I wanted to put out a really quick post today about using the space you have for gardening. There’s all kinds of Pinterest ideas and books about gardening in really small places. As always, I would recommend a gardening journal to keep track of your ideas, and results. Also, it seems to require a creativity and willingness to try things.

Myself? I’ve had LOTS of failures, but lets call them experiments instead. Does every experiment prove the theory? Does every attempt end up working exactly as planned? 

What fun would that be?

I’ll tell you a little secret; I plant things too close almost every year in my little urban farm. I choose not to berate myself about it because I’m just an ambitious gardener-I dream large and abundantly. (I'm sure my neighbors would back this up 😀)

This is part of our front veggie garden. Two raised beds 5'x10' hold dirt, bunny manure, and the following veggies grown from my seeds: strawberries, pumpkins, Zucchini, cucumber, tomatoes, eggplants, bush beans, peppers, and decorative corn. In the background from left to right are blackberries, pear trees, cherry trees, and an apple tree. True, I can barely get in there to prune the vines and harvest, but it pleases me to look at it and think about the jungle I've created.

These are my manure spreaders.

The squashes growing on the front fence have to be 'encouraged' to stay there every week or so. 

This is this morning's harvest. Squash vine tips are yummy stir fried with soy sauce and garlic. 

So I encourage the same for you. Dream as large as you dare each spring and see how that changes over your years. You might be surprised with what you are willing to try and the way that bounty, and sometimes the lack thereof, teaches you about gardening, soil, and yourself. 

Blue Skies

For those of you reading this who know me personally, you know that we are hoping to move our family and critters to a hobby farm inside of 2 years from now, hopefully less. I tell people that I’ve tried lots of things in my Saint Paul yard and that I’ve now outgrown my tiny lab and need a bigger one.

In the interim, in part because I get the comment frequently, “I can’t believe you do all this while you live in the city!”, I’ve decided to bend my blog to something with a little more focus. Exactly how much can my tiny portion of Mother Earth create? While I long to have the ability to do more than I can do while we are here, I’m still proud of what I have accomplished already and I think it would be interesting to showcase that.

So to that end, I’ll post some pictures of where we are now in the wheel of the year as we move into harvest season, and challenge myself both to see how much I can do and create, AND how much I can demonstrate and encourage.

My mom made this ceramic toad years ago and it graces my perennial garden.

 This is my back garden. 2 raised beds, 1 with things rabbits like to eat, and the other with overflow tomato and eggplant seedlings and a few herbs.

These are white currents growing in th front yard, next to the rhubarb and blackberries.

This is the view to the street out front. You can see the pumkins clearly in the begginning of world domonation. I hope we don't loose the mail carrier as she hacks her way thru the jungle 

to deliver our mail.

More of the front garden with: Cleome flowers free seeded for the humming birds, pumkins, zucchini, pear trees, cherry trees, and blackberries.

Front raised beds with: decorative corn, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, pumpkins.

King of the North grapes growing on the side fence. 

Seed starting; Go boldly but simply.

In the spirit of getting ready for the next season, I thought I would take the next couple posts to lay out some of my plans in the garden for 2017 and perhaps a rehashing of what worked and what didn’t in the years past.

A friend of mine recently asked about seed starting and what recommendations I had. I could likely have begun an expanded version of that conversation here in blog-land by stating my vast experience from when I owned and ran a CSA. However, the truth is, I’m sure I did do seed starting all wrong in those years for that kind of business. In that venture, what’s needed are proven varieties that grow in a wide range of conditions, mature predictably, harvest with good structure, and maintain their own post-harvest freshness and appearance. It’s not romantic at all but very effective.

What I wanted in those years was popping color, an array of unusual varieties, and amazing flavor. Oh yeah, I also had this vision of having the hours in the day to save my own seeds, which, among other things, necessitates the making of tiny, pollinator proof cages to house parent varieties that I would then get up at the crack of dawn and hand pollinate and then mark for later seed saving. I know, it’s OK to laugh at my ideas of how much time I would have. The amazing Hmong farmers I formed relationships with were polite enough to not openly mock me. They were, to a family, masters of a kind of efficiency I only dreamed of. Generations of hard-scrabble mountain farming in Laos left their elders with real knowledge of farming when what you grew might very well be all you had to eat. If you ever had dreams of learning the ropes, apprenticing even for a day of harvest with one of these families would never been time wasted.

But grow things, I did, and they were beautiful and bountiful. Now that I’m the master gardener of my city lot only, and don’t even sell very much, I could go whole hog with my seed fantasies. But falling on my face a few times a season running a small farm did teach me to marry the two visions and that I could have all the unique beauty, but temper my exuberance with a healthy dose of keeping things simple.

I have just a couple sources for seeds and sometimes, I just buy the darn plant, already well on its way. I buy seeds almost exclusively from Baker Creek (http://www.rareseeds.com/), hands down the best garden-porn in the catalog industry. They support heirloom varieties and put a great deal of time and effort into finding and rescuing our planet’s ancient seeds, tiny little treasures of culture that deserve a place. I also usually will buy a few from Seeds Savers (http://www.seedsavers.org/), Seeds of Change (http://www.seedsofchange.com/), and for market gardening varieties that work, Johnny’s (http://www.johnnyseeds.com/). And don’t start seeds inside unless you have an actual greenhouse of some sort to transfer them to more than 6-8 weeks before the last possible frost date for your area. It’s easy to get excited and plant them in early February, here in MN, but they run the risk of getting leggy and are prone to disease indoors.

I bought a small seed starting mat, like a heating pad for soil, and used a soil block maker from Johnny’s that would make the soil into tiny blacks to optimize my small area on the mat. It means you have to replant within a week or so of the tiny spouts emerging, but when your seed starting in your house in the kitchen counter, being able to take up a small space is important. I always had a small thermometer so I knew if the soil was too hot or not hot enough. There are charts for each veggie, but I shot for about 80 degrees Fahrenheit and that worked well because I had a mix of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, okra, strawberries, certain flowers that like it hotter to germinate. Sometimes I would have to mess around with covering the flat and plants with towels to get the temperature up and remove them if it got too hot. Then the little seeds would emerge and I would carefully replant them in flats with bigger soil plugs and try, with varying success not to mix up the variety tags. They would go into a shelf in my kitchen window with lights and then I boosted the efficiency of the light by using tin foil to reflect it back onto them instead of spilling into my kitchen.

The best thing about this whole process is that seeds, by their very nature, want to grow. The Mother has made that their only purpose and with a couple tools and careful attention, most of my seeds sprouted just fine. So rustle up your courage and order those seed catalogs. You’ll spend way more at the garden stores and never get the variety if you don’t start them yourself.

Blue Skies, All.