Buying The Farm

Grafting heirloom tomato plants onto disease-resistant tomato plants. I need a closer-up view of the cuts that are needed, but holy cow this is a Very Cool Thing.

Grafting Greenhouse tomatoes.

I use a lot of recycled plastic containers for my indoor garden.  You Grow Girl advises sticking to these plastics for safety:

1 – PETE

2 – HDPE

4 – LDPE

5 – PP

and avoiding these:

3 – PVC

6 – PS

7 – PC

The numbers refer to the symbols pressed on most plastic products, indicating their makeup.

I’m into the exciting phase of my first garden: Seeds are starting (or, in the case of the edamame, ready for high school already!) and the weather’s been beautiful. We’re getting closer to the actual planting!

The bag gardening method I’m adopting, while faddish, hasn’t developed as deep a literature for things like plant spacing. My research has involved a lot of bouncing between sites. Luckily, though, one result was this website.

The concept is to plant at least one container of vegetables, and they’ve very helpfully prepared short, illustrated cheat sheets for some commonly-grown plants. Not everything is on here, but for amateurs like myself, it’s an excellent primer.

http://www.onepotpledge.org/getgrowing.html

Mother Earth News offers this handy online garden planner. I’m sure, for experienced gardeners, it’s a bit too simplistic, but for pale green thumbs like me it’s very useful. You can lay out your garden and have a list of sowing/planting/harvest times generated automatically. Not everything is represented, and it’d be nice to have some companion planting suggestions (dos and don’ts!), but for one just starting out this is a nice little resource.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/garden-planner/vegetable-garden-planner.aspx

I’m investigating sharing a space with a local homeowner. She’s got a few fruit trees but most of the ground is in shade. I found this list of shade-happy plants which gives me some hope our potential crop won’t be entirely composed of microgreens.

**EDIT** Turns out she’s a he, and the shade isn’t as bad as I thought. Still, plenty of space to put shade-tolerant kale!

http://www.motherearthnews.com/shade-tolerant-vegetables-zm0z11zsto.aspx

The beauty of the Internet: I can go from total ignorance of biogas generation to a YouTube video of some guy making one at home in but a few clicks.

I’ll need more steps in a how-to than Lord Vaader here provides, but it’s an excellent start.

http://www.youtube.com/user/LordVaader#p/search/3/aju_kNKNtXw

The home I’m considering buying has a concrete backyard, so the idea of container gardening is suddenly very appealing. I was trying to search for crops that would work well in a sub irrigated planter, and it occurred to me that EarthBox would probably be a great source for this info. I have no intention of spending the kind of coin they ask for their planters, but it’s a good guide on what kind of crops will grow.

http://www.earthbox.com/resources/what-to-grow/

This site offered some interesting point form notes on what worked and what didn’t with an urban gardening experience.

6. Parsley does best if you plant it in stages. Start one set of seeds, then start another 3 weeks later, then another 3 weeks after that. That way, when you’ve depleted your first set of parsley, you’ll have plenty more on the way.

http://urban-green.livejournal.com/7735.html#cutid6

This site offers plenty of suggestions on building “flow through” vermicomposters (which should save plenty of time fiddling with screening out the worms) and has lots of good tips from people who are trying out new systems:

May i recommend you put the barrel on wheels before it gets too heavy. I put mine on a pre-made caster setup made to put tool boxes on. It was guaranteed to hold 2 thousand pounds. Got it at Harbor Freight for 20 Bucks.

Next I transferred all the contents of a 2 week old storage bin wormery (bedding, worms & food). I will cover all this with a wet, thin cotton sheet (cut up t-shirt) to discourage fruit flies

This was a useful how-to:
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/verm/msg042040421641.html

I like these designs especially:
http://vermicomposters.ning.com/photo/albums/sues-96-gal-grey-monster-flow

http://vermicomposters.ning.com/forum/topics/my-new-flow-through-bin-with

http://vermicomposters.ning.com/photo/01-the-farm?context=user

http://vermicomposters.ning.com/profiles/blogs/new-flow-through?xg_source=activity&id=2094123%3ABlogPost%3A43518&page=2#comments

“No power tools needed” always gets my attention, and I love the simplicity of these vertical supports.

http://www.insideurbangreen.org/2009/11/garden-update.html