Cottage Farming

Even though the weather wasn’t great, we braved the drizzle of rain to mix the ingredients to make our growing medium for the square foot gardens. In case you haven’t read Mel’s book, the Square Foot Gardener, the medium is made from equal parts (by volume) of vermiculite, compost, and peat moss.

Since most of the ingredients were marked with their weight, rather than their volume, we had to estimate the relative amounts to mix together. Fortunately, it looks like we estimated correctly as the final product appeared to be just what we expected.

Unfortunately, however, our overall calculation for the amount was off by a factor of two. For some reason we underestimated the total volume needed for all three boxes, so we’re going to need to do the exercise again (and mixing it together can most definitely be considered exercise) next weekend.

As we had enough to fill one and half boxes, though, we went ahead and planted the first one. While we’re still germinating some seeds inside, we got a jump start by purchasing a few starter plants. So far, we have a couple different varieties of lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower. Allyson also took over a couple squares to plant radishes and cucumbers.

Also, we found that while working around the boxes it could get kinda’ muddy. We opted to surround the boxes with large bark mulch so that we could walk around them without tracking too much of the mud back into the house. So far it worked out pretty well, plus it looks nice.

We did learn a lot about how to effectively mix the amount of medium we needed. I’m sure the next round will go more smoothly, and I’ll post any time-saving tips we come up with after having put them to the test.

As a side note from the “Coincidence Category”, I received a note from Steve Greenberg, my DataPortability: In-Motion Podcast co-host in response to a tweet over the weekend. Apparently, his wife is about a month ahead of us in the garden race… I guess we better step up our game.

We spent the past couple of weekends building the raised garden boxes that will be the foundation of our backyard gardens. We’re basing our approach on the technique outlined by Mel Bartholomew in his book, “Square Foot Gardening“. The basic concept is to build a raised garden bed, filled with a growing medium blended from equal parts (by volume) of compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. There are some subtleties in the types of compost used (ie. you’re supposed to mix at least 5 different sources of compost to increase the probability of a wide-spectrum of nutrients), but other than that it’s relatively straight forward.

The first step is to build the frames, which we’ve done:

The book is full of variations the reader can choose to adopt, or not, depending on particular situations. For our part, the yard is slightly sloped where we placed the frames, so we opted to dig down slightly in order to terrace them. We also lined the bottom of the boxes with a wire screen to keep out tunneling critters, then laid down a weed barrier:

Oddly enough, we found it relatively difficult to find large bags of vermiculite. After calling around to the various shops in the area, we opted to order a couple large bags from Uline, a packaging wholesaler, rather than purchase a dozen smaller bags. Doing so was easier, and was about half the cost.

Next up, when we receive the vermiculite, we should have all the raw ingredients for the soil. We hope to mix it up and load the frames next weekend. In the meantime, we’re planning out what we’ll grow and start germinating some of the seeds inside. We’re definitely a bit behind schedule on the germination, but we’re learning as we go… hopefully next season we’ll be much further along by this point.

More as it develops!