Out of Ground Experience

So for those of you who were surprised by my post about doing kale, spinach, and chard starts indoors, this post is for you. Usually one does not plant these seeds indoors and then transplant them. They germinate at cooler temperatures, and conventional gardening wisdom states that one should sow them directly into the ground. However, we are all about experimentation at S-UH, as well as cultivating (no pun intended) ways to make gardening more accessible to people in climates less mild than the Pacific Northwest. I wanted to see if there was a way that my family in Central New York, or our readers in Chicago, Minnesota, and Alberta could get their plants going before the outdoor growing season starts.

Hence the article in which I planted kale, spinach, and chard into egg cartons to get the growin' goin'. These little sprouts are leafy and happy on my start shelf, but beautiful weather and the need to turn them EVERY DAY due to sun coming from only one direction finds me putting them out into the raised beds in the backyard.

First off, if you are following the blog, you know that the beds themselves are experimental. They have been out back rotting away for a while now, and I am please to report that the peas I planted recently have been growing well out there! Here's how I am going about planting in the sheet mulch, as well as details about the transplantation experiment.


The sheet mulch is not soil. It is a partially-composted mass of striated compost, straw, soil, and manure. To increase the success of anything I plant here I am digging a trench into the bed, and filling that trench with soil before putting in the transplants. In this pic I show the trench I dug today to put in the pea starts that I kept indoors for an extra week.


I used the cardboard egg cartons to plant in, which meant that I could just cut them up and place the plants into the soil inside the cups. Here is where the experiment starts getting interesting. The plants came up in the egg cartons just fine. I planted one row of each plant by scooping the start out of the cup and planting it bare into the soil, one row with the cups still intact, and one row I sowed seeds directly into the ground. Now all I have to do is water, fertilize, and watch to see what happens with each row. Not the most scientific, controlled experiment but hey, I am no scientist.


The plants are in! Will report back to see how it goes. At the moment I get to enjoy the happy kale, chard, spinach, and pea plants out back in the sun. Oh, and the cucumber starts are popping up!!!

Playground for Peas

It has not taken long for the pea starts to shoot up (no pun intended) and start to tip over. I was not expecting to put them into the ground so soon, but I was worried that they would not continue to grow up if I did not move at least the tallest. So...I went out today and got the requisite materials for building a pea trellis.

Vertical gardening is an excellent way to maximize space when you are growing things in a small backyard. We will be doing a number of projects that utilize this tactic. Peas are nearly always grown vertically (I only say nearly always because there MIGHT be someone out there doing it differently, but I don't know any other good way to grow them). So as soon as my peas were tall enough to start bowing downward I knew it was time to get them outside.


Building something for peas to climb on is really really really really really really really (you get the point) simple. If your garden is up against a chain link fence you don't even have to make something - just use that unless you are worried about animals (or your neighbor's children...or your neighbors for that matter) stealing your peas through the links. I took a trip to the Benton Habitat for Humanity ReStore downtown to get scrap lumber for my project ($1.25 baby). I chose 5 pieces so that I could keep the string tight over the 8 foot lengths of my raised bed.

I got my string at Michael's - an arts and crafts store in town. My friend Stephanie put a bug in my ear about using nylon string, but my gut wanted to go with cotton. I picked up some cotton yarn meant for crocheting dish towels. I made sure it was non-toxic. i picked red because I thought it would be pretty with the green peas climbing it! I rounded out my supplies with 2" screws left over from Jason's coffee table project.


I used the screws to attach the poles to the outside of the raised bed. If you do this be sure to use two screws per pole. If you use only one it will tip back and forth (and, as you will see at the end of this project, two screws does not ensure this issue either). Why did I not put them on the inside of the box? The answer it simple - it was way easier to do it this way.


While I was working on this I got a chance to check out the sheet mulch up close and personally. The straw has sprouted, so there are a number of weeds, but they are easy to pull. Under the cap of leaves there is rich, dark soil. I also found the bed teeming with insect life - ants, arachnids, lady bugs, and worms. Still not sure how this stuff is going to support plant life, but I am happy with it so far.


I wove the string in and out around the poles, wrapping it around each pole as I passed it. I did it at approximately 1" intervals, and alternated from which side of the poles the string wrapped each pass I took. The result is a ladder of tightly-wound string that goes from soil level up about 3 feet. You can see in the picture below that the posts on the North end started to tilt over with the tension of the string. I went in and added another screw to each after the string was put up to ensure that they don't tip over with the weight of the pea plants.

Other ways to set this up would be to use chicken wire, cheese cloth, mesh, or any other porous materials you like. I put any of my pea starts that were tall enough to reach the string into the bed after building the trellis. This week I will go out every day and check to make sure the peas are attaching to the string to climb. Once I had the materials lined up, the whole project from start to finish took me 3o minutes.

Mo Mo Sheet Mulch

Our sheet mulch posting has thus far been the most visited on the blog (we are small but mighty at this point, and celebrate any page that gets more than 10 hits!) so...we decided to do a follow-up on the project with some great pics so you could see what we were up to.

We started with the frames that Jason built out of reclaimed lumber from the Benton Habitat for Humanity Store. The frames are 8'x3' and made mostly out of sections of 1"x6". We chose that size so that a) we could stand off of the beds and reach across them, and b) so we could fit them nicely into our humble backyard with room to spare for the large black raspberry bush (pictured here), and for the dog to have a play space.


You can see in the above picture that we dug into the ground in the farthest bed. This was part of the experiment that led us to choosing to sheet mulch. Once Jason got into the soil we discovered that it was too high in clay content to till and use as is. That is what led Jason to research ways to improve the soil...and voila! We discovered the sheet mulch concept. In some ways it ended up being a much better way to get going - digging up the sodden ground in the yard was the very definition of back-breaking.

Instead I spent some quality time chopping down the grass inside of each frame, first going at it with scissors, but finding my hands much more effective. Next we broke down old cardboard boxes and laid them on top of the grass clippings like so. Make sure if you are doing so that the paper and boxes are wet.


Next came the really fun part. I don't think had anyone asked Jason or I five years ago if we thought we'd ever haul around goat poop that we would have said yes. However, there we were in the Pacific Northwest drizzle team-carrying Tupperware totes filled with partially composted goat manure, straw, and sawdust.


Sheet mulching is composting in place, so it is necessary to alternate layers of green matter (for nitrogen) and brown matter (for carbon) in order to start the microorganism frenzy leading to decomposition. It is important to note that all dead, organic matter will break down eventually. Organizing compost in this way simply serves to accelerate the process.


After spreading poop came the straw cover and a layer of topsoil made of mostly-composted fir trees - a great way to take advantage of the byproducts of the local lumber industry.


Finally we capped the beds with a layer of leaves. It is important to have a layer that is free of seeds and will block sunlight from the other layers to hamper weed growth.


In the end we created 96 square feet of raised-bed garden in about 2 hours. We are now rooting for the rainy season to help accelerate the decomposition while we prepare our starts indoors.

Sheet Mulch

So its time for us to actually start that whole gardening thing. We spent some time talking, dreaming, scheming about it about 2 weeks ago, and now we are finally getting it to action.

We decided to put in 4 framed beds out back - each is 8'x3' and made out of reclaimed lumber we got from the Benton Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Jason worked this week getting the frames built, and we are going to spend some time this weekend turning the ground and starting to get things ready for seeds.

Upon digging into the yard (thanks to our landlady who is OK with this!) we found that the soil is mostly clay. This is great when we are talking about making plasters or cob, but for gardening it worried us a bit, hence the framed beds so we can import some other materials without having to till up the whole yard.

We looked into ways to get ahold of good soil. This included all kinds of ideas from going to the woods and getting some to purchasing it at a local store. We decided hauling soil seemed pretty energy inefficient and labor intensive, and discovered the route of buying soil would put us out over $200 minimum (ouch). So Jason got on the horn and started researching other options.

What he landed on was sheet mulching. This was an idea he'd originally had, but rejected because he did not think it was feasible for immediate planting. Sheet mulching is an incredible soil-building technique, especially if you have 6 months to let it break down. Fortunately, Jason pursued this idea deeply enough to discover that it is possible to plant almost immediately if one takes certain steps.

Lets take a moment and talk about what sheet mulching actually is. It is rooted in the concept that tilling is actually not beneficial for sustainable gardening (or agriculture for that matter) in that it will initially promote plant growth, but in the long run leeches nutrients out of the soil and leaves in barren (anybody remember the dust bowl?). It is essentially composting in place. To do this we are going to:

• Trim the grass short, leaving it in place.
• Covering the grass with newspaper and cardboard to prevent grass growth.
• Layering on top of the paper and cardboard from the bottom up, these four layers: partially composted goat manure and straw from a local farm, completed compost from the local municipality, straw, and dead leaves.

The net result is a striated combination of materials that will break down into fluffy, humus-rich, healthy soil. This process would have been best started back in October of last year. Of course last October Jason was living in a tent at an earth-building worksite, and I was watching football and drinking beer in Flagstaff. So, we are starting a bit behind, but developing a plan for being able move forward nonetheless.

While Jason builds his 5-layer dip of poop and other organic material in the backyard, I have been saving old containers to get our starts going. The plan is to get the sheet mulch up and decomposing while the plants get rolling indoors. Stay tuned for an article on starting plants as well as updates on the backyard beds. We are slated to get our plants into the ground on April 15, thus turning tax day into happy-gardening-fun-plant-dirt-day.

We must certainly give a nod to Toby Hemenway, author of "Gaia's Garden" for inspiration, ideas, plans, and instruction.