New Jersey and standing in a ditch or something.

So, Susan, can you assure me that our boy, Keith, is okay?

******

One of the reasons I adore Keith is he answers his email. He had a root canal yesterday and was still too medicated to do the show. Also, he says, his boss apologized to him. And, I should quit smoking. 😛

If I wanted to inspire you to believe that you can grow enough food for a family of five on 5 acres, I would recommend reading “The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency” by John Seymour. There is no other book available that so completely details how to take an organic, wholesome approach to providing for your self.

But, if you live in the US and already have 5 or more acres, or if you plan on doing so, then you need to know what Joel Salatin has to say in “You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Start and $ucceed in a Farming Enterprise.” He is a well-known promoter of grass-fed poultry and beef and an out-spoken advocate for family farmers in Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Like most original thinkers, he is also a cracked pot. More than once I felt like cracking the spine of his book against the nearest wall when he veered off into right-wing nut-so land. So allow me to spare you the outrage and distill the nuggets of gold buried in the mud of his wing-nut philosophies.

The bottom line reality is that most of America’s farmlands have been reduced to 6 inches or less of topsoil. Generations of monoculture, slash and burn, erosion, drought, and chemical dependency have turned once fertile croplands into barely sustainable grasslands. Simultaneous with this rape of the earth was the imposition of an industrial model of production on an essentially organic process. Salatin sees this quite clearly and yet he blames liberals, tree-huggers, and eggheads for allowing it to happen.

The main mistake was treating agriculture and animal husbandry like an assembly line chemistry project. With an emphasis on standardization and end-results, the essential process of farming has been subverted, perverted and polluted. And the whole concept of family farming or small-holding has been denigrated as a money-losing enterprise. The rise of agri-business has been the death of the small family-owned farm. Salatin blames government without seeing that it has served the interests of the agri-business lobby that was rapidly gobbling up family farms as soon as they foreclosed.

Salatin indicts the entire food producing industry:

When you buy a hamburger from your local fast-food outlet, you are eating beef from a cow that never saw daylight. It was locked into a feeding trough, shoulder to shoulder with other cattle, eating a mix of antibiotics, chicken manure (!), bone meal from other cows (!) and grain. It stood knee deep in its own shit. It never got to chew its cud out in a pasture. It has been treated like raw ore being turn into I-beams. Factory-produced beef is full of sickness and can kill you.

When you eat a chicken bought at your neighborhood grocery store, you are getting an animal that was packed into a warehouse with less than a square foot of space. It also has never seen the sun or felt the wind or tasted anything remotely natural. It had its beak cut off – without anesthetic – so that it won’t peck other chickens to death because of the stress of being so jam-packed against them. And it shits. And the shit lands on the floor and dries out eventually and because chickens scratch, this dust fills the air. The chicken breathes fecal dust all its days. It is shot full of antibiotics but its lungs are still lined with actual crap. If you take one of these chickens and boil it down, the broth is a nasty shade of brown/gray. Factory-produced chicken is full of sickness and it can kill you.

If you buy a tomato at the grocery store, you are most likely eating the fruit from a plant that literally never grew in the earth. It was hydroponically grown in a chemical solution, injected with artificial flavor, red dye and vitamins and arrives at your produce sections at least two weeks after it was packed and shipped. You might as well be eating a nerf ball.

So, we’re eating shit and our land only grows grass. Here Salatin emits brilliance: He takes what he’s got and turns it into a white-collar salary. Put your cows and chickens on the grass that you’ve got and reduce your feed bill by 30-50%. Let the sunshine disinfect their natural animal functions. Feed them living green stuff to kill their diseases. Let them lay a layer of manure on the top soil, scratch it in and build another inch a year until you can plant your own grain and kiss the big-boy grain providers good-bye.

But the key to Salatin’s approach is selling direct at retail or above prices. The most interesting chapters of his endless rant had to do with accounting and marketing. The gist of his accounting is to keep a careful record not only of your expenses but, of your time. Then, pay yourself at least $25 per hour. Work out the per unit value there from. Pay no attention to what the supermarket is charging. You are producing a superior product. It’s wholesome, natural and additive free – and you deserve to be paid accordingly.

Then, go out there and sell it. Not everyone has the personality to do this or the daredevil gustiness to put their product on the line and demand a higher price. Salatin has that kind of evangelical fervor. He has preached his gospel of “God’s Own Plan” for whole food goodness at every PTA, garden club or Moose Lodge that would have him for the last 25 years. I commend his passion. Salatin can rant with the best:

http://www.mindfully.org/Farm/2003/Everything-Is-Illegal1esp03.htm

This is a good read and presents some of his basic principles and prejudices.  I disagree with his position that anyone should be able to brew up spaghetti sauce in their roach-infested kitchen and sell it to whomever they please. Since I can’t be in the kitchen of everyone who provides food to me, I rather like knowing someone else is inspecting the premises. I plan on building the kitchen on my farm to surpass health code requirements.

But, I digress.

After spending quite a bit of passion ranting against the mechanical, industrial production models of big agi-business, Salatin presents his alternative – which is, at its core,  a mechanical , industrial model of production. Yes, his cows get fresh grass and sunshine – while being moved along inside of electric fencing. Given their freedom, most cows would prefer to wallow under shade trees but Salatin drives them forward across his prairie grass with an electric prod.

Instead of the one-square foot of space they get inside agri-business chicken warehouses, Salatin’s chickens get a whopping two-square feet inside of a 12 foot by 10 foot by 2 foot high chicken wire cage that is moved every other day across the prairie grass two days after the cows.

There’s no question that his model is an improvement over standing in shit and breathing fecal dust. At least his animals do get fresh air, sunshine and fresh grass. But, his successful production depends on controlling his herds and flocks. On the one hand, he exalts allowing animals to enjoy their “animal-ness” while on the other he assures us that they have “no souls” so we shouldn’t be bothered about eating them. Or controlling them. After all, that’s what God intended we should do.

I had wild vacillations of moods reading “You Can Farm” and “Pastured Poultry for Profit$.” I veered between admiring Salatin and abhorring him. I want small farmers to succeed and everything that helps them is good to me. But, I have reservations about endorsing a man who takes pride in being sloppy and lazy about farm building projects and considers his children as so many peons to do his bidding.

He tells us that his young daughter just loves getting up before dawn to help Dad refill the feeding bins for the chickens out on the pasture. I bet she does; since she is home-schooled, does she even know of any other activities that might please her more?  The photographs of her in her home-spun cotton dress, squatted down by the movable chicken coops caused me undo ire – can’t the man buy her a pair of blue jeans? Doesn’t he understand what a cold draft up a skirt can feel like at 5am?

I know this criticism may be petty but I felt it exemplified the callousness of Salatin’s ego-driven success. He’s a salesman and his product is his farm produce. You may replicate every aspect of his production model and still fail if you lack his ability to sell, sell, sell! So the hinge on which his system swings is ego and personality. I have met a few of his disciples and they all had that slightly perspiring edginess that defines cult followers.

One of them told me in a whisper, “I couldn’t keep my chicken boxed up like that. I let `em go in the pasture and it works just as well, I think.” I looked at the photos of his flock roaming freely across his pasture and bought a couple dozen eggs and a stew chicken who had passed her prime egg-laying. The eggs are superior and we’re having Chicken and Dumplings tomorrow. I don’t’ mind eating chickens who have had good, productive lives. It’s not because I think they don’t have souls; it’s because I know they have spirits and I respect the sacrifice of their lives to mine. I pay homage to them and thank them for providing for me. Salatin doesn’t get the idea of Nature’s Plan and, for that and his hatred of intellectuals and “eggheads,” I’ll never be one of his true followers.

Bottom Line: Salatin’s process of adding an inch of top soil per year to your land by driving animals in cages across it actually will work – if you’re a lazy S.O.B. who is off giving lectures to sell your products.

On the other hand, if you are willing to work hard and shovel all the free cow manure available from dairies and the free horse manure from stables and invest in a manure spreader and a tractor to plow it into your grasslands about once a month for a year, then you can add six inches of top soil in a year! And grow whatever you want in that nitrogen rich mix. But, I’ll wait to write that book after I’ve actually done it. Yep, Hubby and I often joke that the locals are going to call us Manure Farmers for the first year until they see our yields in the second year…

I believe that Peak Oil is going to throw us all back into being reliant upon local providers of food. And I plan on being one of those providers. You, too, can join the real Green Revolution if you have cash for land and the inclination to work hard. There are no get rich quick schemes even tho Salatin claims there are. It’s easy for him to say; he’s a snake-oil salesman, selling another model of unnatural animal confinement and calling it wholesome. Well, honestly, more wholesome. Is that good enough?

You have been warned. If you have not yet finished reading “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” do NOT read further! This is a discussion for those who have aleady digested the latest episode…

SPOILER ALERT!!! Below the fold…
DOUBLE WARNING…

TRIPLE WARNING…

Only you are responsible now…

I wasn’t surprised that Dumbledore got blasted. If Harry is to assme full hero status, he must do it alone. Yes, he has pledged assistance, but in the final scenes he must face Voldemort alone. It’s required.

I also was not surprised that Snape turns out to be as repulisive as he’s always been. Who thought Snape had been somehow redemmed by Dumbledore’s trust? (I’ll pull a catnip here.) Raise your hands. Um, I thought so.

I didn’t really feel grief until the funeral scene. I just absorbed Dumbledore’s death as so many more words. Am I the only person who gets so caught up in what-happens-next that I don’t feel what’s happening in the scene as I read it? In other words, how the characters react is more important than how I react. Do you wait to feel what they are feeling?

I watched this movie on the FX channel last night and see that it is on again tonight. If you didn’t see it, give it a chance on its second viewing. It was really very well done.

They use a documentary style with news bulletins and cable news type interviews and build a very compelling story about how ordinary families could be affected by a sudden change in our oil supplies.

A hurricane knocks out the main port where oil is received then a revolution in Saudi Arabia accelerates the process. It was all very plausible and realistic without any super special effects or super-heroes to the rescue.

It was brilliant propaganda and something every SUV-driving fool in America needs to see. I especially liked the farmer who becomes a populist advocate for “Food Not Oil” being the basis of what makes America great. The implication was that this guy was on his way to being president.

I’d like to hear what you think if you saw this movie or watch it tonight.