Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Where do I get some help?

That was the question I was asking myself after I saw that my original garden plan needed some tweaking.  What I found was Victory Gardens San Diego and their Gardening 101 class.  http://www.victorygardenssandiego.com/  
What was Victory Gardens about?  From their web site...
  • Eating nutritious, locally grown organic food
  • Promoting genuine empowerment, practical knowledge and self-sufficiency
  • Fostering community, skill sharing and information exchange reconnecting people to food history and its traditions
  • Growing food in innovative spaces
  • Encouraging a greater understanding of food systems and their connections to local and global sustainability issues
  • We help anyone seeking an active role in their own food production!
Ok, I was in.  I was referred to a Gardening 101 class at the beautiful Olivewood Gardens.  http://olivewoodgardens.org/.  Olivewood Gardens is a garden and education center located in National City (just south of downtown San Diego) on a 6.85 property.  The site offers garden classes for grade school students on field trips, as well as adult oriented garden courses like the one I attended.  In addition, they have cooking classes featuring local San Diego chefs, with produce straight from the garden! 

In addition to all the good work they do, the environment is beautiful and features a fully restored victorian house that crowns the garden with impeccable style.  Olivewood gardens is a non-profit, with the house, gardens, and property donated to the foundation by the Walton family in 2006 and later gifted to Olivewood Gardens in 2010.
 
The next Gardening 101 is coming up in about a month if you'd like to check it out.  http://olivewoodgardens.org/education/gardening-101-how-to-grow-your-own-food.

So, back to the garden.  The first lesson we took in was all about getting started...Getting a garden started, starts with siting.  More on this next time, but to give you a hint, here are some topics to consider from the Gardening 101 class:

SITING
  1. Sunlight and Shade
  2. Water accessibility
  3. Soil quality and terrain
  4. Existing trees and shrubs
  5. Existing pests/weeds
  6. Accessibility
  7. Community

Lawn, lawn, nothing but lawn...Where to begin?

I was at the Little Italy Farmer's market http://www.littleitalysd.com/mercato/on a beautiful, sunny Saturday  morning and happened by a booth staffed by Karen Contreras of Urban Plantations. http://www.urbanplantations.com/.  Wow, I was excited, she consulted on the exact thing that I wanted to do...turn my lawn into a beautiful garden.  So, she came out and took a look at my large rectangular front yard, walked around and gave me tips on where to place the garden and also how to turn my lawn into soil.  As it turns out, I didn't have so much a lawn, as a green weed patch, which actually was a good thing...much easier to dispatch than a true lawn.  In terms of where to have my garden, we picked the spot that would get the most sun, which was off to the left of my front door, in a space not shaded by the house and close to the street.  In garden terms, this is called "siting".  We also talked about how to change the green stuff into soil.  Karen suggested "lasagna gardening" which involves putting down cardboard, then compost, chicken manure, straw, basically anything you can find that will turn into compost over time, and then you wait for it to do it's dual job - kill the grass and ad a nice layer of nourishing compost to the top of your newly cleared soil.  My results were mixed.  I definitely killed the grass, but when I investigated the what was underneath, I did not have the beautiful, soft crumbly soil I had hoped for.  Instead, I had a little compost on top of super hard patch of dirt that was pretty much unyielding to my attempts to plant anything in it. 

Last summer, I did plant a small watch of Sugar Baby watermelons http://www.localharvest.org/heirloom-sugar-baby-watermelon-seed-C6664 - 6 total.  Here's a picture of the watermelon I was trying to grow from a seed catalog...also note, this is a heirloom.  That means that the seeds that I kept from last year, should be able to be used to grow this year's watermelon.  In addition to the watermelon, only a lone zucchini made it into the ground.  That was all I managed to dig in. 

Everything else went into planters around the edge of my hoped for garden.  I also got some surprise "volunteer" pumpkins that grew up from the middle of the garden from seeds still within the compost.  They had giant leaves and between the watermelons and pumkins, I did have a garden full of beautiful pumpkin leaves, but not the garden I had hoped for when I started. 

Still, it was fun and I was inspired to keep trying.  The mini watermelons that I grew were delicious, but small.  Most were the size of a softball.  Have you ever seen a watermelon the size of a softball?  The first one split open in the garden because it got overripe while I was waiting for it to grow to full-size.  The pumpkins were cute, almost a dozen in all, from a large to tiny and very hard.  It took a hammer to get one open when I wanted to bake it.  I also raised other "mini" veggies in containers.  I grew butternut squash, cantilope, bell peppers, eggplant, tomatos, tomatillo and a single spagetti squash.  These all did a valiant job, considering their limited root space.  They were all minatures compared to what you see in the store.  Hopefully this summer, "summer 2.0" I'll have better luck in getting these into the ground and giving them all the space and nutrients they need to grow.

I'm starting a Healing Garden...in my front yard!

So...I'm starting a garden...in my front yard.  The idea is to grow fresh, organic produce...mostly veggies to help support me in a new healthier life.  Ideally...everything organic, mostly heirloom, and since it will be in my front yard whenever I get hungry...even fresher than the farmer's market!

Who has a garden in their front yard you ask?  Well, in my case, people who don't have a back yard.  I live in a duplex, i.e. two houses together, so I have the front yard, and the other house has the back yard...so for me, front yard it is.  However, there is also an upstart trend of homeowners digging up their front grass to create "food not lawns".  In San Diego where I live, Food Not Lawns advocates just that - starting a garden and losing the grass.  www.sdfoodnotlawns.com  Some of the motivation is about finding an eco-friendly way to eat and also working to be more food secure in an uncertain world.  It's also about eating local and not  contributing to the massive use of fossil fuels.  Fuels used not only to make fertilizer to grow conventional produce, but also then used to transport it, usually many miles away from where it was grown...all the while getting less and less fresh before it arrives in your neighborhood store.