Jimmy's GAMCODish garden

So......my first year making a real attempt at a real garden (as opposed to potted plants growing in store bought potting soil that shrivel up and die in the summer heat, or a small patch of mostly weeds). I won't/can't fit all the requirements for GAMCOD, but I'll be incorporating some permaculture techniques, as best I can. So here's what I'm starting with.....when we moved here, this patch of dirt held an in-ground pool. We had it knocked into its own hole, and then the hole was filled with mostly sand, and some fill dirt from wherever the contractor kept his fill dirt. For the last several years, it was the kids playground, with a swing set and whatever crabgrass could grow there. Now that they've outgrown it, its becoming my garden. I've got about 245 square feet of bed area, math is my weak point so I'll have to take some time to figure out how many calories I'd have to grow to equal a million calories in an acre. As far as starting with dirt....I don't know that you can get much worse than sand and fill dirt. I live in town, so no ghost acre, but I've got some chickens that help out by making poop and eating weeds. At the end of last autumn, I fenced the area in and put them in there, and they had it down to bare dirt in a couple weeks. So......wish me luck. I'll update as I go.

So, I started turning over my dirt today, and I found that just under surface lurks my first hurdle. I'm going to be in a world of pain in the weed arena soon. I'm thinking of waiting 3 weeks or so for everything to sprout and turning the chickens loose again to hopefully eat a bunch of these weeds. Other than that, I suppose it'll just be a battle of me against the weeds for quite a while. I'm open to other suggestions though.

Hi James, thanks for sharing your gardening adventures.
Those are weed seedlings? Any idea what they are likely to be? Nice that the soil is already warming up.

Possible strategies:
1) leave them and let the chicken in to dispose of them.
Will the chickens scratch around and expose another lot of weed seeds to grow?
Variations of 1) hoe them off, but letting the chicken do the work seems good to me.

2) Let them grow and just plant in them.
This depends on what they are and how competitive they are likely to be. The advantage is that they will be starting the soil organisms off for you.
You could chop and drop them later which will give a little mulch to the surface and again feed the soil organisms.

3) Mulch them over to smother them.
I'm not sure what your plans are for soil improvement, but I would guess you'll need to be adding something to feed the soil, so if you had a thick enough organic layer the weeds might give up.

4) .....?

It took some googling, but I think I figured out what it is. If it's what grew all over last year, not just in that area but in all the cracks in the driveway, it's some sort of spurge. I know it's full of crabgrass seed too, since that also grew all over there, but soil temps are a little too cold for that right now. Soil temps are a little over 45 degrees, just measured with a meat thermometer 5" deep (it's all I've got). We've got some colder temps in the forecast, though, including some lows in the 20's, so I'm at least a month away from planting anything out there. I think my plan for now is to wait 2-3 weeks and let it sprout, and then unleash the chickens. Anything else after that will just have to be dealt with with mulching. Edit....a quick google search seems to indicate that chickens shouldn't eat spurges. I didn't have any problems last year with them in there, though, so maybe they just avoided it on their own. In any case, they should be able to deal with the other weeds.

In the past, I've just hosed it all down with 2-4D, Dicamba, or roundup, whatever was cheapest at the hardware store. But I'm moving away from those methods now, so this is all a learning experience for me.

Baby seedlings starting to grow, with more getting started this weekend. Keeping them warm on the radiator has helped tremendously with germination. Along with the garden patch, I've got two more bare root lilacs planted (for wine making), some bare root raspberries, and some bare root elderberries. I also have peach trees coming in the next few weeks here.

Wow, Peaches! Good luck with those.

Do you make wine from lilac flowers? I'd not heard of that.

Nancy Reading wrote:Wow, Peaches! Good luck with those.

Do you make wine from lilac flowers? I'd not heard of that.

yes, the lilac wine is like drinking lilac perfume (but in a good way, not like drinking rubbing alcohol which is what I imagine most perfume tastes like). Super fragrant and has a "spicyness" to it that makes one think of perfume. I found it's best drank young, the perfumeiness goes away with age.

New addition to the fod supply came today. 12 baby Cornish cross chicks. Daughter is currently reading them a bedtime story.

The first seeds/plants are in! This weekend I put down azomite and 3" of compost on the garden and turned over the soil again. Peas are all the way around the garden fence on the outside, cucumbers and melons and such will go on the inside soon. The row with hills has potatoes at the bottom of the he hills, with the first planting of radishes and spinach at the top of the hills. After each harvest of radishes or spinach or whatever short-lived thing plant on the hills, I'll push some of the dirt down into the potatoes.

James Bridger wrote:After each harvest of radishes or spinach or whatever short-lived thing plant on the hills, I'll push some of the dirt down into the potatoes.

Ha that was my idea too! Although as yet I haven't got round to planting on the top of my mounds (Probably another week or so...), the potatoes are at the bottom to hopefully get 'earthed up' as the season progresses

The garden is exploding. My radishes didn't radish and my turnips didn't turnip.....they made tons of leaves but tiny little roots. I'm making the best of it by eating the greens though, and giving plenty to the chickens as well, so they can turn them into eggs. Some of my plantings are too close...my marigolds are basically covered by the tomatoes, and some of my peppers are covered by the squash plants. But that's better than having a bunch of bare dirt. Weeds aren't nearly as bad as I thought.....sitting down for 30-45 minutes once a week is all it takes to keep it weeded.

For a first garden that is very impressive. Good job!

That looks so lush James - well done!
The good ground cover of crops might have reduced the weed burden, or maybe you just managed to get on top of them early enough. My seedlings are still too tiny to do much weeding around, but the potatoes are looking pretty good.

I wonder why your radish and turnip didn't bulb up? The laidback gardener blog suggests too much Nitrogen can give lots of leaves but little bulb, other reasons are excessive heat, dry or heavy soil, and root damage (by transplanting for example). Not sure which of these are most likely for you, maybe too much Nitrogen, since you got good leaves rather than the plants just going to seed?

Nancy Reading wrote:That looks so lush James - well done!
The good ground cover of crops might have reduced the weed burden, or maybe you just managed to get on top of them early enough. My seedlings are still too tiny to do much weeding around, but the potatoes are looking pretty good.

I wonder why your radish and turnip didn't bulb up? The laidback gardener blog suggests too much Nitrogen can give lots of leaves but little bulb, other reasons are excessive heat, dry or heavy soil, and root damage (by transplanting for example). Not sure which of these are most likely for you, maybe too much Nitrogen, since you got good leaves rather than the plants just going to seed?

I'm thinking it's excessive nitrogen, from having chickens poop in there before the garden, along with "hot" compost from the city landfill. Not sure what that's gonna mean for my potatoes. My beets seem to be making good roots though, so not sure.

Your garden looks very lush and vigorous!
Radish is sensitive to both day length and temperature. My daikon radishes already set seeds due to warmer spring temperatures. I usually sow a second crop in late July and those will produce in the fall. If yours don't bolt they will grow massive roots when the day length shortens.

A few lessoned learned so far.....
1. I need better tomato cages. I bought the "better" ones from the hardware store, and they're totally inadequate. My tomatoes are waaaaay to big for the cages, and as such are falling over and laying in the ground. I tried tying the cages to each other and the fence, and they still collapsed. I'll prune them shorter later today so that they can hopefully stand up off the ground.
2. Read the seed packets. I thought the squash I planted would grow as vines on my fence, instead they're some sort of bush variety and completely covered over my entire row of green beans and peppers, and are taking over the newly planted row of beets next to it. They took need to be trimmed back.
3. Pay better attention to where I plant stuff. I planted my carrots behind my tomatoes, and they don't get much light. I got plenty of yummy carrots, but they were small, and some were just a thread. My zinnias behind the tomatoes are also spindly and falling over. They maybe needed a cage as well, but they're making plenty of nice flowers.
4. I need to do better and at starting seeds. All my lettuce and brassica seedlings are collapsing. I think I need a better light , perhaps a 4-bulb light instead of a 2-bulb. My other seedlings that I grew earlier (pepper, tomato, cucumber, etc) did really well under my light, but I didn't harden them off and they really struggled once planted outside.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with us.  Maybe we should all start threads like this, where we just talk about our growing and our process, one post per year?  I'm growing carrots too, so far very limited success, but one can still plant carrots in July where I live, so I planted some more and we'll see what happens.

James Bridger wrote:A few lessoned learned so far.....
3. Pay better attention to where I plant stuff. I planted my carrots behind my tomatoes, and they don't get much light. I got plenty of yummy carrots, but they were small, and some were just a thread. My zinnias behind the tomatoes are also spindly and falling over. They maybe needed a cage as well, but they're making plenty of nice flowers.

Whenever your tomatoes are finished your carrots should start to grow. I wouldn't give up on them yet.

Jimmy, any updates on how much your harvest was for the year and how may hours you spent, and stuff like that?

Liv Smith wrote:Jimmy, any updates on how much your harvest was for the year and how may hours you spent, and stuff like that?

I don't have any info on that, I'm sorry. I ended up not keeping track. I can say that it was massively successful (for me at least). A few things (and keep in mind I'm feeding myself, my wife, and 5 or more kids)......I harvested potatoes in July, and didn't have to buy potatoes for 3 months. I have several bags of frozen mashed turnips too. I haven't bought pasta sauce since June, and I still have tons of tomatoes to turn into sauce.  I have green onions galore, and haven't had to buy them in months (they were planted from grocery store leftovers). I was able to successfully grow different than NGS in succession, keep weeds down, and always have something from the garden to eat, and currently still have some carrots in ground to harvest, along with garlic for next year. I have cereal rye growing as a cover crop.

I also added two new garden areas, one with raspberries and blackberries, where I grew turnips and lettuce to fill in the empty spaces, and another garden sace that I just made a few weeks ago for next year.

Wow. Sounds like a great harvest!

Thank you for “growing with us”. We hope you’ll do it again next year!