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Polyculture in a Bucket: Goji berry, kale, onions, strawberry, and foxglove.

Food forestry (a.k.a. forest gardening) is a concept that people seem to become enthralled with when they hear about it: a way of gardening that mimics the diversity and resilience of a healthy forest, and provides an abundance of fruits, nuts, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and more.

You’d have to be a baby-eating robot not the like the sound of that!

But forests are big, and balconies are small.  So how to adapt this wonderful idea to the apartment-scale? All it takes is a basic understanding of how food forests are put together.
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I briefly mentioned this technique in another post, but I wanted to throw up a picture for visual-learner types (like me!). This is a great way not to waste money on those silly little plastic plant labels that you buy at nurseries:

Take a 1 quart plastic yogurt container and make vertical cuts about 3/4″ apart all the way to the bottom. [pictured below]

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Here in Portland, we always seem to get a window of Spring-like weather in the middle of February. It’s traditionally the time to direct sow peas, onions, and radishes, and to start tomatoes and peppers indoors. Even though the gods of climate generally plunge us back into the dark and rainy for another month, the opportunity to get the garden going is like a life-line from the future: a reminder that—even though we haven’t seen the sun for two weeks—Spring really does exist.

But this year’s Spring-tease has come early: It’s only January 28th, we haven’t had a hard freeze in a month, and it’s been in the upper 40s and low 50s for over two weeks. The tulips are up, buds are swelling on the cherry trees, and I’m faced with an exciting dilemma: Do I risk some the peas I saved last year and hope the mercury doesn’t dip far below freezing again?

Of course!

Get Growing Early

Here in Oregon, even though we can grow many vegetables almost year-round, lots of folks don’t start thinking about planting until April or May, a full 2-3 months after many seeds could have already been in the ground. These gardeners not only miss out on some of the best time for cold season crops (radish, arugula, spinach, etc.), but they also miss out on a lot of productivity. While it varies by species and climate, planting sooner generally means that plants reach maturity faster, and thus, yield more.
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Of any garden I’m currently tending, the one that I’ve had the longest connection with isn’t at the house we rent, and it’s not our next-door farm either.

It’s at my office.

We’ve only been in our current house for 2.5 years, but I’ve had a connection to my current office space for more than 4. In those years, I’ve been able to participate in the evolution of what I call our “sidewalk food forest.” In a 30 inch-wide swath next to the street, and and 18 inch strip next to the building, we grow an incredible variety of food: apples, almonds, asian pears, cherries, italian prunes, grapes, boysenberries, peaches, currants, artichoke, rosemary, potatoes, sunchokes, roses, and an assortment of ornamentals. [see photo]

The satisfaction and experience of this garden, not to mention all the fruit, has been an enormous asset in my life. I get to see it—and snack on it—every day, and it has been a great way for me to have a steady relationship to food growing, no matter how many times I have to leave a home garden behind due to a move.
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Getting this one out a little late today. I generally try to get posts done the night before and scheduled to go up in the middle of the night, but I was up for a while last night putting up the third installment of the greywater series.

Just in time for lunch, a few tasty morsels:

Project Thoreau

In my ongoing (and generally successful) quest to distract myself from the things I really need to get done, I read most of what comes out of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia’s blog. Over the past year or so, I’ve been enthused by the intermittent updates from a renter permaculturist (I need a single word for that: renterculturist? permarenter? arrgh!) in Australia working on a little thing she’s calling Project Thoreau. The updates, which include birds-eye-view photos of a tiny back patio and yard, show her progress over the last 2+ years of experimentation, and offer an inspiring model for what can be done in minimal space.

[photo: permaculture.org.au]
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(For previous talk about container gardening, check this out.)

I keep having a lot of random thoughts and links that I want to get out to y’all, and not the time to develop each into a post of its own.  So here’s another batch or snacks for your brain…

Links

Life on the Balcony, a beginner container gardener’s wet dream, just finished a blog carnival about edible containers. Lots of good reading there. Check the rest of the site for more container gardening information than you could ever assimilate.

I find a lot of stuff on this site (aesthetically) boring, but it has a huge range of ideas. Check it out if you’re needing inspiration around different materials to make containers out of.

The ever-informative about.com has a section devoted to container gardening that I didn’t come across until just recently. Suprisingly extensive.

Books

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Fresh Food from Small Spaces by RJ Rupenthal, and Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler. Both are superb books for tenant farmers, and while container gardening is a core focus of each, they explore other interesting topics as well.

Places to find great containers for the 2010 season:

For a lot of us in the northern hemisphere, right now is the time to be gearing up for planting, which means get your containers ready!  If you need cheap containers to re-purpose or upcycle, check out these places:

• Yardsales
• Estate sales
• Flea markets
• Thriftstores
• End-of-Season sales at nurseries (varies by region, generally November here in the Pacific NW)

There you go for now.  Happy gardening!

-LB

[image source: ...eeek! can't remember]

I feel weird when I see that half-tone graphic of Che Guevara on t-shirts, mugs, and underwear—one of socialism’s most beloved heros plastered all over the artifacts of global capitalism, cheap, mass-produced crap.  A cruel irony…

I feel the same way about several seed ball (aka seed bomb) products that have popped up lately.

Here we have one of the quintessential tools of the urban guerilla gardener and permaculturist, wrapped up in unnecessary packaging (albeit cute packaging).  The irony here is how little resource it takes to make seedballs, and how easy it is.

Several seedball tutorials on the web make it sound like you have to go out and buy particular types of clay and certain composts, and that’s silly. If you live in a place where there is clay soil, and you have access to seeds, you’re all set to go.  Here’s a flexible recipe to get you started:

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Randomly selected, assorted snacks for your brain:

Liquid Gold

“We all think of human pee as gross and something that ought to be vigorously “cleaned up” or sanitized. However, human urine is actually sterile (unlike faeces, urine is bacteria-free). This liquid by-product of our daily lives can be a rich food source if it gets into the RIGHT part of the right ecosystem.”

(quoted from submersible design)

Recycling urine as fertilizer is one of the easiest ways to participate responsibly in several major nutrient cycles.

For more info, and a lot of renter-appropriate strategies check out the book Liquid Gold: The Lure and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. Author’s website here, Amazon.com listing here.
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A reader recently requested a post with more resources for container gardening, specifically, types of containers to use, and where to get them.  I’m going to split it up into two installments: this post will discuss upcycled container ideas when visual aesthetics aren’t so much an issue, and I’ll follow up next week with one looking at containers to use when they’ll be subject to a more discerning eyes. (That follow-up post here.)

Here are some of my favorite things to use for container gardens when a rough, upcycled aesthetic is OK:

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It’s been slow on the posting front, as I’ve gotten addicted to Twitter (follow me!).  I’ve been coming across a lot of great container gardening-related resources, and thought I’d throw up a quick list of a few:

Vegetables

• Great list of specific vegetable varieties well-suited to container growing.
• This page has a good chart (scroll to bottom) showing the minimum container sizes for various vegetables.
• Lifehacker’s post about self-watering tomato planters.

Fruits

• Basic tips for growing fruit in pots.
• An article specifically about apples.
• A pdf all about growing blueberries in containers.
• From the Royal Horticultural Society, a great list of fruit varieties suitable for container growing.

For all troubleshooting related to container gardening, post questions to the forum at GardenWeb.

Finally, if you like the tactile experience of a book, pick up a copy of McGee and Stuckey’s Edible Container, an encyclopedic work on the subject.

Have fun!