The rain barrel project ...

In keeping with our goals of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, I decided to construct some sort of system that would collect and make use of rainwater for the Thirty Square Foot Garden. Humans have been collecting rainwater for millennia. Cisterns have been traced back to at least 4,000 B.C. Only 2.5% of the Earth's water is freshwater, and 98.8% of that water is in ice and groundwater. So, freshwater is really a very precious resource, and conserving it should be a goal for all of us.

The garage next to my garden had a rain collection gutter on it, but it was on the wrong side of the building, so my first task was to carefully disassemble it, clean out all of the muck from years of disuse, and then reassemble it on the garden side of the garage. This was pretty straight-forward and took about a day to complete.

Here is the reassembled rain gutter and downspout:

The next step was to procure some sort of rain barrel. While there are commercially available rain barrels, these are pretty pricey at between $100 and $200. If you do a little searching in your community, you may be able to find a suitable alternative. I was able to locate a food grade plastic 55 gallon drum for only $20. Apparently, these drums are used to transport apple juice concentrate, and amazingly, are only used once and then thrown away. So, this turned out to be an excellent example of recycling.

Converting the drum to be a rain barrel was a fairly straight forward process. I purchased a plastic hose shut-off valve for about $8. I drilled a 1" hole near the bottom of the barrel, and using some silicon seal, screwed the shut-off into the barrel. The top of the barrel already had two bung holes in it. I removed one of the bungs, and secured some ¼" plastic screening over the hole to keep debris from getting into the barrel. I also installed a leaf strainer at the top of the downspout for this purpose.

The higher off the ground, the more water pressure you will get, so I cut some old fence posts into 2' lengths and made a simple platform that raised the barrel about 14". I used an 8" flex elbow to connect the downspout to the rain barrel. Some rough calculations indicate that I should get somewhere between 2 and 3 psi of water pressure from this setup.

The downspout that supplies my rain barrel is fed by about 150 square feet of roof, so has the potential of about 75 gallons per inch of rainfall, using the following rule of thumb: ½ gallon per square foot per inch of rain. Again, using some rough calculations and the average rainfall figures for the summer months where I live, I can expect to collect about 1,000 gallons of water over the course of the gardening season. This is a conservative estimate. That is not too shabby!

Here is a breakdown of my costs for this project. Of course, my expenses were somewhat reduced because I already had the rain gutter and downspout materials.

Rain Barrel Project:
50' Boat & Camper Hose	19.20
Plastic Hose Shut-off	7.90
Silicon Sealer	3.94
55 Gallon Drum - Food Grade Plastic	20.00
10-Pattern Hose Nozzle	10.16
8" Flex Elbow	6.77
3" Leaf Strainer	3.94
Brass Hose Repair Coupling - Male End	3.27
Total cost:	$75.18

The final result is a simple, low tech solution to watering my garden for the season which allows me to reduce my water bill, reuse the barrel, rain gutter, and downspout materials, and recycle the rainwater for a very useful purpose. Now, I am waiting for it to rain!

Lending a helping hand ...

You may have heard that honey bees are in trouble. Bee hives all over North America and Europe have been dying off en masse.  The situation has been given the name Colony Collapse Disorder. It is currently thought that the parasitic Varroa mite is spreading a particularly virulent disease known as deformed wing virus. This has led to "one of the most widely-distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet", according to the bee scientists.

This is of importance to humans because bees are responsible for pollinating many of the food crops that we consume. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the situation, consider that it takes 50,000 bee hives to pollinate the blueberry crop in the state of Maine. That is a lot of bees! The American Institute of Biological Sciences reports that native insect pollination saves the United States agricultural economy nearly an estimated $3.1 billion annually through natural crop production; pollination produces some $40 billion worth of products annually in the United States alone.

Honey bees are not the only kind of bee that are useful in pollinating crops. One species of bee that is helpful to the backyard gardener is the mason bee, which is the common name for species of bees in the genus Osmia. Mason bees prefer to nest in narrow holes, and get their common name from their habit of using mud to partition their nest holes.

Mason bees are active for several weeks in Spring, and you can encourage them to pollinate blossoms in your garden or on your fruit trees by building very simple houses for them. All you need is some scrap blocks of wood (2" x 4" is perfect) into which you drill some 5/16" diameter holes. Hang your finished block up on a south facing wall and the mason bees will use this as a nest.

The nest block that you make can be as simple or as fancy as you like. I put a little rain roof on mine. This is a very simple thing that you can do to increase the chances for pollination in your garden area. It is somehow rewarding to see these little creatures using the nest block that you have made for them. Lending a helping hand ...

For this project you will need ...

Let's talk for a moment about materials for the garden. The bywords for all of us these days should be Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I have tried to employ those principles at every step of the way with the Thirty Square Foot Garden. Materials to frame your raised bed garden should be relatively easy to scrounge. I was able to put together enough lumber to make the Thirty Square Foot Garden by looking around my neighbourhood. 10" x 2" planks are ideal. These will actually measure about 9¼" x 1½". You might try asking at a local construction site for any scrap wood that is just going to be discarded. Keep in mind that your garden doesn't have to be 6' by 5' like mine is. The inventor of the Square Foot Gardening method (which I talked about in a previous post) maintains that the ideal raised bed size is 4' x 4'. For corner posts, you will want some 2" x 2" material about 5' to 6' long, with pointy ends so that they can be driven firmly into the ground.

This single most important material for your garden is going to be the soil that you use to grow plants in. Everything about your soil will have an impact on the success or failure of your garden, so don't scrimp here. If you are starting from scratch, it is best that you go to your garden centre and buy the best materials that you can. I have come to favour a mix of black earth, compost or manure, and peat moss in pretty much a one third of each mix. If you have a dense, clay-like soil you may want to add some sand to this mix to improve the growing conditions.

Whatever soil mix you are starting out with, you will probably need to improve it over time, and there are many ways to do this. As a starting point it would be a good idea to get a simple soil testing kit so that you can determine what sort of soil you are dealing with. I found a soil testing kit for about four dollars that tests the soil for pH, nitrogen, phosphorous, and potash. Following the kit's instructions, I discovered that my soil had a neutral pH of 7, very little nitrogen, a high phosphorous content, and a medium potash level.

Using the results I obtained from the soil tests I know that all I really need to do to improve my soil's growing ability is to raise the nitrogen level. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. If I wasn't fussy about being organic, I could just apply an appropriate fertilizer such as ammonium nitrate. Studies have shown that there is no difference in the nutritional value of organically or inorganically grown food. If you are concerned about having unnecessary chemicals in your food though, you are going to want to use organic gardening methods.

In my case, this would mean adding more compost or using a "green manure" technique. That is what I plan to do. Come autumn, after the garden has finished growing, I will clear it out and plant winter rye seed. This crop will grow on, and come Spring, I will till it into the soil and add more compost at that time. That will go a long way towards improving the nitrogen level of my soil.

Incidentally, have you ever wondered what those three sets of numbers mean on a container of fertilizer?  Like 10 - 10 - 10, or 20 - 10 - 15. Those numbers indicate the relative proportions of nitrogen - phosphorous - potash contained within that particular fertilizer. So, given the example of my soil, I would want to choose a fertilizer with a high first number for the nitrogen, and lower numbers for the phosphorous and potash. Something like a 30 - 5 - 10 would be appropriate for my circumstance, if I chose to have an inorganic garden.

Since I know that I want to grow peas, which are a climbing plant, I added some plastic mesh stretched between the two back posts of the garden. Also, because I am planning on growing pole beans, I put in some tall bamboo poles in the back corners of the garden. To make it easy to use square foot gardening techniques, I used some twine to mark off one foot squares. So those are the materials that I used for the Thirty Square Foot Garden. And when I put all of the components together, here is what the garden looked like:

The best-laid plan ...

Given that my garden turned out to be Thirty Square Feet, based on the materials that I had at hand, it seemed like a good idea to draw out a plan for the growing space that was available. Out came the graph paper and I decided to draw the garden on a scale of 1" = 1'. I knew that I wanted to grow a wide variety of things, but I had no idea about how best to do that.

The traditional way of gardening is to plant things in rows, and in fact for about ten years I have had a small row garden in my backyard. It only measured 2½' x 22', but over the years I have had some success with certain crops. In particular, cherry tomatoes. There was one year where we had a steady supply of tasty cherry tomatoes for weeks and weeks.  There was the year where the garden also produced about a dozen cucumbers. But I was never really able to produce a succession of vegetables such that I could say that we ate out of the garden during the summer.

I have read various articles about gardening in small, non-traditional spaces and so I decided to Google the phrase "square foot gardening". The best resource that I found is an updated book published in 2006 entitled All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. Square Foot Gardening is described as the practice of planning small but intensively planted gardens. It turns out that square foot gardening is very popular and you will find many resources available to you on the Internet.

There are many advantages to this method of gardening, but there are two advantages that I really like and will share with you. First, you can locate a square foot garden in a relatively small space. This means that you can put your garden close to you so that you will walk by it every day. You will pay more attention to such a garden, and chances are it will receive better care. The second advantage is that your garden will only take up 20% of the space of a traditional garden. This means that you will use 80% less water and fertilizer, which is a tremendous advantage over traditional growing methods.

So, having read the All New Square Foot Gardening book, I decide to adapt some of those methods to my thirty square foot space. With that in mind, I considered the kinds of vegetables that I would like to grow and which ones might best be successful for my garden, and worked out the following plan:

As you can see, I am planning to get at least fourteen different crops out of my small space. In fact, using succession planting, after the radish, spinach, and lettuce crops have finished, I should be able to plant some other crops to maximize the garden's yield. Gardeners are by nature optimistic and ever hopeful. I must confess though that I will be thrilled if this garden does half as well as I am planning!

The growing season ...

The length and timing of the local growing season is of keen interest to the home gardener.  You want to start growing things at the earliest possible moment, and grow things for as long as you can to maximize your harvest. A good starting place is to consult an almanac for your area. The almanac that I have found most useful over the years is The Old Farmer's Almanac. Besides the Frosts and Growing Seasons chart, this almanac has much other useful information about home gardening.

Consulting the Frosts and Growing Seasons chart, I discover that the growing season for my location begins on May 24th and ends on September 27th, for a growing season that is 125 days long. Of course, the earnest gardener will want to push that envelope as much as possible, both at the start of the season by sprouting seeds indoors and using cold frames, and at the end of the season by using frost covers and prayer.

Since temperature is the key here, a useful tool for the gardener is some sort of minimum - maximum thermometer that allows you to see just how cold the nights are and just how warm it is during the days. There are many designs of these, and I purchased an inexpensive electronic one that has a remote wireless sensor which is located in the garden and a display that I have located conveniently indoors. I kept track of the daily variations and made a graph of the beginning of this growing season. Here is what it looks like:

What the graph shows is that Spring came early this year by about 16 days. The last time the low temperature fell to 0°C was on May 8th. This means an extra two weeks of gardening this year. Wooo! As is usual with these things though, there is of course, a downside. The biggest lesson that we have learned from the ecologists is that everything in our living world is interconnected . Having the first frost free date come two weeks early has implications that we might not understand at all.

As an example, suppose there is a species of bird that migrates north and nests early in the Spring. This species times the hatching of its young to the outbreak of a specific insect, insuring that there will be plenty of food for its nestlings. Now, imagine what happens when the insect hatches out two weeks early. There will not be enough food for our nestlings and the population of that particular bird species will fall this year. Naturalists are noticing more and more of these sort of interactions every day now.

There are unknown millions of these interactions in the world around us. This is why global warming should be of tremendous concern for all of us. A similar interaction with serious implications for us humans could come out of left field at any time and take us by surprise. Think again, for a moment, of the surprise the parent birds got when they discovered that there was no food to feed their hatchlings.

In the beginning ...

Like many things in my life, this all began with my friend, Annabel. Last Spring, Annabel asked me if I would help her set up a small garden. Because the ground next to her house was very poor for a garden, we decided to make a small raised bed. This was located on the very open, south facing side of her house, which insured maximum sunlight for most of the day. Using some boards that were at hand, we managed to construct a bed that was about six feet by three feet and about ten inches deep.

Next, we went to a friend in the country who runs an organic sprouts operation. We got enough organic soil, peat moss, and horse manure to fill the space we had made. This amounted to about four hundred pounds of material. We spread a thick layer of newspaper in the bottom of the bed (we found the Times&Transcript to be extremely useful for this purpose), and then filled the bed and thoroughly mixed the components of our soil.

At a local plant nursery we bought tomato, cucumber, and pepper transplants. We also got seeds for swiss chard, beets, carrots, and parsley. I planted these out with the taller growing plants in the back of the garden. A handful of bone meal was put in with each transplant. We used tomato cages for supporting the tomato and the cucumber plants. Annabel got a watering can and the garden was off and growing.

As things turned out, the garden did really well! The soil in the raised bed was heated nicely by the sun, and the south facing location was ideal for growing things. Even though the garden didn't receive meticulous care, most everything grew very well and there was a pretty reasonable harvest in the end. Based on our experience, I have become quite keen on raised bed gardening. So ...

This year I decided that I was going to try a raised bed garden of my own. At the end of last year's gardening season, we disassemble the components of Annabel's garden and stored them in my backyard for the winter. I scrounged around for some additional lumber and managed to construct a raised bed that measures six feet by five feet.

Instead of using newspaper this time, we turned the sod within the enclosed space with a spade and then put in the soil from the original raised bed. I borrowed a friend's small rototiller and tilled this thoroughly. At my local garden centre I purchased equal amounts of organic soil, sheep manure, and peat moss. This amounted to an additional four hundred pounds of material, which was thoroughly tilled into the raised bed. And that is how the Thirty Square Foot Garden began.

This blog is the story of that backyard garden and my attempt to encourage growing food at home. For many reasons local food production is much preferred to depending on the supply chain to bring us vegetables from thousands of kilometers away. I hope to explore many of the issues that face the home gardener who wants to grow at least some of their own produce, both for the well being of our planet and also for the joy of gardening.