In which part of Canada do you live, and what is your hardiness zone?

South central Ontario, 157 km north east of Toronto, zone 5a or 4a if you use the USDA hardiness zones.

How old are you, and how long have you been growing food?

Age 62, first garden was in 1980, then not again until 1987-88, then not again until 2002, then not until 2007 when we got serious.

Why did you abandon your previous gardens?

Just the demands of life at the time – children, a demanding corporate career, moving.

What would you estimate the age distribution to be among people growing their own food?

Very interesting question. I was at a Seedy Saturday on Sunday, Mar 13 and age distribution was from young parents with babies to quite elderly seniors as the pictures show. It’s not so much the age distribution as it is the numbers which are increasing at an explosive rate if events like this and seed sales are any indication.

What drives you to grow your own food?

There are a number of different reasons. When we started in 2007, it was just part of gardening in general. We had moved from a small 40 x 100 foot city lot (12 x 30 meters) with tiny back & front gardens to a 10 acre property (40,000 m²) in the country where size doesn’t matter.

We had a vague idea about growing perennial flowers and vegetables. Then along came the financial mess of 2008 and I looked more closely at the fragility of all systems including food distribution & production. I didn’t like what I saw so food – growing, preserving, and propagating became a large and growing part of the garden.

Do you have any good sources of information about food security, i.e. distribution and production?

Not really. I don’t actively follow this line of thinking. I find that there’s a great deal of talk and analysis but not much in the way of solutions and even less in the way of doing.  Because of a just-in-time delivery system, supermarket shelves carry about 3 days worth of food.  To put that another way, we are 9 meals  from anarchy. Is that fragile? I don’t know but I prefer not to take a chance. Similarly, there is immense consolidation and concentration in food production, e.g. chickens. I don’t do much digging into this because I see the same pattern repeated over and over again.

Do you mostly propagate from seeds or cuttings?

Vegetables tend to be seeds although perennial vegetables will be by root division. Trees and shrubs depend on the species and variety.  They tend to be mostly cuttings but some are seeds.

Do you have anyone to help you in your garden?

My wife, Joyce. It’s a team effort. I tend to start most of the seedlings that require starting under lights but Joyce takes care of the direct seeded vegetables. The fruit orchard is completely hers. She did/does the research, the ordering, the hole digging and planting, the spraying. I tend to be the one who sources new vegetables to grow. She’s the one who is interested in herbs, mostly culinary but also beginning medicinal. There is no reason for this division of labour. It just seems to happen this way.

What type of grow lights are you using, and where do you get them from?

I much prefer these to the old long tubes:

I can position them exactly where I need them.  They store very well.  And they are cheap. I’ve never seen much difference between the ordinary fluorescent and the grow lights other than the price.  I leave them on for 14 hours a day.

I’ve had problems with seedlings growing long and thin. How much light do you give your seedlings? Do you control the temperature?

Yep. Long and thin is a problem.  I try not to start too early since that tends to make plants long and thin.  I use a bottom heated seed tray with the plastic plant cells.  With care, I can re-use them.

What kind of vegetables and fruits are you growing?

In a cold climate, food isn’t much of a problem in the summer. You eat straight from the garden and can have a steady stream of food all summer long. Of course, that depends on how long your growing season is.  Ours is around 125 days from last frost around May 18 to first frost around Sept 20. Because winters are the problem that’s what we tend to focus on. From there, we looked at the easiest way of preserving large quantities of vegetables for an extended period of time which is root cellaring. So we grow carrots, parsnips, a number of varieties of winter squash, beets.

(Sweet dumpling winter squash, bush variety)

And because we like to experiment – salsify, Jerusalem artichokes, Chinese artichokes, scorzonera. And we grow a number of varieties of tomatoes for canning and freezing whole. For summer vegetables, we grow salad greens including spinach.  We eat a lot of salads during the summer. We also grow a number of perennial herbs such as salad burnet, lovage, and oregano and summer herbs such as basil and cilantro. All get eaten fresh and all get dried for the winter.

(Chocolate mint in the spring)

Joyce’s orchard has cold hardy plums, pears, apricots, and heritage apples. The trees are all dwarf or semi-dwarf because they produce fruit much earlier than standard trees. Last year we added, mulberries and hazel nuts as well as cold hardy peaches. We have two peach varieties – Bailey and Chui-Lum Tao from Golden Bough Tree Farm. Both are rootstocks. We’re hoping that they provide us with peaches for canning.

(Illinois Everbearing Mulberry)

We’ll be grafting one of the wild apples that we found in our woods. Because of the difficulty of finding rootstock in Canada, I’m propagating some of the rootstock I did find so that I have a steady supply.

We grow an increasingly wide range of soft fruits – high and low-bush blueberries, highbush cranberries, low-bush cranberries (not bog cranberries), bilberries, tay berries, Saskatoon berries, goji, goumi, autumn olive (which isn’t an olive an all), edible blue honeysuckle, sea buckthorn, thornless blackberries, blackberries, Boyne raspberries, ever-bearing raspberries, ever-bearing gold raspberries, hardy kiwi.

(Goji)

(Goumi – Elaeagnus multiflora)

(Autumn olive – Elaeagnus umbellata)

We have Bluejay and Reka blueberry varieties. We haven’t focused much on them because we have a very large pick-you-own berry farm near us. I was able to propagate some from cuttings but managed to kill them by not giving them enough winter protection while they were still small.  They aren’t a high priority because the particular requirements of growing them.

This year we will be tip layering wild blackberries, raspberries, and gooseberries that we found on the property last year and moving them to more accessible locations. We also harvest wild grapes for jelly. Joyce makes large quantities of jams and jellies which she sells at our local market each Saturday from late May through early October. $4.00 a jar except for the wild grape jelly which is $5.00.

From a food security point of view, we will be experimenting this summer with a couple of crops – soybeans and black oil sunflowers.  Nutritionally, soy has lots of energy, a wide range of vitamins and minerals, good fats, and minimal bad fats. It stores very well. It’s a nitrogen fixer which means that I add to rather than deplete the soil. And its range of food usages is extensive. We’ve already managed a palatable soy beverage which works wonderfully in coffee and to make soy yoghurt.

We’re growing the black oil sunflowers to see if we can get a decent harvest. If we do, we’ll probably invest in an oil expeller and try making sunflower oil. That would give us a cheap and easy source of cooking oil.

And we will be keeping bees this summer using a topbar hive instead of the more conventional Langstroth hive that you see everywhere.

Joyce has already been able to substitute honey for sugar in one of her jellies and she’ll be experimenting with others this summer as the different fruits come into season.

What advice would you give to people growing in colder climates?

Don’t get hung up on technology such as poly-tunnels. It’s expensive and difficult to maintain and will become increasingly so because of its oil component. Look to cultures that deal with cold climates and see what they were growing before World War II.

(Winter sowing)

Most survived on root vegetables. Look to grow hardy perennial vegetables such as Jerusalem artichokes, wild leeks, wild onions, Turkish rocket. Look at your weeds with a different eye. Use cold frames tucked up against the warm of your house foundation on the sunny side of the house to extend the season and possibly over winter tough greens like spinach. Look for unusual varieties of vegetables such as long keeper tomatoes. We have some from last year that are sitting on our kitchen counter ready to be eaten whenever we choose. We’re actually going to see how long they last.

How do you choose what seeds to use in your garden, and where do you get them?

The seeds have to be organic and not hybrid. That insures no GMO’s or seed treating. Hybrid means that you can’t save seeds and have them come true (assuming you use the necessary seed saving techniques). We also like heritage seeds because of the varieties that exist, the taste, and the fact that they’re likely to be hardier. Up until this year, we haven’t saved seeds. It was on our list but not that high since there was always next year. That’s no longer the case because we will be growing some vegetables that may not have seeds available next year. Either off the market or not available to us in Canada. In particular, Altrei Coffee because it is a rare seed and Laura soybeans because we can’t get them directly from the US anymore. We’re also helping to grow out a couple of varieties from Dan Jason’s Seed and Plant Sanctuary for Canada. So we’ll be saving seeds from everything that we grow this year.

Do you spent a lot of time planning what to do next in your garden?

What else is there to do during the winter?? Actually, we realized this year that our gardening season lasts all year. The winter is reserved for reflection and research. The garden itself doesn’t get a great deal of planning. The garden talks to us and tells us what to do next. This isn’t as silly as it sounds. Gardens are very complex and dynamic. You do one thing in the garden and that often leads you to a lot more things. For example, two or three years ago we had a terribly poor winter squash harvest.  We had lots of flowers but little fruit. That meant a lack of pollinators.  So we started thinking about keeping bees. The research led to all kinds of ideas that we could integrate into what we’re already doing, such as substituting honey for sugar wherever we could in our day-to-day diet.

What advice would you give to people who want to experiment with raised garden beds?

Buy Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening book and watch the videos.

Don’t get too hung up on what you surround the plot with but don’t use pressure-treated wood unless you isolate it from the soil with vapour barrier. Don’t cut corners on the soil mix.  Either use pure well-aged compost or build your own using Mel’s formula.

And if you aren’t sure and want to test the water, start small. A 4′x4′ plot (1.2 x 1.2 m) is two 8 foot lengths cut in two.

What books about food gardening do you have on your bookshelf?

Surprisingly few, mostly because it seems there are few good ones. Most of what is written today seems to be written by editors rather than gardeners. The information is collected from other sources rather than from first hand experience. Here are some good ones that we have:

• Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to Zuiki Taro, a Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-grow Edibles. By Eric Toensmeier
• Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden. By Lee Reich
• The Pruning Book. By Lee Reich
• Royal Horticultural Society: Propagating Plants. By Alan R. Toogood
• Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners. By Suzanne Ashworth, Edited by Kent Whealy
• The New Seed-Starters Handbook. By Nancy Bubel
• Root Cellaring: Natural Cold Storage of Fruits and Vegetables. By Mike Bubel and Nancy Bubel
• Putting Food by. By Janet C Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan
• Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs. By Claire Kowalchik and William H. Hylto
• The Herbal Drugstore. By Linda B. White

(All pictures are republished with permission from Mike Higgs)

How about you? Are you collecting seeds, or have you just planted your first seed from the store? … somewhere in between? Please leave your comment below.

This ebook on how to grow tomatoes is written by Lucia Grimmer and Annette Welsford. Lucia has a Masters Degree in Plant Pathology and works as a technical nutrition specialist in the fertilizer industry. Annette has a partial degree in Horticulture. For me as an amateur grower this puts some weight behind the 37,000 words on the 73 pages. I paid $34.90 + $8.72 VAT to get the ebook in .pdf format down on my PC. You can get the ebook here: How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

It’s a very comprehensive book with many details so I’ll limit myself and only talk about the things that were new to me.

Definitions

A term I often see when reading about tomatoes is determinate versus indeterminate. In the book there’s a good clarification of what this means:

• Determinate types are the low ones, up to 1 meter. The tomatoes are picked over a few weeks in a concentrated crop.
• Indeterminates grow up to 5 meters and are picked over 12 to 20 weeks.
• Semi-determinates grow up to 2 meters and are picked over 2 to 6 weeks.

Water

There’s a lot of information on watering in the book but some things stood out to me because I realized that I have probably made a huge mistake earlier on with my tomatoes, and potatoes for that matter.

To water correctly you need to soak to a depth of 15-20 cm. So far so good. But you need to do it early in the morning, and only the soil must be watered. No water on the leaves, for God’s sake. If the leaves do get wet it’ll dry off during the day. That’s why you should water in the morning. The problem with wet leaves is that it will be a heaven for fungus and disease spores. If you have read about my 2010 tomato disaster you’ll know what I’m talking about. Drip irrigation, mulching to prevent soil splashing, and water in the morning. That’s the way to do it.

Reproduction

Pollination is still a confusing subject to me. I don’t know if it gets any clearer but apparently tomatoes are self-pollinating according to the book, because the flowers contain both the male and female organs. At least it’s beginning to make sense to me, why a heirloom variety can stay with one grower for a lifetime without outside DNA material. But then again, you wouldn’t want that with humans, right? Weaknesses would build up, but I guess tomatoes can handle that somehow.

And a good tip on propagation: Save your clippings and dip them in a seaweed solution or plant hormone powder. Then plant them in a pot, and you’ll soon have en new tomato plant. That’s easy

Fruits

The advice on the actual tomato fruits goes against what I believed you should do, but the authors recommend picking the fruit before they even have the right color. Thereby the plant will focus its energy on the remaining fruits. Makes sense. The picked fruits should be kept away from sunlight or they’ll overheat and ripen unevenly. Makes sense too. Green tomatoes should be placed in a warm location to ripen at 18 – 21 C (64 – 70 F).

Tips & Tricks

• One way to plant out your tomato seedlings earlier in the season is to use a ‘wall of water’. It’s a device with several vertical tubes filled with water surrounding each pot. The water absorbs heat during the day and releases it during the night.
• The book also has a tip on compost that’s new to me: Earthworms hate onions. So keep onion scraps out of the compost.
• If you use red plastic as mulch on the soil below your plants they’ll think they’re overcrowded and grow even more. I think it has something to do with the color of the fruits?
• In an organic garden you should consider using neem oil / margosa oil if you want to actively fight pests. It has been used in India for a long time against almost any type of insect.
• A greenhouse made from polyethylene has several advantages: Low cost, ease of replacement, high light transmission and good heat retention. I didn’t like the artificial look, but with all these advantages it’s quite interesting compared to traditional glass.

What I LIKE about How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

• It comforting to know that even the experts from the industry agree that the quality of supermarket tomatoes is very low these days (no flavour, few varieties, hard as apples).
• A chapter about biodynamic growing is included.
• Quote: “The advent of Genetically Modified Food is a revolutionary change to our food that offers no nutritional improvement, but increases the profitability and market power of global seed and chemical companies. Changes include incorporation of pesticides and weedicides within the DNA of the plant. If the ingredients and chemicals were properly labeled, like our processed food, some might be defined as pesticides!” Oh? And we’re supposed to eat that?…
• It comes with a huge online variety database
• The book covers the whole world and considers different growing conditions depending on location.
• Great info on heirloom versus hybrids.
• Easy to read and understand.
• Thorough nutrition problem key to use if you find sick looking plants, so that you can diagnose and treat the problems.
• Includes organic bug killing recipes.

What I DON’T like about How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

• Some of the text on the illustrations is unreadable.
• It’s important with references but I prefer to have all of them in the last chapter and not ind the middle of the book.
• Pictures and charts should have a higher resolution in the .pdf version.
• The book mentions that drowned snails can be tossed into the compost heap. I don’t think that would be a good idea as they would attract slugs that would eat the dead ones. At least that’s what Arion lusitanicus would do.

Who should buy How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

It’s a very comprehensive book and a lot of the information is not directly related to tomatoes but of course if you’re serious about growing tomatoes you would need to know all of that too. And the specifics about tomatoes are in there too, so if you want to build a business around growing tomatoes you’re all set. A complete beginner could probably do with half the price, half the number of pages and half the details. The fertilizing scheme alone makes my head spin, despite the fact that I’ve already grown almost 10 kilos of tomatoes.

I doubt I’ll ever need another book on tomato growing so if you serious, knock yourself out and buy this one. If you haven’t grown a single red one yet you could probably do with less.

You can get the ebook here: How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes

I don’t think much have changed regarding gardening techniques – the instructions in the video could just as well be used today. But the battle for victory is different as I see it. It’s still a battle, but it’s for your health. Growing your own food is just healthy. Plain and simple. Exercise, sunshine, vitamins. It reminds me why I even bother writing this blog, but what it all boils down to is preventing muscle atrophy and depression and avoiding fast food.

Although the quality of the video is poor it still moves me. Young people doing meaningful work in the field – exercise, sunshine, vitamins. They even work with a horse in the garden. I can’t remember the last time I even touched a horse. (… no, Jim, not in that way.) Completely disconnected from nature. I think it’s unhealthy and dissatisfying. Look at the amount of vegs they pull from that ½ acre (2000 m2)!

In the video they talk about:

• Early vs. late crop
• Crop rotation
• Fighting pests (with some nasty looking spraying I doubt would be legal today )
• Crazy over-sized swiss chard (what IS that?)

And remember what grandpa said:

No work – no garden. Get what that means. No work – no spuds. No work – no turnip, no tank, no flying fortress, NO victory. Bear that in mind, all you victory gardeners, and work – for VICTORY!

… Your good health, that is.

Mulching

We have a rather big large lawn next to the kitchen garden. It’s justified by the fact that the kids love to play on it instead sitting indoors watching gardening programs Curious George. I dream about the day when the lawn is not needed anymore and can be replaced by raised beds with lots of strawberries and black currant bushes. Or maybe just wild nature. A lawn is a monoculture, but to make the best of it, the by-product is brilliant for gardening purposes. The  grass clippings can be used as mulch on your vegetable beds:

The purpose is to retain soil moisture, so this is what I’m trying out, and it seems to be working. The soil is moist beneath the grass clippings (I insist ):

What you can’t see is what happened hours later, when the weeds decided to grow right through the mulch. Hmm. Need… more… mulch. I hope this will kill the weeds if I just keep adding more and more mulch. Time will tell. Worst case scenario is that I’ll have a s… load of weeds under there, taking up all the nutrients.

Harvest planning

Up until now I’ve had the problem that when my lettuces/radishes/spinach were finally ready for harvest, I would have so much of it that it would go bad before we could ever managed to eat all of it. This is a result of sowing all of the seeds for the season all at once at the beginning of the season. Which again is a result of me being lazy. I like to get work in phases; preparing soil -> sowing -> weeding / watering -> harvesting -> done deal. But this is not smart when dealing with the mentioned crops. Instead of planting sowing my 4 rows of spinach on the same day, I’ll try sowing 1 row, then wait a couple of WEEKS, then sow another row and so on. Then in the end I hope I won’t have to throw away 3 rows of spinach because the plants look like small trees, okay?

Potatoes

Sneaky bastards. The other day I felt so proud proclaiming in front of my girlfriends that the potatoes had finally put out flower buds. She went out and confirmed it and we were both very happy farmers. god I hate that name .
The next day I went out to take a look at the wonder again – but the flower buds were all gone! Not a trace. WTF? I asked my girlfriend to go out and check again, but she couldn’t see them either. And that’s when we started discussing lucid dreaming
Apparently potato plants are very protective of their flowers because fortunately they’re back. They just hide the flower buds the best they can in the evening. I don’t know why. Fearing the dangerous night… pigeons, eh?

So we decided to dig up a potato plant for dinner. I mean, the plants were more than 50 cm (20 inches) tall. FAIL! The potatoes beneath the surface were only 1 cm (0.4 inch) in diameter. So now we’re waiting for the potatoes to blossom and maybe even wilt before trying again. (And sowing even earlier next year.)

Chicken Coop project

Inches to centimeters, marking, sawing. Industry. It’s going to be heavy.

1. Potatoes (48 plants)
2. Potatoes (48 plants)
3. Root vegetables (carrots, parsnip, beets)
4. Legumes and brassica (radish, peas, corn, runner beans, broccoli, cauliflowers)
5. Misc. (squash, rucola, spinach, leeks,  onions)
6. Misc. (carrots, onions, leeks)
7. Flowers

Against the wall on the left I have 17 tomatoes and 2 cucumber plants.

North is to the left.

(Also known as the chickenDIYguides review.)

The product is put together by Mary Nelson with help from Jim Stanley. It consists of more than 300 pages of plans for building your own chicken coop, spread out into several ebooks included in the product. A large part of the material you’ll receive is bonus material including small ebooks and a link collection pointing to 26 YouTube videos. I paid $40 to gain access to the instant download area and I paid $10 in taxes. You can get the Chicken Coop Guide here.

7 individual ebooks are available dividing the collection of plans into 3 groups: Small, mid-size and large. What size of coop you need depends on whether you want normal hens or Bantam hens (small hens).

Small coop: 4 plans available for 4-5 hens (or 5-7 Bantams). Built mostly from 1×4″ or 2×4″ studs and 1/4″, 1/2″ or 3/4″ plywood.

Mid-size coop: 1 plan available for 10 hens (or 14 Bantams). Built mostly from 2×4″ studs and 1/2″ or 3/4″ plywood.

Large coop: 2 plans available for 16 hens (or 24 Bantams). Built mostly from 2×4″ studs and 3/4″ plywood.

If you’re new to raising chickens the bonuses that come with the product will help you become aware of 6 important things to consider before building your coop: How much space do you need for raising your chickens, how to protect against predators, how to protect against the weather, deciding what size of coop you need, how to raise chickens in a convenient way, and deciding what type of chicken you want.

The bonus link collection includes videos on for example how to provide drinking water throughout the winter using a 60 watt light bulb that is always on, or providing protection against snow using a shower curtain over your chicken coop.

A separate bonus ebook on building an incubator is available. It teaches that chicken egg incubation is optimal at 37-39 C (99-102 F) and 50-55% humidity, but for the last 3 days, 35 C (95 F) and 65 % humidity will be best. Details for securing this type of environment is described in the ebook. Yet another ebook in the bonus pack consists of explanations of chicken talk terms, like for instance Bantam – which are half-sized chickens for ornamental purposes; crop – part of the chickens digestive system; grit – bits of rock and sand that chickens eat that goes into the crop and helps with digestion; and wormer – medicine for treating worms.

What I LIKE about Chicken Coop Guide

• Despite the fact that the product is split into several pieces the download page keeps it all together very well.
• The design of each coop is neat – I like the way they look.
• The building plans are easy to understand.
• The level of plan detail is high, with dimensions on all pieces.
• Example photos are available for some of the coops showing actual coops that were built.

What I DON’T Like about Chicken Coop Guide

• One of the plans contains a vital table that is almost unreadable due to bad resolution. I’ll have to rewrite it myself to make it usable.
• The graphics is rather coarse and takes some getting used to.
• Everything is in inches rather than S.I. units. I’ll have to print out a plan and add the converted numbers myself manually.
• As a first time chicken keeper I would like to have a plan for a simple chicken run, although it would be simple.
• To make it easier for the reader the 6 bonus ebooks should be merged and edited into a single ebook.

Who should buy the Chicken Coop Guide

In my opinion you would need years, if not decades, of experience as a hobby woodworker to follow the building plans, due to the level of details of the coops, or at least access to help from someone with this kind of experience. You’ll need to cut and fit things together in angles which is not something you’ll easily do if you never touched a saw before. But then again – it’s details like this, that makes the coops in these plans so pretty darn easy on the eyes.

You can get the Chicken Coop Guide here.

Update 2010-12-06: I wrote a 65 page ebook about how I built my own chicken coop following the guide above. You can download my ebook for free here: Ebook: How I Built My Chicken Coop

I’m even tempted to try and grow melons, because this is such a great spot, but I think that would be pushing my luck on this latitude.

The wall is more than 10 m (33 feet) long and I want to squeeze in as many tomato and cucumber plants as possible. I did a bit of searching and found 60 cm (24 inches) to be a good choice, and a popular one. And that’s about the tomato spacing I used in my self-watering tomato boxes earlier on.

10 m divided by 0.60 m = … a chest freezer? (17 plants). Nice.

The first one is simple and easy to build. It consists of four planks, 12 inch (30 cm) wide, that can be held together with metal angles on the inside. The planks are untreated. You can also use screws to fit the wood together, from the top of one plank into the end the next plank.

The entire bed is a classic 4 by 8 feet (1.2 by 2.4 m).

This is a smaller version of the first one. Remember to level out the whole raised bed so that the soil will be evenly distributed at all times.

A more solid version, but also held together by metal angles on the inside. Both round and rectangular poles can be used. The thicker the wood is, the longer it will last if untreated. Decide if you want to use pressure treated wood or not.

You can make the raised bed as high as you want it, the higher the better, until it reaches your waist. Your root vegetables will love the deep loose soil, and grow long and big.

The raised bed in the picture shows some nice details in the way the planks have been fitted together.

A plastic mesh keeps cats from digging.

A nice detail on the top edge of the wooden bed makes it easy on the eyes.

If you want to grow climbing plants in your beds it’s easy to add a trellis, since the sides of the bed will keep the trellis in place. This is the natural choice for runner beans.

Painting the planks will make them last much longer, but make sure you don’t get unwanted chemicals into your vegetable soil.

Tomatoes would love a raised bed like this. Strings for support and a roof to protect against heavy rain and hail. The plastic roof can be painted to protect against sun burn.

Different types of trellises and protection can easily be mounted on the wooden frames, for beans, peas or tomatoes. Vulnerable plants will be safe under fleece held up by plastic hoops mounted on the frame.

The conditions in a green house can be imitated by placing old windows in top of a raised bed, mounted on the wooden frame.

This one of the more beautiful ways that you can build a raised bed. It’s not wooden but built from flat stones, and fits perfectly into the natural environment.

And last, a raised bed made from old bricks. Very beautiful, but would be more useful if the bricks were held together by cement.

The message here being – use what you got, and have fun!

Unfortunately, the space I had in my old 30 m2 (320 ft2) garage shrinked to a small 4 m2 shed, WITHOUT a ceiling and holes to the outside in the bottom of the shed. The good thing about moving things from the old to the new was that I was forced to throw out a lot of old crap, especially old packaging, which I had been too lazy to throw away. Old cardboard, glass, bottles and plastic. Gosh!… You lazy dog.
Somehow, I have now packed all 30 m2 into the new shed and locked it with a  padlock:

Then I just need some shielding from the weather – and squirting male cats. I’m a bit annoyed about the fact that my compost shredder smells like pee.

But apparently all these things are not enough so I just bought a rotovator, a  Texas Lilli 532TG, that I need to assemble one of these days. And it ALSO  smells like pee already. Hopefully it’ll start to smell like gasoline and soil soon:

I have begun working in the garden, but I’m skating on rotten apples, partly because the three old apple trees are huge, and partly because it has been about 100 years since anyone lived here. Or maybe only 100 days, I’m not quite sure:

The neighbour keeps horses and tells me that he wants to keep bees again, so I feel more at home than ever before (thanks LoA ) And oh, the opposite neighbour even keeps donkeys. That would definitely not work out in the old neighbourhood. Nothing bad said about that place but I just want to try experiencing something completely different now.

When I’m not spending time comforting our toddler, because she slipped and fell in rotten apples, then I’m planning the kitchen garden and digging stones out of the lawn. It looks like the previous tenants set up a relatively large  greenhouse in the spot where there’s the most sun in the garden. You can tell from all the stones that emerge from the lawn:

They’ll damage the rotovator, so they must go. I’m curious to find out if other interesting things will emerge  from the ground when I get the beast fired up.

I’m still considering how much space I will cultivate this year. There’s definitely enough space. There is a huge lawn from the back of the house and down to the stream, although with a crazy slope:

I’ve read advice that says 10 m2 (110 ft2) per person or 25 m2 (270 ft2) per person, and if it has to be top notch – 50 m2 (540 ft2) per person, but I do realize that if I reserve 50 m2 per person, i.e.. 200 m2 (2200 ft2) for the family (and it’s already too much, since the two are toddlers), I’m afraid that I can’t take good care of such a large area, so right now I am inclined to choose a 100 m2 garden and perhaps that’s even too ambitious. At the old place I cultivated up to 30 m2, so it will be approximately 3 times larger. But I’m a healthy boy. And then some kind of fence around the garden to keep the kids out, and we’re back in business!

Here is my review of Jonathan White’s product called Food4Wealth. Jonathan has over 20 years of experience as an environmental scientist and horticulturalist. He claims that if you follow his program in the form of an eBook and related videos you can save up to $5,000 per year, and that may indeed turn out to be Food4Wealth if it holds true.

The product consists of an 80 page eBook, a project plan, and videos with a total length of approx. 60 minutes:

• Dimensions: 8:24
• Creating a Frame: 3:07
• What Goes in the Frame: 7:53
• Putting up a climbing frame for peas and beans: 2:03
• Adapting your existing vegetable garden: 2:12
• Composting: 4:46
• Planting out your Plot: 5:07
• Planting a Seedling: 2:25
• Self Seeding: 4:11
• Maintenance: 5:10
• Seasons: 6:52
• Potato Beds: 3:16
• Mini Food 4 Wealth Plot: 2:58
• Food 4 Wealth Fruit Farm: 5:20

I paid $39.97 for the Food4Wealth product.

How does Food4Wealth work

It is truly unbelievably simple, which Jonathan points out himself, but he says it should not keep one from using the system. He says that there are probably many within the profession who would reject it compared to the traditional orthodox horticulture, which he says is about solving problems. Food4wealth is different in the way that you build a system from scratch, which is in a position to solve its own problems, like an untouched natural ecosystem does. He uses the example of a rainforest. In such a system there will always be great diversity unlike traditional monocultures. And it is exactly this diversity that protects the system, for example when he plants various plants close to one another. A single lettuce head next to a single tomato plant, etc. It reminds me of what I do in my raised beds where I plant a row of one type of vegetable, and the next row is then a second type of vegetable, but Jonathan then takes the idea further to the extreme where all vegetables are mixed together in one big mishmash. Another important aspect of the system is that it also takes care of the sowing itself, i.e. self-seeding. After some years there will be so many seeds dormant in the bed that every spot is filled by vegetable plants and weeds will not have a chance. As he says, nature does not allow empty niches. They will gradually be filled by the right plants in the right place at the right time. A bonus that comes with this diversity is that pests are totally confused because they cannot find their desired plant in this jumble. All of this makes sense and the claim is that it works and you can harvest something from the garden every day.

An important part of the system is that the soil is disturbed as little as possible because digging dries out the soil, so one of his golden rules here says that the soil must never be left bare. Digging disrupts the system and the first plants that show up to restore balance are the weeds, which we do not want in our gardens. Weeds are the ultimate niche fillers. So it’s all about constantly covering bare soil with compost, which you produce yourself, if you follow the system. Many books have been written about composting, so that’s not something new here. But yes, it is clearly a natural thing to do to make it yourself out of kitchen scraps.

The less bare soil you have, the less it dries out and the less you will need to water. So – be generous with the compost at all times. And here is another thing which is somewhat new to me. He even recommends that compost contains the seeds of wilted plants. I have been accustomed to removing seeds from the things I put on the compost, but it’s logical when you think about it – but only the correct seeds, so they can sow themselves. Then you even save money on seeds. This system is very much about freedom.

The system is built entirely from scratch, for example on top of existing lawn. It doesn’t matter. You put these layers in a wooden frame or another kind of frame:

1. Newspapers
2. Hay
3. Fertilizer
4. Hay
5. Compost

As the years go by you constantly fill empty spots with compost, and the small ecosystem takes care of itself and live its own life. If you take good care of it, it will take good care of you, in the form of fine vegetables.

He talks about summer crops and winter crops, and recommends a few kinds of vegetables as being more than enough to provide for you and your family:

• Swiss Chard (Silverbeet)
• Spring Onions
• Carrots
• Snow Peas
• Lettuce
• Celery
• Zucchini
• Tomatoes
• Potatoes
• Rhubarb
• Parsnip
• Cucumber
• Corn
• Pumpkin

He claims that the system can be maintained with only 8 hours of light work – per year! I actually believe him, and the project plan also shows why it could be true.

What I like about Food4Wealth

* Jonathan White has a great energy and enthusiasm and I cannot help but get moved by it. He’s like, “come on now, let’s change the world for the better, and here’s how we’re going to do it – you know it works, right?”, and he is convincing in his explanations. He has spent much of his childhood in the Australian bush, and it seems like he has either talent or intuition on how things fit together in the small ecosystems that he talks about in Food4Wealth. All of this also results in a convincing sales page, which probably sells a lot.

* The fact that he makes use of video as much as he does works quite well, rather than simply using an eBook. For me personally it’s easier to remember key points when I’ve seen a video. There’s more bandwidth, and more information coming through.

* I like that the system is so simple and I just sit back and nod, of course, of course; it seems very smooth, intuitively and sustainable. The fact that he provides plant lists and a project plan is quite good because you can quickly get started without knowing very much about how and why the system works. He is well structured and organized, and that he emphasizes on getting away from control and instead move toward freedom gets a big plus in my book.

What I DON’T like about Food4Wealth

* Sometimes he acts a bit over the edge because he’s so excited about this. It sometimes makes his videos a bit too ‘new-age, peace, hugs and love’ according to my taste. It’s okay, but I just know that I react to it and it interrupts my learning process.

* Another thing that is annoying is the sound volume in the videos, which are blown up when the jingles are played, and turned down when he speaks. And there are many jingles in the videos. It would be nice to get the volume normalized through an entire video, so you don’t have to turn the volume up and down all the time. His “studio” seems quite small and it would be nice to see more space around him. It seems crammed.

* He mentions that you can use railway sleepers to create frames for the beds, but it is certainly not something you would do in my area, as they are treated with some very toxic substances. It may be that it’s a different situation elsewhere in the world or that I have misunderstood what he says about this.

* He treats potatoes a bit different within the system, but still as part of the system. I don’t understand why he doesn’t let them take care of themselves with self-seeding instead of using the traditional method, where you save some of your harvest for next year, which will then be clones, and therefore not adapted to the ever changing conditions in the local area. Volunteer potatoes have new and different genes and are therefore hopefully more robust and adapted.

* A general issue related to the purchase of the product is that a relatively substantial tax sneaked into the purchase, which I could not see immediately. I should probably have dug in and read some of the fine print.

Who should buy Food4Wealth

I think it’s best to build the system from scratch, even though Jonathan also tells how to adapt your existing garden to the new system. I would start from scratch with a clean slate, if I decided to try it out. And when you start from scratch then everybody can actually do it, because the product describes the entire system, i.e. the design, construction and maintenance. And since it is quite detailed, I believe very little experience in horticulture is required to get started and succeed. I’m not new to the vegetable garden but I would allocate a piece of lawn for the project if I were to try it out, and then follow the instructions to the letter. The reason I will not begin such a project right away is that I have moved to a rented piece of land where I do not plan to stay for several years, and that is exactly what the system requires, that it will need some years to find a balance with high soil quality and sustainable self-seeding. But the idea of mixing the vegetables completely to confuse pests and the idea of self-seeding is something I might test in a dedicated raised bed.

You can buy Food4Wealth here.