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Even though we have the established raised beds and tire gardens, we felt the need to try and add some more to the whole
garden area, to further our food production. As stated before, we prefer to have a surplus of food that we would have
to sort out later than to come up short in our harvest.
One of the things that we did find at Lowe's was a couple of Stevia plants. Stevia is a natural sugar substitute
that is far sweeter than sugar, and far safer than ANY of the synthetic sugar substitutes out there, including splenda (which
we do use). To use Stevia one just has to dry the leaves up and crumble them into a powder to sprinkle on their foods
or do whatever they desire.
Since the raised beds were already filled up, we decided to do a separate tire garden for the two Stevia plants that
we got. We planned on lining the perimeter of the house with tire gardens that would be used for growing yet more vegetables.
We started with a tire for a crapped out rose plant that we got from Lowe's at discount (its salvagable), then next to it
we put another tire garden for the Stevias. The mix consists of equal parts of top soil and composted manure.
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| The Stevias planted in the tire garden |
The Stevias are supposed to be perennials, so long as the temperatures do not go too far into the cold extremes, we'll
see what happens. Worst case we may be getting more stevia plants or seeds to start more next year.
Fast Forward to 2015:
After 6 years of gardening and trying different methods, we've managed to get a few things established. First,
we have our few raised beds that have been active long enough that the boards on most of them had to be replaced due to rotting.
No pressure treated lumber for a garden producing food. We did line the beds with painter's plastic sheeting, real thin
stuff, but the whole idea is to produce a barrier that will keep weeds from pushing their way up through to the garden easily.
We will see how well that idea works, maybe it will, maybe it won't, we'll see.
The next thing is the myriad tire gardens that have been growing everything from fruit trees to berry bushes of all sorts
since we established the garden. Apple and pear trees have actually been good producers over the last couple of years,
producing a fair number of fruits given the small size of these trees. Muscadine bushes produced so many of the hard
skinned grapes that we ended up giving some away to friends. Then of course the other favorites, blueberries, raspberries
and peaches have all kept doing their part to provide us with the natural nirvana that is home grown fruit. Even a couple
of wild plum trees that we nursed from a couple of little twigs we dug up from a friends property are now 7 feet tall and
about 5 feet wide at their widest point, have been faithfully producing enough of the little plums that we end up giving away
a bunch of them.
The regular ground garden that we started around 4 years ago is pretty well established now, after years of adding everything
from standard compost to bags of leaves picked up from curbside in fall to chicken house litter and even standard bags of
topsoil from the store, the ground can be tilled down to almost a foot and still reveal black soil that is teeming with worms.
Everything we plant in there does pretty good, minus the issues with the occasional pest or weeds that we are in a never ending
battle against. All and all the ground garden is doing pretty good, its going to be a constant work in progress as we
keep adding stuff through the year even in the fall/winter.
There are future plans to add small barriers to the edges of the garden to keep rainwater runoff to a minimum and allow
for the garden to be built up even more so, kind of like a gigantic raised bed garden. Also other plans like utilizing
trellises and other methods of organizing the plants are in the works. We want to utilize methods of vertical gardening
so instead of having vining plants like tomatoes, beans, cukes, and even melons from covering so much real estate, we can
have these plants grow upwards with assistance, allowing us to put more plants per square foot, keep plants neat for easy
harvest, and protect the plants from the threats of disease and pests as well. Updates will be soon to come.
Greenhouse
A new addition to our gardening operation is one of those semi-portable easy to set up greenhouses that you can get from
Harbor Freight for a low price. They're equipped with two shelves on either side, tall enough to walk inside and have enough
room for even some larger potted plants you may want to house inside for the time, such as some of those dwarf citrus trees
that you can find at the big box stores.
These greenhouses are good for starting off your garden seeds outside where they have a better chance of getting acclimated
to the outside weather versus starting inside and moving them in and out as the weather improves. We acquired this greenhouse
off of Craigslist for cheap and broke it down enough to transport it in our truck. After a few minutes reassembling the unit,
we immediately housed several potted plants we've been moving in and out of the house through the winter as well as the year's
starts of seedlings that we picked up from Lowe's. Our next thing will be to start some seedlings for the plants we can't
get at the stores. If all goes well, we will look to possibly get another one of these specifically to house the potted plants
in that need sunlight but can't be subjected to freezing temps.
These cheap greenhouses are indeed better than spending a large amount of money building a greenhouse and can be broken
down after the weather has improved and the plants can be permanently housed outside, so the plastic skin and the framework
tubing won't degrade from continued exposure to sunlight.
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| The quick and easy greenhouse |
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| A shot inside of the greenhouse |
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