Red State Green

This is a series about learning to feed yourself. The idea for this came from this post. You might want to read both of those first to see where I’m coming from before you comment.

1. Learn to garden <– we are here
2. Stock up
3. Find out who your neighbors are
4. Find local food sources (within 25 miles)
5. Learn to cook
6. Think about your meat sources (this is optional, of course, for you vegans out there, but think of it as a ‘bonus’ should your carnivore friends have a question)

Learn to garden

Gardening 101:

There’s really nothing mystical about gardening. Dirt, water, and sun, meet seed/plant. Add a container to hold it all in (preferably with a drainage hole at the bottom). Green side up.

If you’ve never done this before, find something you might like to grow and try growing it! If it dies on you, see what you did wrong (too little light, wrong time of year, forgot to water for a week?) and try again. It’s sort of like learning to ride a bike. You might mess up a few times, but if you keep getting back up you’ll eventually learn to do it.

You can garden without having one inch of land, as long as you have an area you can set containers on, such as a balcony or porch. You can even grow inside, if you have a sunny window. As long as there’s sunlight coming in, you can grow stuff. Look for plants that grow well in the amount of light you have available:

• Shade means you get no sun
• Partial shade means just that, sun less than half the daytime hours
• Full sun means sun basically all day long (I think more than six hours, but don’t quote me)

Where do you get seeds or plants from? Garden shops, seed catalogs, home improvement centers, your local grocery store or Wal-Mart. I’ve found good plants and seeds from all those places.

What about dirt? I’ll go into that more, but for the beginner growing in a pot, potting mix is probably fine. Read further if you’re thinking of tearing up the backyard.

Gardening 101 is now over. Go forth and grow something!

Here’s gardening 102 (for those of you who found that WAY too simplistic):

Sustainable gardening starts with the soil.

Soil is a living thing, composed of tiny particles of rock/sand/clay, decomposed organic material (dead leaves, etc.), bacteria, bugs, worms, you name it. This is good and natural. If your soil is dead (let’s say you did a Big Ag and pesticided it to death) you won’t get as good of results as if you had all the components there. Just like you’re not going to make as good a burger without condiments, or using stale bread.

The easiest (and most sustainable) way to get good soil is to compost.

Composting provides the nutrients your garden needs. It’s very easy. All you need is wet stuff (leaves, grass clippings, vegetable/fruit scraps) and dry stuff (dirt, dry weeds, shredded paper), along with a container to put it in. It’s better if the container has holes in it to let air in.

I bought a 25′ roll of 4′ concrete stabilizer wire mesh at Home Depot, cut it into 10′ lengths, and staked it up in 3′ wide circles in the back yard. I’ll post pictures sometime. But you can use whatever you want.

Google “compost” and click on “images” at the top, and you’ll see how many different ways you can compost something. There are oodles of gardening and composting groups online if you need help.

Once you got your compost container, you throw in a layer of dry, then a layer of wet, moving it so that the sides are higher than the center. Keep going until it’s full. Water it every so often when it hasn’t rained for a while, but other than that there’s not a lot that needs to be done.

This should not stink. Stinky compost means you need more dry stuff, or your container’s not letting enough air in. I stab holes in my compost pile to let air into lower areas that might be getting too compacted.

After several months, the pile is usually full, so I start a new one and let the old one sit. It’ll reduce in size as everything decomposes. By the time the second pile’s full, the first pile is usually ready to put in your pots or planters. It should look like nice dark dirt. If there are still some big pieces of stuff, toss them into the second pile to cook some more.

So what do you do while you’re waiting for your compost? I just re-started my garden, having moved halfway across the country. I had no compost. I just used regular old dirt. Not as good results as compost, but it worked. My compost is just about ready, so I’m thinking this fall I’ll have a better harvest.

Watering is also easy. You water when your dirt seems dry. There are some vegetables (for example, lettuce and tomatoes) where if you don’t keep an even amount of watering then you get problems. Lettuce goes to seed after a dry spell, tomatoes can split open if given too much water all at once, especially if not watered for a few days. I like to water some every day, unless it’s rained the night before.

What to grow when? Unless you live in the far north or in an extremely hot and dry climate, there are two seasons: Spring and Fall. Spring planting means you harvest in spring and summer. Fall planting (actually this starts in August in some areas) means you harvest in fall and early winter. Your local gardening center or an online gardening group can give you an idea of what to plant when. It’s different for each area of the country.

If you live in a strange situation (like I did in southern California, which basically never freezes and is tremendously hot and dry in the summer), you might need to adjust for your climate. I generally planted “spring” vegetables in the winter, which is when we got rain and cool temperatures. Summer was my ‘winter’, where not much would grow without undue amounts of work keeping it cool/wet. (Sunburned tomatoes, anyone?)

Local garden groups are very helpful in this regard. I’ll talk more about that sort of thing under knowing your neighbors. There’s a lot of wisdom out there, and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Next time: Stocking up. I got a different take on that than most. Stay tuned.