Julie
03-03-2014, 01:02 PM
Monday, March 03 2014
Gardening: Are You Serious?!
By James B. (Jim) Kennard
http://www.ldsmag.com/article/1/14018
It is wise counsel indeed that recommends every family have a garden and grow their own food. The health benefits of eating fresh-from-the-garden vegetables are dramatic and much needed by families everywhere today, and the economic benefits can be relatively small or very large indeed. It all depends on you.
Regrettably, most families do not even begin to reach the potential of their gardens. Reasons include failure to care for the garden on a daily basis, and lack of the knowledge and skills necessary to do things the best way in order to really have success. The laws of plant growth are simple but immutable and failure to obey them makes all the difference. Commercial hydroponic growers learn and follow those laws strictly, and their results are as much as 100 times those of the typical family gardener in the same growing space.
By adopting some of the principles and procedures of the hydroponic grower, and by adapting them to the backyard garden, you can bridge that gap and approach hydroponic yields without the costs associated with hydroponics, while receiving the added benefits of fresh home-grown produce grown in direct sunlight and in the native soil. The rewards really can be amazing!
Both the size and productivity of your garden will vary greatly based upon your interest, need, and capacity. Therefore, for those who recognize their need for fresh home-grown produce, and who have the level of interest required to do it right, this article will describe what can be accomplished, even to the point of actually feeding your family from a garden as small as one twentieth of an acre.
Since most people do not have ready access to 1/20th of an acre (2,178 square feet) for a garden, we will start much smaller and begin by describing the results that are possible from a well-tended garden of very small size, and then relate that to larger gardening spaces.
No matter what size garden you are going to grow it needs to produce the maximum possible yield of tasty and nutritious food for the time, work, and resources expended. This requires accurate, timely and consistent effort, and the best possible gardening principles and practices. You will first see what is possible, and then be introduced to resources giving step by step guidance on exactly how it can be accomplished.
For the city dweller with only a patio, flat roof, or strip of land on the sunny side of the house or apartment, your garden may be limited, perhaps even to a single bed of only ten to thirty feet in length. Is this size garden even worth your effort? Let’s discuss the possibilities in a growing space of only 30 square feet, or 18 inches by 20 feet.
Using either the native soil, or an open-bottomed box of treated 2 X 8’s filled with clean material such as sawdust and sand, you can grow the following warm weather crops in a temperate zone from May through September:
3’ – Tomatoes (5 indeterminate plants grown vertically) 60-120#
2’ – Cucumbers (3 indeterminate plants grown vertically) 20 - 40#
2’ – Squash – vining (3 indeterminate plants grown vertically) 25 - 50#
3’ – Squash – zucchini (2 plants tied up to minimize space) 30 - 60#
3’ – Beans – bush (36 plants - 2 crops in most climates 20 - 40#
3’ – Peppers – (6 plants) 24 - 48 fruits
4’ – Potatoes – (12 plants - 2 crops in most climates) 30 - 60#
Total 20’ 200-400# prox
And in the early spring and later in the fall, before and after your warm-weather varieties, especially if you are willing to grow seedlings and protect your plants with bent PVC pipes and greenhouse plastic, you can grow the following crops in that same space:
8’ – Beets, bok choi, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, turnips, etc. 30 - 60#
4’ – Radishes before and after potatoes (100 plants in 4 rows) 10 - 20 bnch
3’ – Green onions (100 plants in 4 rows) 10 - 20 bnch
2’ – Cabbage (4 plants) 15 - 30#
3’ – Peas-bush (36 plants) 10 – 20# 60 -120# prox
With only 30 square feet of growing space producing 250-500 pounds of fresh produce, if you are willing to do the work your family can be eating some of the world’s healthiest food from March through November, and by freezing, preserving and storing your harvest you can stretch the benefits throughout the year. And don’t forget the possibilities of sales, barter, and gifts!
Now for those of you who have more space for a garden let’s extrapolate our numbers to just 1/100th of an acre (435 square feet). We must allow space for aisles between growing beds, so it is not a direct translation, but even with the recommended 3 ½’ aisles you can grow 4 beds of 20 feet length, which can amount to between 1,000# and 2,000# of produce in one growing season. Surely that is worthy of your time!
And on 1/20th of an acre you can create and grow a garden of eleven 30 foot-long beds. That size garden can produce 4,000 to 8,000 pounds of fresh healthy vegetables. Tell me a family of four can’t live on that. And just imagine the possibilities of a ¼-acre or ½-acre garden!
So far I have described what is possible in a small garden. Telling you how to do it would take more words than we have space or time for in this article, but since “a picture is worth a thousand words” hopefully two pictures and a short video will suffice to get you motivated and working on your own productive garden.
The first picture below is a family backyard garden in Idaho Falls, Idaho. This family chose to grow in containers or Grow-Boxes, and their vertically-grown plants were grown using a less efficient method than we recommend today. The second picture is my garden using the recommended T-frames for growing vertically.
1097
gardenboxes
1098
Jimgarden
As further evidence of the possibilities for small gardens I invite you to watch a short video by LDS Prepper that shows a great harvest – 139# of sweet potatoes – in only 4’ X 15’ of space. Only 3 potatoes were planted in 18” X 15’ of that space. Sweet potatoes were not chosen for our example above because they require a long growing season and require a large area, but this video illustrates what can be done in a really fun way!
The only resource LDS Prepper used to make his back yard garden a thing of beauty and great productivity was The Mittleider Gardening Course, which was a collaboration between Professors of Educational Psychology and Technology from Brigham Young University and Jacob R.Mittleider. It is available on the Food For Everyone Foundation’s website at www.growfood.com/shop, and I highly recommend it. And while you’re there get a package of the balanced natural mineral Micro-Nutrients also. That’s the key to fast, healthy, tasty plants!
I invite and encourage everyone to make the most of your gardening opportunities by following this recipe for a great garden.
Gardening: Are You Serious?!
By James B. (Jim) Kennard
http://www.ldsmag.com/article/1/14018
It is wise counsel indeed that recommends every family have a garden and grow their own food. The health benefits of eating fresh-from-the-garden vegetables are dramatic and much needed by families everywhere today, and the economic benefits can be relatively small or very large indeed. It all depends on you.
Regrettably, most families do not even begin to reach the potential of their gardens. Reasons include failure to care for the garden on a daily basis, and lack of the knowledge and skills necessary to do things the best way in order to really have success. The laws of plant growth are simple but immutable and failure to obey them makes all the difference. Commercial hydroponic growers learn and follow those laws strictly, and their results are as much as 100 times those of the typical family gardener in the same growing space.
By adopting some of the principles and procedures of the hydroponic grower, and by adapting them to the backyard garden, you can bridge that gap and approach hydroponic yields without the costs associated with hydroponics, while receiving the added benefits of fresh home-grown produce grown in direct sunlight and in the native soil. The rewards really can be amazing!
Both the size and productivity of your garden will vary greatly based upon your interest, need, and capacity. Therefore, for those who recognize their need for fresh home-grown produce, and who have the level of interest required to do it right, this article will describe what can be accomplished, even to the point of actually feeding your family from a garden as small as one twentieth of an acre.
Since most people do not have ready access to 1/20th of an acre (2,178 square feet) for a garden, we will start much smaller and begin by describing the results that are possible from a well-tended garden of very small size, and then relate that to larger gardening spaces.
No matter what size garden you are going to grow it needs to produce the maximum possible yield of tasty and nutritious food for the time, work, and resources expended. This requires accurate, timely and consistent effort, and the best possible gardening principles and practices. You will first see what is possible, and then be introduced to resources giving step by step guidance on exactly how it can be accomplished.
For the city dweller with only a patio, flat roof, or strip of land on the sunny side of the house or apartment, your garden may be limited, perhaps even to a single bed of only ten to thirty feet in length. Is this size garden even worth your effort? Let’s discuss the possibilities in a growing space of only 30 square feet, or 18 inches by 20 feet.
Using either the native soil, or an open-bottomed box of treated 2 X 8’s filled with clean material such as sawdust and sand, you can grow the following warm weather crops in a temperate zone from May through September:
3’ – Tomatoes (5 indeterminate plants grown vertically) 60-120#
2’ – Cucumbers (3 indeterminate plants grown vertically) 20 - 40#
2’ – Squash – vining (3 indeterminate plants grown vertically) 25 - 50#
3’ – Squash – zucchini (2 plants tied up to minimize space) 30 - 60#
3’ – Beans – bush (36 plants - 2 crops in most climates 20 - 40#
3’ – Peppers – (6 plants) 24 - 48 fruits
4’ – Potatoes – (12 plants - 2 crops in most climates) 30 - 60#
Total 20’ 200-400# prox
And in the early spring and later in the fall, before and after your warm-weather varieties, especially if you are willing to grow seedlings and protect your plants with bent PVC pipes and greenhouse plastic, you can grow the following crops in that same space:
8’ – Beets, bok choi, kale, kohlrabi, lettuce, turnips, etc. 30 - 60#
4’ – Radishes before and after potatoes (100 plants in 4 rows) 10 - 20 bnch
3’ – Green onions (100 plants in 4 rows) 10 - 20 bnch
2’ – Cabbage (4 plants) 15 - 30#
3’ – Peas-bush (36 plants) 10 – 20# 60 -120# prox
With only 30 square feet of growing space producing 250-500 pounds of fresh produce, if you are willing to do the work your family can be eating some of the world’s healthiest food from March through November, and by freezing, preserving and storing your harvest you can stretch the benefits throughout the year. And don’t forget the possibilities of sales, barter, and gifts!
Now for those of you who have more space for a garden let’s extrapolate our numbers to just 1/100th of an acre (435 square feet). We must allow space for aisles between growing beds, so it is not a direct translation, but even with the recommended 3 ½’ aisles you can grow 4 beds of 20 feet length, which can amount to between 1,000# and 2,000# of produce in one growing season. Surely that is worthy of your time!
And on 1/20th of an acre you can create and grow a garden of eleven 30 foot-long beds. That size garden can produce 4,000 to 8,000 pounds of fresh healthy vegetables. Tell me a family of four can’t live on that. And just imagine the possibilities of a ¼-acre or ½-acre garden!
So far I have described what is possible in a small garden. Telling you how to do it would take more words than we have space or time for in this article, but since “a picture is worth a thousand words” hopefully two pictures and a short video will suffice to get you motivated and working on your own productive garden.
The first picture below is a family backyard garden in Idaho Falls, Idaho. This family chose to grow in containers or Grow-Boxes, and their vertically-grown plants were grown using a less efficient method than we recommend today. The second picture is my garden using the recommended T-frames for growing vertically.
1097
gardenboxes
1098
Jimgarden
As further evidence of the possibilities for small gardens I invite you to watch a short video by LDS Prepper that shows a great harvest – 139# of sweet potatoes – in only 4’ X 15’ of space. Only 3 potatoes were planted in 18” X 15’ of that space. Sweet potatoes were not chosen for our example above because they require a long growing season and require a large area, but this video illustrates what can be done in a really fun way!
The only resource LDS Prepper used to make his back yard garden a thing of beauty and great productivity was The Mittleider Gardening Course, which was a collaboration between Professors of Educational Psychology and Technology from Brigham Young University and Jacob R.Mittleider. It is available on the Food For Everyone Foundation’s website at www.growfood.com/shop, and I highly recommend it. And while you’re there get a package of the balanced natural mineral Micro-Nutrients also. That’s the key to fast, healthy, tasty plants!
I invite and encourage everyone to make the most of your gardening opportunities by following this recipe for a great garden.