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by Tim Buckner

Garden Update Beta version 1.1

March 11, 2012 in Garden Updates

Time to start gearing up for a new year in the garden.  Found some free pallet wood and when I get some time to break them down (sounds easier than the actual work required to remove those rusty nails) I’m going to fashion some 2 foot high beds for hugelculture.  Found a great source for horse manure compost that should give my beds the organic matter they need for excellent veggie production.  This year I’m gonna try companion planting in a polyculture format where you have a few things growing in the same space and their root systems help each other rather than compete for resources or put off certain smells to attract or repel insects.  I’ve been researching weeds in the garden and if properly controlled so they don’t take over, they can be very beneficial to the soil and allow the roots of the plants they grow around to dive down deeper into the sub soils to mine water and minerals.  Bare soil is bad and leads to erosion, nutrient loss and the need to irrigate.  Ultimately I would like some fruit and nut trees incorporated into the system with guilds set up to support those trees, but more research is required to start it off right.  Maybe this year but probably next year.

We have some brussels sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings in the greenhouse now utilizing soil cube technology.  I’m waiting for the threat of a frost to pass in this very warm winter we’ve had to harden them off before putting them in the garden.  I would hate to loose them by putting them out too early.  We also have some other seedlings set up in the utility room waiting for all the seeds to germinate before putting those in the greenhouse also.  I’m about a week late in starting some broccoli seeds in soil cubes and I need to start some onion sets and peas directly in the garden.  Also I need to set up a few trellises for the peas to climb up on.

Found a book the last time I went to Progressive Gardens called the Agriculture Course by Peter Selg.  It’s a breakdown of a Rudolf Steiner lecture recounted by Whitsun Koberwitz about biodynamic agriculture that brings on a metaphysical aspect to the elements within the Earth and their relationships with the planets in our solar system.  It makes my brain melt at certain points, but wow is it an awesome read.  Working on learning this thing called permaculture to reduce the need for irrigation when we don’t get rain for a few weeks or months.  Just constantly listening to all ideas I can come across and learning all the time.

Thank you for your time and energy,

Tim Buckner

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by Tim Buckner

Garden Update Beta version 1.0

February 19, 2012 in Garden Updates

It has been a year since we decided to put a garden in our backyard and transform it into a food production center, but to have a complete journal of my garden experience I’ll start at the beginning.  Sand makes up the majority of my topsoil, but when you dig down about 6 inches it takes on a calico pattern of clay, black earth within a layer of sand.  I purchased some bags of compost from Lowes and began working that in to the soil in 4 foot by 4 foot plots to increase the amount of organic matter available.  Everything we planted in this slightly amended soil would grow, but vegetable production was very poor and it was really discouraging watching our plants just produce leaves.  There has to be a serious repair stage for the soil to become fertile once again after having the topsoil stripped and taken away for a new development.  The first thing that we can do to naturally increase fertility is allow weeds to come in and do the work of pulling up nutrients from the deeper sub soils and at the proper moment cutting them down and turning them into the soil or composting them and broadcasting that compost over the soil.  The reason that weeds come into an area is to break up hard ground to make it porous and bring up elements that have been washed down into the sub soil layers.  For a healthy lawn, grass will naturally come in and overtake the weeds once the soil becomes less compacted and more fibrous not that I really care about grass although it would look pretty especially in our urban setting.

I’m getting off topic with the whole weed thing and biodiversity, so back to the garden.  That was the spring and it wasn’t a total loss we did eat some nice vegetables, but nothing that was gonna really cut our grocery bill.  The gardening bug had really got me by this point and I began researching what the heck to do with our crappy soil.  Raised beds seemed like the solution to getting something going immediately.  So, off to Lowes again to get some landscaping timbers because they are so cheap.  Cut, clamp and screw and viola 3/4 foot high raised beds (I know now that they should be around 2 foot high) with about a foot of the sandy soil loosened up beneath the ground level.  In goes some compost, peat moss, vermiculite/pearlite and a  handful of 10-10-10 fertilizer to get things going.  Yes I know what you your thinking, fertilizer isn’t organic and you shouldn’t use it.  Well my view on fertilizer is if you see a deficiency in a certain nutrient then you should find a way to supplement that deficiency.  Yes, natural means are most beneficial and long lasting, but they take the longest to implement and I needed something to happen now and work on natural means in the future once ideas sorted themselves out.  It may seem that I am bouncing back and forth between ideas and…I am.  There is so much to learn and decipher between so many different beliefs about the proper ways to garden that it almost seems too daunting a task to take on, but I do believe that nature will show you the way and then it will become clear.  I believe the phrase is, “The master will appear when the student is ready”.  Yes, I am a philosopher gardener who truly wants everyone to grow something.  Not necessarily for sustenance, but to at least to experience the creation of life where there seemed to be no life in a barren soil.  When we as a people begin to take an interest in the creation of life, then maybe we can appreciate the lives we cross everyday and not take them for granted.

Okay back on topic, sorry for the interlude but I’m not going to edit that out.  I really want you to know where I am coming from and the serious respect I have for the natural systems that would lead to a permanent solution.  I’ll try to leave the philosophy to the articles and keep the garden updates pure factual event based, but I just had to get that out of me so i could continue.

I got a soil cube tool and that seems to be the way to go for individual plants.  A soil cube doesn’t require a container to hold the soil and this leads to many benefits.  You have none of the setbacks of root shock because the root system self prunes once it meets the outside of the bare soil cube and it just looks cool, but there are still plants that you need to sow directly like roots and tubers.  Well I grew some seedlings in the soil cubes and nurtured them with a CFL bulb indoors and then set them out to come back later to many dead seedlings.  Then I went back to the soil cube website and watched some videos to my dismay I had totally skipped the part about hardening off the seedlings.  Off to Google I went to research this thing they called hardening off of seedlings.  Wow did I feel stupid, of course you can’t just take protected seedlings and subject them to the harsh realities of mother nature.  You have to acclimate these babied seedlings to their new environment before you can just let them play with their mother.  So, the fall crop was so set back that I didn’t feel like I could go forward due to the first frost coming up very soon.  Well I should have just done it because we had the mildest winter we have had so far here and I could have started more plants with no downfall, but I held off to ready my plots and a salvaged green house that a neighbor gave us for next year and continued to collect knowledge about gardening.

We now have the greenhouse set up for the most part.  I need to fix it up a bit, but it has been moved to a more optimum spot to get better sunlight.  This is going to accelerate growing plants from seed dramatically and leave more time to put into other projects.  I totally recommend a greenhouse for anyone serious about food production who has the space for one.  I recently picked up some free pallets and I’m gonna break them down to make more shelves for the greenhouse and use them for some 2 foot high hugelculture raised beds.  Okay now we are getting into the future, so I will leave any more comments for a future post.  Live with nature and nature will provide.

Tim Buckner

The Hermit’s Wonders - Individuals Working with Nature to Replenish the Soil

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Avatar of Tim Buckner

by Tim Buckner

Nature’s Best Soil Fertility Builder

February 5, 2012 in Gardening Articles

Weeds!!  Oh no, I gave away the secret at the beginning of the post; that is not good marketing.   I really need to work on my cliffhangers.  I just finished an interesting book written back in the 50′s about weeds.  Before reading this book, I thought that weeds were the enemy that steals the vital nutrients and water our plants need to thrive.  I found that weeds are natural soil building plants that draw essential elements up from their hiding places.  When topsoil is out of balance, nature’s workforce steps in to begin the process of rebuilding organic matter and mining for nutrients that have been washed down into the sub soil.  Most weeds can take root in soil that won’t grow anything else and send down deep roots that break up the hardpan and wick up water and micro-nutrients.  They make excellent mother crops when paired with the right crops and kept thinned out to allow for proper root structure.  I can’t believe the bad rap these natural soil builders have received and the reason we feel the need to totally obliterate them.

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by Tim Buckner

Ten reasons to start your garden today

January 22, 2012 in Gardening Articles

Greetings and welcome to my blog on taking a wonderful journey into starting to garden and why it’s a great idea for everyone to grow some if not all their own produce.  Follow me on a journey to create fertile soil that will be able to grow food in whatever space you have available.  Here are a few reasons to start a garden today.
  1. Learn a new skill that will allow you to be more self sufficient and give you the tools you need to feed yourself and your family.  I just loved the first time that I cooked a bunch of swiss chard that we had grown from seed. I didn’t research properly hardening off of my first seedlings and that one plant survived.  I made this site to help everyone who wants to garden and keep you from making the same mistakes I did in the beginning.  Even though the learning is fun for me, I don’t want to see anyone get discouraged when it doesn’t work the first time.
  2. Save money by not pumping nitrogen and water to keep a green blanket that is only consuming inputs and not producing a damn thing for use by your family.  Save time by having less area to mow every week; although, you might increase the use of your weed eater getting around raised beds if you go that route with your garden.
  3. Food products that have to be trucked to big supermarkets are not sustainable or reliable due to fluctuating gas prices and weather disasters.  Did you know that over 90% of the lettuce in the grocery store comes from Arizona and California?
  4. Build better communications with neighbors by taking some of your surplus and filling their plates with good homegrown food.  You might even spark some interest into their own food production.
  5. You decide what inputs go into your food and subsequently into your body.  I personally don’t want to ingest any more pesticides than I have already in my life.
  6. Pay less taxes.  The government can’t tax the produce you have growing in your backyard (well not yet anyway).
  7. You will find that it’s easier to consume more vegetables when all you have to do is walk out to your garden to get tonight’s feast.
  8. The variety of produce available at most grocery stores is boring at best and just sad at worst.  There are literally thousands of unique seeds that can produce food and add beauty to your personal environment.  It is very hard to find heirloom veggies in the supermarkets because they only want to sell something that is perfectly round and aesthetically pleasing .
  9. Things you grow yourself just taste better and still have all of their natural enzymes and vitamins intact.  Just think about all the chemicals that have been created so that the produce can make it to the store before it spoils and can stand up to being stacked on top of each other without bruising.
  10. And the best one of all…it’s fun and the whole family can join in.  If you have kids, give them a small section of the garden to do their own thing.  Grow flowers in the garden to attract beneficial insects and make your wife happy.  Just do it!!

I realize that you may not have the space or time to grow veggies, then please start buying local produce and create friendships with local growers.  The more you can buy from farmer’s markets and local farmers will decrease the load on the entire system.  That could lead to a decrease in prices of other items in the grocery store that add a level of comfort that you can’t produce (plastic wrap, aluminum foil, etc).

I’m just beginning on a long road of research and trial and error that will lead to truly fertile soil where did not exist before.  I really believe that building fertile soil in a totally natural way will be one of the most rewarding activities that I can do and heck maybe it will increase the value of our property.  If I had the choice of buying a piece of land with lots of fruit and nut trees and soil that will grow anything you put in it and another section of land that you can barely get grass to grow without pumping tons of nitrogen into the soil, I think you know what my choice would be.

I’m not too secure with the way things are churning in the government sector at the present and I will not give up my freedom to feed my family quality food.  Since I started on the path of producing, I don’t think I can ever stop creating nutrient dense produce from a small speck sowed into the land.  I believe that mono culture farms strip the soil of valuable nutrients and organic matter that is not being replaced.  In order to produce high quality food, you have to work with nature to build fertility and not just take year after year.  If we look at the work of great people like Paul Wheaton, Jack Spirko at The Survival Podcast, Sepp Holzer and many others, we can truly observe nature and work on building soil that can support anything you put on it.  It would be awesome if we could set up systems that support systems and reduce the amount of work we have to do and just harvest the results.  In future posts, I will go into hugelkutur, raised beds, square foot gardening, seed saving, preserving excess produce and some other things not even related to gardening.  Live with nature and nature will provide.

Thank you for your time and energy,

Tim Buckner

The Hermit’s Wonders - Individuals Working with Nature to Replenish the Soil

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