The Current Landscape

Who knows what will happen this year? Which plants will thrive, which will fail? So, I guess I at least need to set a baseline for where I'm at and here it is. This is based on the original plan that the prior owner had done by Gethsemane Nursery. Note the two grow beds in the locations where the dead Kerria bushes were. And I didn't note this in the diagram, but the coneflowers have completely taken over the island. I don't mind because my niece, Charlotte likes picking them when she comes over and the more there are, the more fun she can have!


Square Foot Gardening and the Dust Bowl
A word about gardening, okay, farming and my other love, reading. In less than a week I barreled through The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, describing the wheat boom and severe drought in the Great Plains that resulted in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The descriptions of people trying to live through harrowing dust storms were freakish. They plugged up cracks under doors and around windows. They hung wet sheets over their windows and the black dust still found a way into their house, coating pots and pans, the floor, themselves. People died from something called dust pneumonia--basically because they inhaled too much of the airborne topsoil. Farm animals were blinded in dust storms. Cows died from having too much dust in their stomachs. Nothing grew in the Great Plains for years. Starving horses would chew on fence posts, trying to get some nourishment. And how did this happen? Because people plowed up the prairie grass to plant wheat and make a quick buck. Sustainable gardening or farming could have prevented the Dust Bowl and it's something I'm embracing this summer by trying out Square Foot Gardening.

Square Foot Gardening is a method developed by Mel Bartholomew during the environment-embracing 70s. It's supposed to give you a greater yield using few resources. There are some initial set-up costs. I bought grow beds instead of assembling them myself (it's just easier) and bought compost instead of using my own (again, easier and actually cheaper since I'd have to get a compost bin to make my own compost) and I had to order the vermiculite from a nursery supply company in Michigan. Still, the beds are down and will last several summers as will the vermiculite and I hope to be eating more vegetables than I would have thought possible to grow in that space.

Here's what we're going to try and grow in the bed against the garage:


Here's what we're going to try and grow in the bed against the fence on the north side:


I actually bought the broccoli plants today and will be planting them in the bed tomorrow. (You literally need to seed start broc in mid-February or early March if you want to use your own and I just didn't think that far ahead.)