{"id":54,"date":"2020-07-09T10:24:10","date_gmt":"2020-07-09T10:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bettertimesinfo.org\/?page_id=54"},"modified":"2020-07-20T07:59:55","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T07:59:55","slug":"2005-forest-garden-blog","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bettertimesinfo.org\/2005-forest-garden-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"2005 Forest Garden Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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being an on-going narrative regarding the urban agriculture adventures of the folks who live on the southeast corner of North McKinley and NW 21<\/em>st<\/sup>\u00a0streets in Oklahoma City<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n By Robert Waldrop<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n June 18, 2005\u00a0<\/a>|\u00a0May 10, 2005<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0March 1, 2005<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0February 15, 2005<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a02005 Plant List<\/a> | List of Plants Organized by Layers<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n For information about our plans for adapting our”urban homestead” to meet the looming challenges of peak oil, climate instability, and economic irrationality, see\u00a0Gatewood Urban Homestead<\/strong>, the permaculture design for our home.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t We are eagerly awaiting peaches. They are starting to turn gold and red, but still aren’t quite ripe. We have been consoling ourselves with blackberries, boysenberries, sand plums (just a few, still a bit early), and mulberries, the mulberries and boysenberries and dewberries are finished for this year, but the blackberries are still coming on strong. It also looks like a peak harvest for elderberries this year too.<\/p>\n We harvested the garlic on May 25th<\/span>. 552 bulbs! I started pulling shallots today, I also pulled a few multiplying onions but they have some time to go. We harvested our first bucket of Yukon gold potatoes and they were very tasty.<\/p>\n No, I’m not spending hours every day doing this. The important thing is to organize your garden for efficient working, and then do a little bit every day, early, when it is still cool.<\/p>\n top<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t I plucked the first ripe mulberry today, well, it was purple but it wasn’t completely ripe. Even so, it was a foretaste of things to come. It really looks like a bumper fruit crop this year (God willing). Everything is loaded with fruit, except for the apples which are still skimpy.. Peaches, plums, sand plums, boysenberries, mulberries, dewberries, blackberries. The elderberries are readying themselves to burst into riotous bloom.<\/p>\n We are having a cool and cloudy spring, but hardly any rain. Fortunately, the deep mulch on the beds is doing a good job of preserving water. I have not had to do much watering.<\/p>\n This year we decided to ramp up our production of tomatoes as one of the items we are still buying at the store is tomato sauce. We can buy tomatoes through the Oklahoma Food Cooperative, of course, but most of them are slicing tomatoes and since it takes about 5 pounds of tomatoes to make one quart of sauce, it would be prohibitively expensive for us to buy enough tomatoes to make 100 quarts of sauce.<\/p>\n 100 quarts of sauce requires about 500 pounds of tomatoes and that suggests a need for 50-60 tomato plants. When I started thinking about this last winter, I thought, “well, where would we find room for 60 tomato plants?” Especially since I didn’t want to plant them in a monoculture, but rather to design a “tomato guild”.<\/p>\n As it turns out, we had plenty of room. The longer I live and garden here, the more the area seems to expand. In the beginning, six years ago, I wondered just how much food could be produced on this 1\/5 of an acre urban plot, with a duplex, small house, driveway, and sidewalks. Each year we produce more. I keep finding new places to put plants. Besides the tomato plants, this year we also added hazelnuts (4), buffalo berry (3), 3 more Nanking cherries, 2 more chokecherries, and 20 prairie rose bushes. Also new herbs, 3 more varieties of oregano, 5 varieties of basil, 3 more varieties of thyme, also lemon verbena, dill, yerba buena, passion flower and lots of pansies, petunias, and calendulas. Oops, I forgot some new medicinals, boneset and all heal and astragalus, and 3 more comfrey plants. I planted the comfrey in the fruit tree area, as they are great mulch plants and comfrey’s deep roots bring up nutrients.<\/p>\n And then there are the seven buckets of potatoes. I had tried potatoes-in-buckets before, but they didn’t do so well, I used dirt and compost for the planting medium. This year I splurged and got peat moss and vermiculite to add to my home-made compost. Four of the buckets I have continued to fill with my homemade potting soil as the plants grew bigger. The other 3 buckets I filled with a mixture of straw and leaves as the plants grew. One hears about both ways of doing potatoes in buckets and I am curious as to any difference in yield between the two methods. I also had a problem last time with the buckets getting hot, so the buckets are placed so that the bucket itself is shaded, but the plant is in sunlight. I planted summer squash (yellow and zucchini) in our cold frame, together with catnip, lemon balm and marigolds. Hopefully the squash bugs won’t find them. They are sporting their first blooms today! .<\/p>\n Permaculture speaks of guilds as associations of mutually beneficial plants. In cultivating annual plants, people usually talk about “companion planting”, but the concept of “plant guild” takes the concept up a notch or two. Guilds are an area of on-going research and observation in permaculture, and a lot of experimentation is going on. I decided on the plants for our tomato guild by researching companion plants for tomatoes.<\/p>\n Here are the plants we are associating together in these tomato guilds:<\/strong><\/p>\n Tomatoes – Amish paste, Hungarian paste, San Marzano, Principe Borghese, Roma, Yellow Pear \u00a0<\/p>\n The tomato guild beds are laid out like a Square Foot Garden bed, with one square per plant. Indeterminate tomatoes needing trellising go along one or two sides of the bed (yellow pear, Amish paste, San Marzano), determinate tomatoes (Hungarian paste, Roma, Principe Borghese) which don’t need support are inside the beds scattered among the other plants.<\/p>\n We already had the asparagus scattered around here and there, so adding that to the guild was a matter of siting some of the tomato guild beds. Bee balm, asparagus, horehound, and chives are perennials, I will have to think about what we will do next year, but we hope this works well for this season. The chives we transplanted from elsewhere, bee balm I either started from seed or bought plants. Borage we started from seed, and we also started most of our tomato plants.<\/p>\n I have acquired a cinnamon yam plant. It is a climbing vine, frost hardy in this zone, that bears edible tubers above ground. I have it in a pot still as I haven’t quite figured out where to put it.<\/p>\n We’ve been picking and eating greens several days a week – chard, mustard, and turnip. They are very tasty. We blanch them in boiling water for 2 minutes, and then sautee them in a skillet, with a little broth or stock, also onions, garlic, crushed red pepper, dried oregano, rosemary, and sage. Maybe some soy sauce and oyster sauce and sesame fire oil, for variety.<\/p>\n I ran out of compost this year, all the new bed building and planting consumes compost like it was plentiful or something. Since this is a harbinger of things to come, I am ramping up my compost production. I am now in the process of building 3 compost piles, each about 14 ft long, and when done they will be 4′ high and 4′ wide. I am also doing considerable compost making on the existing planting beds and around the trees and bushes with thick mulches.<\/p>\n I do not produce enough plant material on this property to make all this mulch and compost, so I am always bringing stuff home. I drive around a bit in the neighborhood on trash day and bring home bags of leaves and lawn clippings. I bring home wilted altar flowers from church. I buy some bales of straw at the farmers market and a local feed and seed store. To give folks an idea of how much mulch and compost material is required, Ruth Stout’s “No Work Garden Book” estimates that 25 fifty pound bales of hay or straw are needed to mulch a 50′ x 50′ garden area to a depth of 8 inches. (Ruth Stout’s book, which is a collection of her columns published in Organic Gardening magazine, is one of my garden “bibles”.<\/p>\n Volunteer vetch came up in the garlic, shallot, and multiplying onion beds, I pull it every other week or so so it doesn’t get too thick. Right now it is in beautiful purple bloom, and it looks very elegant twirling around the onion and garlic stalks. It takes nitrogen from the air and puts it in the soil, so it helps the alliums grow. The allium harvests are coming up soon. Last year I picked garlic on May 24th<\/span>. We’re ready for some fresh garlic, we are out of last year’s crop. We planted considerably more garlic this year than last year (which is one reason I guess we ran out last year). We should have enough garlic to have a whole bulb of cloves every day, plus enough to replant a similar amount, and maybe some extra to distribute as seed garlic.<\/p>\n As of today, we have 120 different varieties of useful or edible plants growing on our former lawns.<\/p>\n top<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t Big Garden Day!<\/p>\n We spent all day today working on the garden. Hired 3 folks to help, plus two of us. We did a lot of clean up, and made two new beds out of logs, one of them is 4 X 30, the other about 3 X 10. What’s the point in having a garden if you can’t move things around as you please, that’s what I say. It helps if you have help, of course. Added some new vertical elements, an 8 foot windmill I got on sale, and two 6′ metal arches. Dewberries will grow up the windmill and grapes up and over the metal arches. They are placed so that as the grapes grow, they will nicely shade my favorite “sittin’ log”, part of one of the old elm trees that were original tenants of this property (we counted the tree rings after the ice storm knocked it down and it was older than the neighborhood by about 20 years.)<\/p>\n Planted some 7-top turnips (which are grown primarily for their greens), some “mustard spinach” (described as heat and drought tolerant on the package) and “rainbow” chard, which has a picture of a highly variegated chard on the cover, should be very attractive.<\/p>\n A lot of the cleanup involved the area where the old garage had been. Just behind that was an area of soil, but the top layer was heavily contaminated with asphalt from roof shingles that had disintegrated and were knocked off by wind and rain. Regretfully we consigned that to the dump, as I couldn’t think of anything to do with mulch and soil that was completely combined with asphalt shingle bits and pieces. We used 4 bales of straw making the new beds and adding mulch “all around”.<\/p>\n Looking at the former garage space, I found places for about 10 more edible shrubs, which is good because I have more coming with this year’s bulk purchase of edible shrubs and trees. I can also see my outdoor kitchen and bread oven, I need to accumulate some more bricks so we can start that this summer. Looking at the concrete pad, and the placement of the existing trees, it looks to me like we will have some nice shady sittin’ areas too for the summer heat.<\/p>\n We got the first blooms four days ago, two Nanking cherry bushes. We have had light freezes the last couple of nights, they seem to be coming through fine. One of the peach and one of the apricot are on the verge of full bloom, it seems early to me, but our winter has been very mild, with lots of “mild March weather” in February. March truly has come “in like a lamb” this year. Yesterday was a fine day for gardening, a bit chilly in the morning but by early afternoon we were doing fine.<\/p>\n To make the new beds, we removed the sod, then put down two layers of heavy cardboard (appliance boxes), a layer of straw, then topsoil, compost and straw mixed together, then topped that with a layer of straw mulch. For the sides, we used logs, some standing up, some laying down. The “Lincoln log lawn” landscape I guess you would call it.<\/p>\n I cut up the seed potatoes and laid them out to harden a bit, I will plant them tomorrow in buckets, in a mixture of vermiculite, compost, and soil. We’ll see how this lighter planting mix works this year.<\/p>\nJune 18, 2005<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
May 10, 2005<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
Basil
Chives (onion and garlic)
Horehound
Asparagus
Bee Balm
Borage
Hot peppers (cayenne, habanero, jalapeno, ancho)
Petunias
Marigolds
Pansies<\/p>\nMarch 1, 2005<\/h2>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t