Of Apples and Crabapples

We've had this poor little crabapple tree on the side of our house since we moved in ten years ago. It's a little thing that looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss, and we had often talked of getting rid of it. But it's pretty in the spring when it blooms, and now it has another purpose: cross pollination.

You see, apple trees are social creatures, and they need another apple tree--of another variety--to cross pollinate with in order to set the most fruit. Crabapples fill that bill nicely, as long as their blooming cycle is in a congruent time with the other variety.

Several weeks ago we planted a Sweet Sixteen apple tree on a L'il Dwarf rootstock. Because of its size and appearance, we have affectionately dubbed it our "apple stick." But notice the following picture:

Our little seedling is starting to send out leaves from the top and several buds on the side. Don't come looking around here for apples this year (or even next), but I think the tree might take, unless I come too close with the weed trimmer.

State of the Garden

The garden improvements are coming along. I continued making a "channel" or footpath on the east side, both for ease of access and to eventually get to the attachment points for the greenhouse ribs. I consolidated the lettuce into one more densely-packed bed, and put out some more spinach and broccoli transplants. Finally, I direct-sowed some carrots, too...a bit later than I should have, but better late than never.

Let me allow pictures to describe the garden better than I can do with words. First, the general overview:

Then, the spinach. Some new transplants, some older seedlings.

My lettuce, with Red Sails and Green Sails in the foreground, with some Royal Oak Leaf and Buttercrunch more in the background:

A view through the garlic...

The onion sets were put in not long ago, so they're still a bit away from harvesting...

Here's the new northern bed that I narrowed and straightened. The 2"x8" on the left edge is a salvage from my alley that I just got today. I'm making this my main carrot bed, since it gets the most sun. Just planted four short rows today on the north end, and will add more in succession in the weeks to follow.

The broccoli bed that I mentioned building in the last post. The black tubes are drip irrigation lines to water the seedlings. That system will be fairly radically changed as the new greenhouse takes shape.

So there you have it: the state of the Bareford garden on April 20th, 2010!

Rethinking the Garden

I'm a firm believer in garden plans. I've even taught a workshop on how to make a garden plan, and preached the mantra "Make a plan and stick to it. Your premeditated ideas and decisions will almost always be better than your emotional, in-the-moment ones." Hopefully, if you were in that workshop, you weren't listening to that line of bull. Apparently, even I wasn't.

You see, my garden plan is out the window.

The problem began with one innocent tray of lettuce seedlings. This past winter, I was slowly accumulating some equipment necessary to eventually set up an indoor aquaponics ecosystem, and I was testing the grow lights that I had put together, using some leaf lettuce seeds as guinea pigs. They sprouted, but quickly yellowed and just weren't thriving. Because growing plants are a vital link the aquaponics chain, I tinkered around for better results: I changed the grow lights, and made my own potting soil. As a test bed, I scattered a bunch of mixed lettuce seeds in two inches of soil inside an aluminum roasting pan and waited to see what would happen.

Well, they sprouted. All of them. I was happy because my growing setup was working. And then the seedlings were 2-3 inches tall and crowding each other badly. I should have tossed them out; it was only an experiment, right? Of course, I couldn't do that. Instead, I transplanted 18 of them into individual peat pots. And then gave a half-dozen away to one friend, another dozen to a second friend. And then I transplanted another dozen for myself, and still I had more. Did I mention I scattered a bunch of seeds?

So, in March after I built my cold frame, I moved my growing little collection of seedlings outside. Then, once the beds were ready--and the drip irrigation installed--it was just too tempting to wait. I planted my lettuce seedlings where I'd planned to, but also right across the beds that I'd planned for spinach and carrots.

The non-plan problem deepened when my strawberries didn't come up the way I'd hoped, and I moved them to the new rain gutter planters and put broccoli in their place (therefore not putting the broccoli in the bed space I'd planned it to go). Then, after reading Four Season Harvest, Melissa and I have decided to put up a convertible greenhouse over our main garden, which requires space around the edges.

So today, I fully converted the tiered strawberry bed into a fully-enclosed raised bed for the broccoli, and I made a footpath on the west side of spinach, lettuce, and onion beds, even transplanting some plants to do it. It looks great, and it will improve both the look and the usability of the garden.

But now my garden looks almost nothing like the design I crafted last winter, and my plan bears little resemblance to the growing reality behind our house.

Oh well, even architects have their initial blueprints (the way they imagine it) and their as-built drawings (the way the building was actually built). Maybe next year my plan will be better...

In the "See, I'm not Crazy" Department

Student Melanie Christion, 17, tends to the fish farm at Chicago High School of Agricultural Science, which is raising 1,000 tilapia. The school's farm operates at commercial grade, but not on a commercial scale. (Photo: Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune/ April 11, 2010)


Urban fish farming: Will it catch on in Chicago? - chicagotribune.com

Next week, I'm planning on taking a journey to Milwaukee with a friend to tour Growing Power, an urban aquaponics operation that is becoming more and more well known. But, there are things happening right here in our little Chicago, as well! I may have to add the Chicago High School of Agricultural Science to my tour itinerary, to see how they're doing things. I wonder if Alderman Bernie Stone will be as receptive to such endeavors.

The Bareford aquaponics project has no official start date yet, but it will happen. Oh yes, it will happen.

Book Review: Four Season Harvest

For my birthday this week, my family gave me a couple of books, including Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. The basic premise of the book is that Coleman, a gardener who lives in Maine, grows a kitchen garden and harvests food throughout the year, even during the winter months--and he does it without an expensive, artificially-heated greenhouse! His success is due to a simple formula: plant cold-resistant vegetables, such as spinach, carrots, kale, and mache, and protect them by using simple technologies like a plastic-sheeted hoophouse and the time-honored cold frame. Coleman points out that he is not trying to grow plants during the winter, only to have them available to harvest. Think of it like a large-scale crisper drawer from your refrigerator!

The book has starting Melissa and I seriously thinking about covering our main garden plot with a "convertible" greenhouse. During the warm months, it would be covered with deer netting to keep out squirrels, dogs, rabbits, etc., and as fall and winter approach would be clad with clear plastic sheeting and stocked with cold frames inside to preserve the fall-planted crops for harvesting throughout the year. The price is far less than you might think (the PVC materials to make the ribs of the structure will cost less than $40 total!), and it seems simple to put together.

Stay tuned for more greenhouse information to follow, and hopefully more four-season harvesting, too!

First Harvest

Shown above is our first harvest of the year--a salad of baby greens and spinach that was wonderful when tossed with mozzarella cheese and oil and spices. Of special note is that this harvest is at least six weeks earlier than our first crop last year. This is partly due to the unseasonable warm Spring we've been having, but also to starting seeds earlier and having a better indoor growing setup coupled with an outdoor cold frame to extend the growing season back several weeks.

My goal this year: a four-season harvest! Stay tuned for how we will do it...

Rain Gutter Strawberry Beds

Those humble-looking additions to the souther wall of my house are my new strawberry beds. Like I mentioned in my last post, my old bed wasn't being fully utilized by the plants, so I installed these. There are nothing more than a 10' length of vinyl rain gutter cut into two 5' pieces and secured to the wall. There are drainage holes drilled at intervals along the bottom, which completely wrecks them as actual rain gutters but makes them much better planters.

Now, 17 strawberry plants call these gutters home. We also hope they'll be easier to protect from squirrels and birds, once we overlay them with deer netting. I think slugs or other creepy-crawlies might have a harder time scaling the wall to get at them, too! The best part is, now my strawberry take up absolutely zero "floor space" in my garden and are located in one of the sunniest places in my yard. Hopefully, I'll take pictures of them in coming months, brimming with berries.

On Being Ruthless

Urban gardeners, as a rule, have drastically less space to devote to a garden than people dwelling in suburbs or agrarian areas. Some get by with a raised bed 3' on a side while others have only their windowsills on which to place container plants. I feel blessed to have an 8'x20' area to do my growing; my sister, by comparison, who lives on a rural farm in Washington, has a vegetable garden larger than my entire lot. All this is to say that urban gardeners must be absolutely ruthless when it comes to space. We must covet that empty space in between rows of lettuce seedlings (quick! plant carrots!), replace that harvested plant with a new seedling, and always be assessing if we are using every available square foot in the most efficient way possible.

To that end, Melissa re-examined our garden again tonight and made the ruthless decision to remove our main strawberry bed. Last year, I planted 25 plants in a bed three feet wide by eight feet long, and they did pretty well...until the squirrels ravaged the berry crop. Then in the time-honored tradition of closing the barn door after the horse has fled, I built a frame around the bed and cover the whole thing with netting to keep out the squirrels. When the plants sent out runners I meticulously arranged them and rooted the shoots all around the bed. This fall, I covered the plants in a deep mulch of clean straw, just like you're supposed to. But now, nearing mid-April, only about 15 plants have re-emerged, despite all the time and energy I poured into them.

Twenty-four square feet for 15 plants? Hardly efficient. So, Melissa and I bought a vinyl rain gutter, cut it into two five-foot lengths, and are turning the south wall of our house into a miniature vertical garden. One gutter is up, and hopefully tomorrow I'll get the other hung. Then, I'll dig up the strawberry plants and transplant them into their new home. It's a way to take advantage of hitherto unusable space (the wall) and free up a significant growing area for more efficient use.

So keep turning a critical eye on your garden, and stay ruthless!

It's On!

Despite my earlier dire warning to the contrary, I've started laying in some of my garden. Today saw the planting of 48 yellow onion sets and 28 leaf lettuce seedlings (shown above) that have been out in my cold frame for the past two weeks. If you inspect the picture closely on the right-hand side, you can see one of the drip irrigation lines that water the lettuce bed. Used it in the first this-is-not-a-drill irrigation this afternoon, and it worked liked a charm!

Even my (established) raspberry bush has exploded with greenery. It knows Spring is here! Might we still get some cooler weather? Definitely. But, I've only planted cold-tolerant things at the moment and if a freak cold snap comes up, I can always cloche and row cover to get my tender charges through the night. So damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!

Drip Irrigation System

This afternoon, in beautiful 80-degree weather, I installed my gravity-fed drip irrigation system. The "sample system" is shown above. It actually went much more smoothly than I expected. Because gravity-fed systems has such low PSI, there are limits to how far a mainline and dripline can run. In this picture, you can see me four primary bed driplines and a couple of my strawberry bed lines. In total, I have 7 lines, each with drip emitters every 12". 

Here is where some of the driplines connect to the mainline:

Connecting them was so simple! Using the provided punch, you make a hole in the mainline where you want the dripline to come off, then use a two-way barb to connect the mainline to the dripline. Add a plug at the other end of the dripline, and you're done. The system works perfectly, and gets equal flow on all seven lines. It's magic.

Becausee the drip emitters are so small, clogging could be an issue, so there's a filter between the rain barrel and the lines. Here's a photo that shows the filter and shutoff valve hooked to the barrel:

So, the plan is to keep the rain barrel on the garden cart, above, and mostly keep it hooked to the downspout. When it's time to water, I just pull the cart over to the garden, connect up the hose, and turn it on! This system waters about half of my garden. I have leftover mainline and driplines that I will probably set up for the other half, though I'll probably have to buy a couple more pieces to make the second system operational. But, for a net cost of $35, this will save a lot of time!