Ahhh, Tag Clouds.

Well, I just completed my longest post yet. It was kind of a celebration: a lot of new features, such as tag clouds and categories and other fun stuff.  You can find it, and the continuing blog, at http://www.andtheplotthickens.net/ .  See you there!

Wrestling with Blogger's inadequecies... back soon.  (And may have a good answer!)

Fun Fact: Tomato segments were originally regular, like oranges.  Cherry tomatoes and some smaller slicers still are.  The big, monster tomatoes have many, many irregularly-shaped seed compartments.  That mutation is probably part of what got us big ol huge maters. 

Bed building: Quick, Cheap, Easy?

Sounds like everyday decisions at my last job, because you only get two of the three.  Anyway.   Here are a few of the different kinds of garden bed building I know of; will be doing research on this and will likely find more methods shortly.  :) Most of them involve putting together things that, when they compost, create excellent soil for growing gardens in.  Please note that this is talking about raised or bermed beds -- building boxes is for another post.

Ruth Stout's method: Very basically, you whangle some nice yard maintenance companies (baked goods are helpful) to dump a load of leaves on your property.  Then you push it together until it's a bed.  Wet it down and wait a couple of months, or through winter, until it's crumbly deliciousness and plant in it.  This is basically what nature does anyway when all the leaves fall.  Mulchy goodness.  Since most of Ruth Stout's books are out of print (link to ridiculously expensive used book below), here is an excellent story on "The Mother of No-Till Gardening" at Mother Earth News. 

Lasagna method: Kind of the same as Ruth's, only you layer things carefully.  The microherd needs a few different things to get to work.  It has to be warm enough for them to party down, they need water because it's not BYOB, and they need both types of munchies: carbon and nitrogen.  The Lasagna method aims to provide a good buffet along with everything else, and takes a stab at creating good texture and nutrient content as one goes along.  Here's Patricia Lanza's definitive book.

Delivered method: Pay oodles of cash to have finished compost/soil/what-have-you delivered right to your front lawn.  Fill in your beds with the delivery, add amendments and you're ready to go.

Hugelkulture ("mound method") method: Find a downed tree that's been rotting for a while.  Haul it into your bed.  Cover with native soil and Bob's your Uncle.  As the already-crumbly tree breaks down all the stored nutrients will be slowly added to your beds. 

Sheet bed building: Stare contemplatively at lawn while amassing material.  Measure out your planned bed space, mark and soak.  Pile on newspapers or cardboard.  Soak.  Pile on garden clippings.  Soak.  Pile on hay, last year's leaves, coconut coir or other dry fluffy material.  Soak.  Pile on whatever soil you have to hand.  Soak. Cover with a mulch such as bark, cocoa hulls, or whatever heavy comes to hand.  Leave this bit dry. If there's enough soil, you can cut through the mulch to plant in that last layer.  Otherwise, wait a couple of weeks for the soaked pile to break down a bit and then plant. 

I'll be trialing these methods.  A new Venn diagram will follow with the much more useful "Yield, inputs needed, Renovation needs"

Fun Fact: Renovating crap soil is pretty easy with any of the methods above.  As long as you have the ingrediants for a microherd party-down, you can make beautiful fluffy soil under wherever you put your beds. 

Rant: don't think, just spray!

I love watching CBS Sunday Morning.  It's a great chronicle of some of the things worth pondering.  It's a thought-starter.  Apparently most of the people who watch it are idiot gardeners.  There's a lot of ads for herbicide this and Glyphosate that and pest control another.  OH PLEASE.  If all you plant in your yard is tasty lunch for pests, then all you'll get is hungry bugs.

It doesn't matter how you define it -- Nature, the Biomass Principle, whatever -- life wants to make more life.  If there's life there in the center, it will find a way to expand left and right, front and back, and up and down.  Reproduction, evolution, adaptation... it fills space by whatever means necessary.  Shoot, if you put a bare freakin' rock in the middle of the ocean... life will happen to fly, float, or be swept right out to that spot and BOOM you got an ecosystem.

If a gardener prepares a nice bare stretch of land, SOMETHING will grow on it.  Probably overnight.  Wishful thinking will not keep it from happening. Death-cides might, for a while.  Or you could cover it over... or plant on it!  Maybe with stuff that doesn't attract hungry pests.

This morning we saw ads for:

• Home pesticides (instead, try diatomaceous earth in the back of cabinets when you move in or just clean up your food storage problems in the first place)
• Garden pesticides (hand-picking and water spritzing fix infestations, or you could showhorn in those things that attract pest-eaters.  Tomato hornworms are lunch to birds, so put in a birdbath for them to drink from so you get a daily bird-patrol.)
• Herbicides (boiling water for weeds in the cracks of pavement; or just lay down flagstone instead and put in tough plants inbetween so there is no space for weeds at all)
• Lawn care (rip up your lawn and put in gardens, or clovers, or natural meadows -- monocultures such as lawns attract diversity such as weeds and pests, and lawns do not support wildlife unless your mower is... a little squirrely)
• Fertilizers (compost.)

If we put in life for something besides only our own pleasure, we'd be able to enjoy the whole garden more.

Okay, I'm done ranting now.  *whooh*.  Thanks for listening.



Fun Fact: The fields of Europe were historically seperated by hedgerows.  Hedgerows are long corridors of wild, untended habitat for pests and their predators.  When a field became infested, the pest-eaters in the hedgerows were ready to respond.  Nom nom nom, no sprays needed.

Bees

I want bees, and I want to do some research, and want another graphic.  Hold on, I'll be right back.

(....)

Okay, I found the coolest resource.  It has an excellent graph, and good information one how to help bees want to come to the California garden.

• Native bees are mostly ground-dwellers.  Don't mulch everything all the time so they can burrow.
• Native bees like native flowers best and are MUCH less likely to sting than honeybees.
• Big clumps of each flower, so the bees don't have to fly all over, are excellent.
• Many standard culinary herbs are big hits with bees (sage, thyme, mint, verbena, rosemary) so the herb garden may be a good place to stock up on the flowers.
• Purple and blue are bees' favorite colors, followed by yellow and orange.
• In addition to flowers, bees need a source of water if one is not nearby. A small pond, puddle, birdbath, or even dripping faucet fulfills this need.

More more more: Here is a really really big list of bee-feeding plants, and here's where you can ID your bee.




Fun Facts, lifted directly from the Urban Bee Legends page: California actually has about 1,600 species of bees, both native and very few non-native, living throughout the state. This is actually a very large percentage of bees as the United States has only about 4,000 species of bees. Worldwide there is estimated to be about 20,000 species of bees. California is home to a large diversity of flowering plants (~6,000 plant types), most of which are associated and have evolved with native bees. Our statewide survey of California’s urban areas has identified almost 250 species of bees living in seven cities, and we expect to add more species as we survey more cities. Typically, people are most familiar with honey bees, bumble bees, and carpenter bees, but there are many other types that can be easily observed in gardens and other floral rich places. Some of the most common bees we observe in urban areas include many types of sweat bees, the ultra-green sweat bee, digger bees, long-horned bees, leafcutting bees, yellow-faced bees, and wool carder bees.

Permaculture Zones

This will be a short post because I spent forever on the graphic.  Ever see a front yard with a nicely landscaped little spot around a bench as far from the door as possible?  That never gets used?  *sigh*  Better to put the stuff you use a lot (or that needs a lot of your attention) closer to where you are a lot, and put the stuff you hardly ever visit way the heck out in the boonies.  Zones do this by radiating out from everyday living space.

Fun Fact: make it even easier on yourself by zoning your Annual Crop gardens.  Put your 'everyday' crops, like beans and strawberries, closer to the front door and the 'dude are they ever going to get ripe' crops such as winter squash and cabbage farther out.

Annual Cropping meets Permaculture

Most people haven't heard of Permaculture, so they expect it's new. In truth, it's ancient.

Most native peoples practiced permaculture. When the Europeans came to new land, unless they saw monocultures of waving grain they didn't 'see' gardens. Permaculture gardens look just like forests, and for good reason: permaculture is mostly made up of plants that grow for at least three years. So when these techniques -- heavily based on forestry and observations of natural rhythms -- are properly applied, the European's eyes could not recognize them as gardens. They just thought that the natural forest was unusually productive.

There are indications of Permaculture cropping (limestone alters soil PH, good for certain types of food crops and we can see that from orbit as reflected in leaf canopy color) in most of the lost cities of prehistoric mezoamerica. There are many indications of continual management by indigenous peoples -- don't even get me started on Terra Preta -- from all over the world in all kinds of environments.

So Annual Cropping comes to the colonies (pick a continent) with the Europeans and stomps out native ideas of permaculture. At this time, the fields were sown by hand by walking across them, sometimes behind a type of animal drawing a plow.

Then in the 20th century Annual Cropping got mechanized. Not only were there bare furrows where one walked, the field would be half-bare because the mechanical contraptions need space for their wheels.

That's Annual Cropping -- modern Agribusiness. It's even practiced on forests and fruit/nut trees.  You know when you drive down a road and look into an orchard and the rows of trees open up to your line of sight?  Yeah, even permanent orchards are subject to row farming.

 Permaculture was re-discovered by a busy Austrian in the 1960's.  Then beleaguered farmers and gardeners of Australia needed a way to keep their topsoil in place, moist, and fertile so picked up the idea and ran with it.  It is becoming more refined through judicious applications of science and collaboration. I had only been exposed to gardening in rows through Annual Cropping, so Permaculture was a revolution to the way I thought about growing food.  It will definetly be in the upcoming trials!


Fun Fact for this post: Condensing 100 sq ft of row-planted Annual Crops down into beds reduces weeding, fertilizing and land use by 60%.