Garden design
sastyk | December 2, 2012I probably won't get to look at them until after Isaiah's birthday and our Chanukah party next weekend, but the seed catalogs are piling up, and I'm starting to think about gardens again. I can't wait to sink down into the couch with a stack of catalogs and dream.
This was a tough year for gardening - I was already behind in early spring because of the final push to get _Making Home_ out. On May 1, K. and C. arrived, and it took the better part of a month before things normalized. That was ok, I thought, the fall garden will be SPECTACULAR, I'll just put my energies there, and get serious…
sastyk | March 30, 2012
The mother of mulch gardening explains how she did it - in her 90s. My favorite part is how she grows all her own vegetables, does all the housework, preserves her vegetables and never does anything after 11am.
sastyk | February 24, 2012I got to see it back in November when I gave a talk to a class at UMASS - next time I go there I'm asking for payment in cuttings ;-).
Neat videos of how it came together:
sastyk | October 11, 2011The first "seed" catalogs of the year are always the tree catalogs, and now is a good time to begin siting and planning for next year's tree stock. We try to add trees to our home orchard every single year, sometimes just a couple, sometimes more.
Now with 27 acres, it may seem that our choices are very different than yours, but in fact, with a large herd of goats, the areas that we can ensure are 100% goat-proof are no larger than many people's good-sized yards. Moreover, because of our cold climate, we have to site many of our most sensitive trees and shrubs in an area the smaller than…
sastyk | October 6, 2011I don't live on a mountainside, but my town isn't called one of the "Hilltowns" for nothing, and Sepp Holzer's permaculture designs, set in a cold, steep place with stripped soil (my soil was literally stripped when the farm was a sod farm in the 1980s) comes closer to what my farm requires than almost anything else. I'm particularly taken by his methods of making large scale raised beds from brush.
He has a recent book on his techniques, and it is extremely valuable, even for a woman who doesn't have his same passion for earth moving equipment ;-). Neat stuff - a way of making land that…
sastyk | March 3, 2011This week's project is getting the material up for my garden plants and herb CSA - I'm hoping to be able to offer a wide variety of plants from annual vegetables (my tomato list alone is insane) to unusual edibles, native plants, flowers and herbs. My garden obsession is making me a little nuts right now, since there are still 3 feet of snow on the ground and its about 12 degrees right now - nuts enough that I came up with this: my secret garden that can be planting in plain sight without anyone...not the neighbors, not the zoning board, knowing that it all (shhhhh!) delicious food plants!
I…
sastyk | February 9, 2011
The first thing you need to remember is to think ahead, and bring in the compost before three feet of snow and ice lands on top of it. That was my big discovery two years ago, and like so many big discoveries was a. unpleasant and b. completely obvious - in retrospect. Living in a linear society, it can be difficult to get cyclical.
You see, I knew you could start seeds in lightly sifted compost - in fact, I'd seen Rodale Institute tests that showed that some varieties seeds did best in finished compost. So, the year before, I'd gone out in February, dug up some compost, let it defrost, and…
sastyk | January 13, 2011I'll be offline until Tuesday of next week, running my winter apprentice weekend (or Goat Camp as one attendee called it ;-)). The next one will be offered in May, and will be a family-friendly long weekend (tentatively Memorial Day weekend - I'll confirm that in the next week). You can bring the kids, stay with us or camp, and we'll have baby goats and chicks along with a chance to do herb growing, milking, dairying, tree fodder crops, and many other projects! If you are interested in a spot email me at jewishfarmer@gmail.com.
In the meantime, Aaron Newton and I will be running our annual…
sastyk | February 25, 2010In a recent previous post "Do You Have to Grow Food" I pointed out that the impact of urban gardening is vastly greater, in the aggregate, than most people believe. We tend to think that little gardens here and there make no difference, but in fact, they add up rapidly. Consider the impact of US Victory Gardens in WWII, for example - in 1944, US Victory gardens, which averaged only about 350 square feet, grew fully half the produce for the US. That is, home gardeners grew as much produce as all the vegetable farms in the US at the time. While it may seem, intuitively that small gardens…
sastyk | February 18, 2010In keeping with the reminder I got that I should back up a little bit, and present my ideas more coherently for those who haven't encountered them before, I thought I would add a post about why someone might want to start seeds, and how to do it, to supplement the posts on winter sowing and the sowing of perennials from seeds.
New gardeners generally start out by buying their seedling, and depending on where you are getting them, this can be a problem. The destructive wave of Late Blight that hit the tomato crop across the eastern half of the US was derived from seedlings purchased at big-…
sastyk | February 18, 2010Yesterday, I spent a long time filling seed flats and pressing seeds into dirt - and then I took them outside and set them to germinate. The temps were hovering right around freezing, and there was light snow coming down - the perfect conditions for growing things. Or at least, for winter sowing
(Note, there was originally a link and short quote from a website about the subject, but the owner of the site apparently took offense because I attempted to drive traffic to her, so I strongly recommend you avoid her site, to avoid offending her. I will go out of my way never to mention it or any…
sastyk | February 17, 2010Just a quick reminder that tomorrow Aaron Newton and I will begin our next Farm and Garden Design Class. The class covers everything from the very basics of design - how to get started planning for a garden or small farm, soil, sun and water issues, seed starting, choosing perennials, making the best use of space etc... to small-scale livestock keeping, making money and long term design. We've done the class a number of times, and we've had people with 100s of acres and people with tiny city lots, and people with no land at all gardening in community gardens, on public spaces or sharing…