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Step 1: Capture Rain Water!
Water is the source of life and that’s nowhere more apparent then the home garden. Not only are we letting this most valuable food production resource run away from us, but water rushing from streets to sewers to rivers causes pollution and aquatic ecosystem destruction! We can’t afford to let our water go to waste any longer. There are many community organizations currently helping folks learn about and create rain gardens. Rain gardens are one very clever way to capture the rainwater that falls on your property. Planted with native species ready to survive and create a seasonal wetland, rain gardens not only hold and filter the rain they are also a source of habitat for birds, bees, butterflies, and more. So whether you just plop a barrel under your rain spout and water your tomatoes for free this summer, or you go all out and decide to install a rain garden, you’ll be doing yourself and the rest of the world a favor by placing a high value on that free falling food of life, rain water. Click here for more information on rain gardens including links to community organizations that can help you create a rain garden in your yard.Step 2: Compost!
We create mountains of garbage together daily! Composting is one great way to cut down on the amount of garbage your hauling out to the curb. The old proverb about one persons garbage being another persons treasure surely applies here. Turning your kitchen and yard scraps into garden gold will bring abundance to your yard and cut down on your own personal contribution to Mt. Garbage! Composting is easy, and beneficial. For a complete and detailed explanation of how and why to compost click here.
Step 3: Create Habitat!
This step asks you to be the decider. Those of us lucky enough to have a yard to work in are charged with the responsibility of choosing what plants will grow in this space. Our decisions will either positively or negatively affect ourselves, and our fellow earthlings. Growing green grass lawns in your yard will give no edible benefit to you or anyone else. Instead of turf grass, try mixing your favorite edible plants with some pretty flowering annuals, native perennials, and fruit bearing trees and shrubs. The birds will thank you for the trees and shrubs, the butterflies will thank you for the flowers and native perennials, and you will thank yourself for being so smart as to grow your own food in a beauty filled environment teeming with life. Variety is truly the spice of life! The greater the diversity of plant species in your yard, the more beauty and health you will have at your fingertips. Click here for more hints on spicing up your back yard habitat. Step 4: Source Responsibly!
Think Globally, Act Locally! This is your opportunity to turn this smart slogan into a reality. When we purchase goods produced close to or in the communities that we live, we benefit ourselves and the rest of the world. Think for a moment about the number of miles each food item you have has traveled to reach your kitchen shelves. When you purchase food and goods produced close to home, you boost your local economy, while at the same time reducing the amount of gasoline burned in order to stock your shelves. While your cutting back on fossil fuel consumption, you might as well cut out a few more petrochemicals and do your body good at the same time. Organically grown foods are much more nutritious and better tasting then their chemically grown cousins. The Seward Co-op and Deli, Mother Earth Gardens, and Kern Landscaping are a few local vendors that specialize in locally and organically produced goods for the home and garden. Growing food at home is as local as it gets, the closer to home you get your food, the easier life is for all of us. Step 5: Harvest Responsibly!
Now that you’ve got a garden full of goodies, you’ll want to make sure to not waste your bounty. Drying, canning, freezing, tincturing, and fermenting (Click here, you won't regret it.) are some of my favorite ways to store goods. I love this step because this is where I get to start giving out some of my homemade favorites. Think about what goods you can produce for yourself and your community. If you’ve got a cucumber vine that’s grown out of control, maybe you could be the pickle producer for your block that summer. I like to plant berries and tomatoes close to the street and alley so folks walking by can grab a bite to eat. Step 6: Make It Beautiful!
I’ll be the first to recognize that we all have different ideas of what is beautiful. That’s exactly the beauty of this step. We can all learn from each others talents, and expressions, so we need to be willing to share our own. When we make garden spaces that we ourselves enjoy, it’s pretty likely that at least some of our friends and neighbors will delight in them as well. Creating an attractive home garden can be as simple as an annual flower patch, or as complex and integrated as a professional landscape design. Your imagination is your only limit. Click here for some great garden design tips. Step 7: Tell The World!
We can’t fix this whole mess by ourselves, we’re gonna need a little help. Even if all the gardeners of the world suddenly united to start producing food for the communities they live in, we’d still be dangerously understaffed. We gardeners need to spread the good word, to stand up on our produce crates and shout to the masses that we are ready to guide the world to a better day. Okay, so that’s a bit lofty, but you could at least teach your kids, or the neighbors kids a thing or two. When I was young, I loved watching food grow in the garden, and I loved it even more when my mom would tell me that I helped make it happen. My mom took the time to teach me what her mother and father had taught her about gardening. This newsletter, Giving Tree Gardens, and every flower that’s ever bloomed in my garden soils are just a few of the many benefits that the seed of my mom’s instructions have grown into. Join a garden club, help out with local youth gardening programs, talk with your neighbors and family, or just invite your friends over for a homegrown meal. Learning and teaching gardening is a lifelong hobby that can grow community, family, health, and beauty. These seven steps are intended to reduce humankind’s footprint on the world one back yard at a time. Producing food for ourselves at home is the best way to cut down on our own negative impact on the environment, and make the world a little more supportive of life. If you put these steps to work at home, you will find that healthy yards create healthy lives!
"In a moment the ashes are made, but the forest is a long time growing."
It will beggar a doctor to live where orchards thrive.
~Spanish proverb
"The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability."
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The Seed Vol. 22 Jan. 20, 2009 A Giving Tree Gardens Newsletter
Photos by Russ Henry ©2008 ,Text by Russ Henry ©2008 by Giving Tree Gardens, all rights reserved.
Garden Secrets:
3 Secrets That Will Turn Any Back Yard Into A Food Producing Paradise
Secret #2: Save your seeds!
Seeds are like currency. You can’t get food without them. So it makes sense that the more variety and volume of seeds that you have the more solid the guarantee you have that your shelves will be stocked. We need to make sure that We The People are in charge of our seeds. We need to grow independent of big seed producing companies, so that we get to choose our local food selection. For more information on seed saving, follow this link! Giving Tree Gardens in the Co-op news!!!!!
Healthy Yards, Healthy Lives
We need food, we need air, we need water. Generally speaking we need all of these things to be clean and free of toxins. We share these needs with the rest of the creatures on this planet. These common needs of all earthlings are best served when the world around us is balanced. For example, If the microbes in the ground are fed nutrients in the form of a cow pie, then the microbes in the ground help the roots of the grass take up water and nutrients, and the grass can grow up tall to feed the cows. The cycle starts all over when the cow lifts her tail to waive goodbye to the grass she has digested. Now, if for some horrible reason the ground is treated with chemicals such as fertilizer or pesticide then the microbes in the ground will be killed off to a degree that the grass will now not be able to grow without the assistance of the chemical fertilizers. Instead of being dependant on easy to produce cow pies, the food cycle on the planet becomes dependant on environmentally and economically costly products. This is one tiny example of imbalance in a world full of similar circumstances.
We need only look around us to see the world out of balance. We can see the air we breathe, as it’s laden with chemicals. We can taste bleach and metal in the water we drink. Our rivers and lakes are overgrown with invasive species and toxic run off. Our food travels thousands of miles in petroleum burning vehicles only to arrive to our dinner tables laced with carcinogens and bacterial diseases. These problems are only a drop of water next to the ocean of trouble this planet is facing. Enough Is Enough! It’s time we clean up our act!
In a time of need like this the world has only one place to turn. Gardeners, I’m talking to you! It’s time we put our heads and hearts together to keep this planet from self-destructing. Giving Tree Gardens is happy to announce that we’ve come up with a plan to guide brave gardeners everywhere in their heroic efforts. Our plan is strong in that it’s simple and ready to be adapted to the creativity, lives, and yards of anyone willing to pick up a shovel and work toward a better, healthier day. In this special edition of The Seed, Giving Tree Gardens is proud to announce the launch of our new free educational program: Healthy Yards, Healthy Lives, 7 Steps for Growing Personal and Global Health in Your Own Back Yard!
LOCAL LINKS
Click here for the coolest local resources
Healthy Yards, Healthy Lives
7 Steps for Growing Personal and Global Health in Your Own Back Yard!
The back yard in our new house was a blank slate this spring. As soon as the ground thawed I set to work putting in posts to hold up my hops trellis.
Mother Earth Gardens is my favorite garden store. The ladies who run this shop know their stuff. I look forward to leading a class about shade gardening at Mother Earth early this spring, dates will be posted in future newsletters.
I can't wait to see how big my strawberry patch will be this spring. I planted these seed balled strawberries into double dug beds last summer, and I watched the plants grow bigger then the gardens borders in the first season. I'm looking foward to free, fresh, organically grown berries next June.
Whether you prefer tempeh or bacon between your lettuce and tomato sandwiches, you'll surely be impresed with home grown produce. Try an heirloom variety tomato in your garden this year, and save the seeds for years to come. There's nothing more satisfying then eating a home grown meal. While your growing food, you might as well go ahead and grow it mixed in with beautiful flowering annuals and perennials. If you make your garden a place of beauty, working in it will feel relaxing.
Secret # 1: Double Dig!
To double dig is simply to mix compost deep into the ground before you plant. Typically I’ve seen landscapers and gardeners mixing compost in soil to a depth of between six inches and one foot when installing a new garden. This is fine if you have plenty of space to produce your food in, but anybody who’s grown a healthy zucchini in a city yard knows that every inch of space can count. In order to double dig, mix your compost into the ground to a depth of between two and three feet. The deeper you dig in the compost, the more room there is for the roots to grow down deep instead of outward along the surface. When roots have room to grow deep, plants can be placed closer together, thus making your yard able to produce more food! Once you have mixed your soil, you’ll be never need or want to turn it again, instead you can add compost as a top dressing for your gardens every spring. Trash to compost, compost to earth, and earth to dinner plate, now that’s a cycle we can all live with. Click here for more information on how to stop treating soil like dirt! Secret # 3: Seed Ball!
Secret #3 can be summed up in an old rhyme that comes handed down from farmers before us. Sand into clay is money thrown away, but clay into sand is money in the hand. What these wise farmers of old would have us understand is that while you won’t get any benefit from adding sand into clay soil, clay will work to help retain moisture in a sandy or loamy soil. If you mix clay soil with a little of your compost, and form this mixture into a ball with a seed in the middle, you will give your plant all it needs to grow up healthy and strong right from the start. This is a favorite tool of guerilla gardeners everywhere as these seed balls, also known as ‘seed bombs’ can be tossed at random in vacant lots and empty medians, thus turning unused space into an edible symbol of food security. This is perhaps the simplest secret of them all, but also one of the most powerful. Clay soil is fairly easy to procure in small amounts throughout the twin cities area, if you don’t know a farmer or developer who will let you scoop enough for your seed balls, than I’d recommend consulting with Craigslist. 
This giant red spinach plant is the result of the use of these 3 secrets. Saved seeds, seed balled into double dug beds. This plant grew 5 feet tall within 6 weeks of being planted.
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Here's the water from our rooftops and lawns, headed for the Mississippi. Aquatic life is directly affected by what we do with our yards and gardens. I plucked this healthy baby snapper out of the Rush River in Wisconsin. Don't worry, he was only out of the water long enough for a "snap" shot.
Here I am leading a couple of garden tours at The Seward Co-Op Grocery and Deli's former building. Their new site is up and running beautifully. Giving Tree Gardens is looking foward to working with the Seward Co-Op this spring to begin installation of their extensive new garden beds. I've thoroughly enjoyed this series of garden tours at the co-op! Not only have I been given a chance to share the organic methods I use, but I've been informed and entertained by the thoughts and stories shared by my fellow gardeners while touring through the gardens. Hanging out with gardeners is like that though, you learn something new each time.
When I need a quick batch of compost to kick start a clients garden, I go to Kern Landscaping in St. Paul, and ask for farmpost!
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