Gardening

[helwen]

Spring is coming, and summer with it...

A few thoughts and some suggested reading :)

Reading:

The No Work Garden Book, by Ruth Stout (out-of-print, but you should be able to get a copy through Bookfinder) Great little book on mulch gardening. Saved me and my father-in-law William many hours of back-aching weeding, and watering too. It's pretty simplistic, in that it doesn't get into stuff like balancing the mulch, etc., but a good place to start.

Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, by Steve Solomon. He gets down to basics for folks, things like what tools you'll need and how to take care of them, how t make your own fertilizer mixes (although I have some other ideas on that one), what veggies are easier to grow than others and what is needed to take care of these different needs, etc. Tool care and plant requirements are probably what I like this book best for... I've given up on growing spinach after trying the hardiest variety this past year. It's good to know what kind of farmer you are when it comes to taking care of plants, and I'm apparently the type who believes plants should do some of the work, help take care of themselves. Probably one of the reasons I like growing herbs and older varieties of plants -- they're generally hardier. Spinach is fussy stuff, with requirements that were hard to meet, at least down where I used to live. Kale, on the other hand, while not being an ideal salad ingredient (unless the leaves are very young), is a dark green leafy vegetable with as much or more nutritional content than spinach, and stays green right through the winter... guess which one I'm growing more of this spring?

Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway. The book on small-scale permaculture.

***
Tomatoes

One of the things I grow every year is tomatoes -- enough for us to have some fresh, turn a bunch into sauce for the winter, and (last autumn) hand out bags of it to everyone helping us with our move, plus a bunch to one of the neighbors. The thing that usually kills my back is staking them and tying them up (sort of forming a cage around them). This past year I finally got the hang of it, when I went from grow 4-8 plants to growing 16 of them. We got a few pre-made cages, but they're expensive so we only got a few. For the rest, I stuck in the stakes (5-6' tall), say 3-4 plants per day, while the tomatoes were still young.

Then when it looked like they were getting towards needing something to lean on, I'd tie a string near the bottom of one of the stakes and wrap it around each stake (3-4 per plant), spiraling upward, leaving about 6" space between each circle of the spiral. Then fasten at the top with a single loop bow -- not a knot. This way, if I need to adjust the string placement a bit for a particular plant, I can undo the bow (maintain some tension on the string so it doesn't fall to the ground), and move the string as needed. That only happened a few times over the summer.

We had different types of tomatoes too, since I was going to be making sauce - Amish Paste and Roma. They have different growing habits, one forming more suckers than the other. But even so I only really had to trim some extra bits off a couple of times during the summer. And again, I didn't do it all in one day.

The reasons for spreading things out wasn't completely premeditated, because I'd been planning on taking at least two days for each step. But they actually got spread out over more time (a little too much in the case of the staking, but couldn't be helped), because of supply and injury. Supply was we didn't have enough stakes until my sister-in-law Doris found out we were looking to get more stakes and brought the ones she wasn't using anymore down from her place. Injury was the right shoulder, of course. fitzw was helping when he could, but really the gardening was primarily my job because he works full-time and he had all the house-fixing stuff to do.

So, the end result of my not being capable of working myself into the ground was that I discovered I could spend 10-15 minutes every day or so on putting in stakes or tying up the tomatoes, then go on to work on other parts of the garden, or go weave, or.... and no aching back.

***
Basically, whatever you do, be it farming, housework, work or play, remember to take breaks so you don't break your back. If there's a lot to be done, order your tasks in such a way that you can alternate between bending over and standing upright.

Comments

[oakmouse]

If conditions in your area permit you keep your tomatoes in the same garden bed year after year without worries about pests or diseases, you could try building permanent tomato cages out of lathe. I'd never seen them before we moved here, but in this ecosystem they're practicable and they work very well. We're putting some in ourselves this year to free up our handful of store-bought cages for cukes and other veg.

The basic pattern that's most popular around here is an open frame about one foot deep by two feet long and about two to two and a half feet high, with a divider halfway across cutting it into to a pair of 12"x12"x24" vertical compartments.

[helwen.livejournal.com]

Definitely worth thinking about for the future, at least building them for permanent use. We'd still want to store them over the winter though, because it gets a little windy across the field.