Round Foot Gardening - or - the Re-Tire Garden

If you are like me and refuse to be defeated by your failures at gardening you automatically seek knowledge from the experts. That almost always includes internet searches and reading books about how to garden. There is a lot of information out there, and some of it is totally false. Luckily you can use the internet to find out what other people have to say about books and information before you invest your time and money in books and DVDs. So, after our first couple of years of unproductive to marginally productive gardens I began my quest for wisdom from the experts. Let me narrow down the vast field of available information to the ones which I found most useful. Notice how I said useful, not interesting, because there is a large amount of interesting but ultimately unhelpful information out there as well. The first should be Mel Bartholomew's latest book, All New Square Foot Gardening: Grow more in less space!. Mel is a retired engineer who decided to start a garden. His failures lead him to rethink gardening in an engineering sort-of-way. Like the designer of the Glock pistol, he took something people have been doing traditionally for centuries and breathed fresh new life into it. I am not ashamed to say that I copied his concept, I just executed it differently. The next is The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith. Edward's book is forewarded and endoresed by John Storey, of Storey Publishing. That is a clear indicator that his book falls into the category of pure enduring wisdom and zero hyperbole. Edward and Mel both hit upon the same truths: wide, raised beds, successive planting, companion planting and crop rotations. Mel uses square and rectangular raised beds and Edward uses long, wide raised rows. The idea is the same, deep soil for your plants to grow in and separation from invasive weeds. Mel's book gives us a great concept, Edward's book a similar concept, both books have more merit than these concepts with good, useful planting info for specific plants, using composts and soil, and like I mentioned, companion planting and crop rotation ideas. I took their concepts and combined them with another idea I found for planting potatoes: using recycled, old tires as planting beds. Again, not a new idea. People have been using old tires as planters for decades, I just combined Mel's concept with the use of recycled tires instead of more costly, less durable materials like wood, and Edward's concept of raised beds by raising them into rows of tires. Thus we dubbed our garden the re-tire garden - or - in deference to Mel, Round Foot Gardening. We also decided to combine the innovative with the traditional in an attempt to maximize the positive features of both. That means I planted traditional Native American "Three Sisters Gardens" in our tires, successively. A Three Sisters Garden consists of corn, beans and squash (or pumpkins, melons and gourds). Native Americans were successfully feeding themselves and their families with this mutually beneficial companion planting concept before anyone ever arrived from the Old World with gifts of blankets and many centuries before the phrase "companion planting" found its way to the internet. I won't bore you with the scientific details, especially since I don't fully understand them myself, but suffice it say that the plants feed each vital nutrients through the soil. You start by planting corn as soon as you can, according to climate/planting zone, etc. If you plant different strains of corn you must be careful that they do not flower simultaniously or you risk cross polination and harvesting your own less than ideal "experimental hybrids", which sounds so much nicer than "mutant" corn. Once the corn is up about six inches or so you plant the green beans. The corn will provide the stalk for the green beans to climb. Once the beans are up you plant or transplant your squash/melons/pumpkins/gourds (I'll plant all this year) and those broad leafed plants provide shade on the base of the other plants and deter weeds while also providing vital nitrites into the soil. I'll plant them successively to provide for a continual harvest, the hope being that any overage will be canned for storage.

The tires were free and will be in place in a thousand years when future archeologists discover my garden and declare it a religious temple for the ritual sacrifice of car parts. Having a good relationship with my mechanic shop/Goodyear dealer helped me to convince them that I would carry away their old tires and they would not 1. have to pay someone to haul them away to the landfill, or 2. have to haul them away themselves. They also appreciate the fact that I am a customer and I will keep coming back to them many years after I have fulfilled my desire for their trash. I took the old farm truck (which sounds much cooler than "my battered 1979 Ford F150") down to the tire shop and picked up the tires from beside the dumpster, making two trips and coming away with a treasure that amounts to 40 odd otherwise worthless tires. 40 seems like a lot, but once we finished the plan that is what it amounted to. That includes tires for the bases of our fruit trees and for our blueberry and raspberry bushes. Once we placed the tires on the ground to get a visual of our plan and made our changes accordingly we cut the side wall of of the side of the tire that faces up. That gives us plenty of space for planting. At first we cut the sidewalls off with a folding combat knife, because it was handy. Then, my brilliant wife asked if we could do it with the electric saw. Turns out you can, and very well, with much less grunting and sweating. We covered the ground beneath the tires with a liberal amount of old newspaper, which will deteriorate and cause no harm to the ground we grow our food in while stopping the growth of weeds and grasses from below the tires. We filled the tires with our own compost made from last year's horse, chicken and goat manure and clippings and all things compostable. We then planted, fed and watered our seeds and seedlings. Wish us luck! If I went through all this for nothing I will be closer to garden defeat, but I have more strength left - and a heck of a lot more confidence this time.

Gardening

Everyone who thinks of living in the country also thinks of having a garden. In the Spring of 2008, our first Spring here, we decided to have a garden. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both Virginia Gentleman Farmers like myself, had large gardens. Clearly, it was the right thing to do. Really, how hard can it be? Humans have been growing their own food since Adam and Eve. All manner of ignorant societies subsist on the crops they grow. Gardening is going to be a snap.

Not so. Gardening is the great equalizer. If you don't believe me watch the "The Godfather". If Don Corlioni had not been so enamored of his tomato garden he would still be with us and Michael would never have become so evil. I often wonder exactly how gardening came about since the trial and error method so common to human history and agriculture should have ensured the death of the human race the first winter outside the garden of Eden. Not long after moving to our little place we identified a perfect spot in the yard for our garden. It was a South facing gentle slope that got sun all day long. As we walked the ground we realized that our forerunners on this land had identified the exact same spot many years ago. The rows of a garden were clearly evident. We envisioned long rows of tall corn swaying in the summer breeze, prize winning watermelons, numerous healthy tomato plants bending under the weight of huge, red, delicious fruits. We would be giving away paper sacks of vegetables to our neighbors and friends and basking in the light of their praises. With these visions of cornucopia dancing in our heads we instantly began procrastinating until it was nearly too late to plant anything. At the last minute we dashed to the home and garden center and bought the last few remaining sorry looking tomato plants and some assorted flowers. Having prepared the ground in our "garden" not at all we compensated by buying a few bags of potting soil and some green liquid fertilizer. Having mowed the tops off of all of the ancient rows in the garden with a push mower, which, by the way is a proven scientific process for finding huge, native Virginia rocks and creating clouds of dust where none should rightfully exist, we set out with a shovel and a hoe to plant our garden, just like our pioneer ancestors. God bless our pioneer ancestors! I now understand why one half of my family decided to stay in European cities and put up with German invaders every so often. It seems a small price to pay for not having to dig in the New World's rocky dirt to plant a small number of garden center reject tomato plants. Finally I broke down and went back to the home and garden center to rent a gasoline powered tiller. I quickly realized that tilling the entire 40’ x 40’ garden plot was not feasible with this device so instead I tilled in individual beds across the slope for the various plants we wanted to grow. Then, after removing at least a bushel of healthy native stone, we assaulted the now softened ground in the beds with our garden shovels and bags of potting soil. Soon after we had tomatoes, green beans, strawberries, watermelon, squash and cucumber plants in the ground. Soon we were growing a healthy crop of weeds. The weeds were invasive, they took over the garden, seemingly overnight. Clearly, this garden was not going to work into my schedule of walking into it to survey my wonderful crops every Sunday afternoon. It required work. So, we pulled weeds. In fact, we mowed weeds with a push mower. I learned one important lesson that summer: fertilizer makes the weeds stronger. Another lesson was that tomatoes are weeds. Thank God! They were the only thing we got that year, besides a few handfuls of weak looking green beans. The cukes and squash plants died before producing any fruit, the strawberries suffered predation from some unseen strawberry thieves (we did get one tiny, red berry) and the watermelons kept rotting from the moist soil. At the end of the summer our garden looked horrible. Tall stands of brown weeds dominated. So, we spent the winter reading books about gardening. 2009’s garden was a great improvement. We actually harvested more tomatoes than we ate. We got a few cucumbers, a reasonable number of squash, although our attempts at potatoes suffered and we learned some valuable lessons. Potatoes can be planted in beds with straw covering them instead of deep soil. Notice how I said straw. If you substitute straw with uneaten hay you will have a bumper crop of hay grasses, which will choke out your potatoes and give sanctuary to insurgent insects that will eat your squash and cukes. Ask me how I know.

Farming for Dummies (that would be me...)

A couple of years ago we moved out to Stafford, VA, from inside the Capitol Beltway of Northern Virginia. We wanted to escape the overcrowded, unfriendly feel of "occupied" Northern Virginia and have some room to move around in, be free to raise a few farm animals and generally enjoy the country. We couldn't be happier with our decision. The life we envisioned comes with challenges and rewards. For instance, living in the country does not mean that I can give up my job in the city, so my commute to work went from 25 - 30 minutes each way to no less than 1.5 hours each way. As anyone who has ever traveled up and down I-95 through Virginia and Washington, DC, knows, that commute is one of the worst in the United States. The reward, however, comes once I am home. I can sit on my front porch and enjoy the peace of our little parcel of paradise, watch the hummingbirds at the feeders, stroll through the woods to my beehives, walk through the garden, enjoy the sunset over the trees, watch my chickens scratch through the yard, or even shoot my guns on my own property without having to worry what the neighbors will think or that someone will call the police. My kids go to a much better school than the one inside the beltway. But I assume anyone who reads a farm blog wants to know about farming, so as we go along we will share our experiences with you. Most of what we are doing is relatively new or brand new to us so I am confident that our mistakes will either confound or amuse you. We' re also not too timid to address politics or religion from time to time, so we invite you to join us on this journey of farming for novices. Sit down, buckle up, and hang on!