3 Garden Success Secrets

3 Secrets Guaranteed to Grow Garden Success this growing season:Secret # 1: Double Dig

Double digging is the best way to turn a tiny yard into a year round gourmet delight for your family and the ecosystem as a whole.

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Best_Business__1

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 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.  The hops vines shown in right side of this picture grew 12 feet in a single season due to the 4 foot double dig we did before we planted.

 Secret #2:  Save Your Seeds 

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IMG_0277

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.  Store your seeds in clearly marked envelopes inside of plastic zip lock bags, air tight containers, or mason jars with tight fitting lids and place them in cool, dark, dry cupboards or boxes.

Secret # 3:  A Little Clay Goes A Long Way

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DSC_0163

Secret #3 is perfect for gardeners with sandy soil.  There is an old farmers rhyme that comes handed down from generations before to help us remember:  "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,  you will get benefits from adding clay into sand.  Clay will help retain moisture in a sandy or loamy soil.  If you mix clay soil with a little of your compost before spreading the compost you will give your garden all it needs to grow up healthy and strong right from the start.   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 sandy gardens, than I’d recommend consulting with Craigslist. 

Compost Is Heating Up!

Organic gardening and farming are based on the notion that when we build our soil’s natural fertility through composting we strengthen our environment and grow the land’s capacity to provide us with health.

It’s a pretty good system when you think of it. We throw out scraps, and the scraps become our food. So simple, so elegant, so effective.

At Giving Tree Gardens, we’re such big fans of compost because we’ve seen it’s powerful results. Our gardens and lawns have all quickly filled in and grown with health and beauty using nothing but good healthy compost for fertility.

Last spring Giving Tree Gardens began working with farm partners to build Grow! Twin Cities Urban Farm. At this 12 acre city farm growers with various talents ranging from tomato and potato farming to bee keeping and mushrooming have come together to grow food for urban eaters. This farm space has been the perfect place for us to launch our composting operations.

With consultation from local composting experts Peter Kern, owner of Kern Landscape Resources, and Professor Tom Halbach, from the University of Minnesota, we designed an 85 feet long compost pile. Friends of the farm and Giving Tree Gardens employees set to work transforming our greenhouse and hauling in the compost pile’s base layers of wood chips and landscaping waste.

We now bring in 2 tons of Minneapolis’ finest coffee shop, vegetarian eatery, and beer brewery waste per week to compost inside our largest greenhouse. Composting takes place inside the greenhouse for two reasons. First, composting in the greenhouse means that our pile doesn’t stop cooking all year long.  Second, and more importantly, the fact that we’re heating our greenhouse without any petroleum products means a huge environmental win for everyone involved.

If you’ve purchased food, beer, or coffee from Peace Coffee, Caffetto Coffee Shop, Tao Foods, or Second Moon Coffee Shop, then you are contributing to healthy soils, and local food production at our Grow! Twin Cities Farm.

If you’d like to support more of our farming and composting efforts, there are great ways to get involved. You can sign up to volunteer, donate to the farm, or sign up to follow our newsletter.

Many thanks to all the hard working compost helpers!

Community Design Forum

Is your block club, church group, or office place ready to go green? In this time of shrinking budgets we need to recognize the assets in our communities and help them grow into a sustainable future! Community Design Forums are meetings where folks come together to create action plans for moving forward with changes that positively affect their community's environment. By sharing needs, knowledge, and ideas communities get to know the power within their ranks and discover ways to help grow their green ideas.

Facilitated by Giving Tree Gardens owner Russ Henry, these forums bring together his skills as a professional Earth-Friendly Landscaper and a volunteer Restorative Justice Facilitator. Russ sits down with consultation attendees and asks them to share their concerns, ideas, efforts, and knowledge with each other so that communities can not only draw from his experience in the garden and landscape, but more importantly, attendees learn about each other's skills and abilities.

Maintenance

Giving Tree Gardens landscaping department offers year round garden and landscape maintenance services. Our landscaping maintenance crews are out maintaining our client's organic gardens and landscapes from the time the last snow melts in the spring till the ground freezes again in the fall.

We'll maintain your landscape through the winter months with our trusted Snow Removal Service.   Our landscape maintenance services include composting, weeding, perennial division, tree and shrub pruning, and mulching.  In addition our maintenance crews plant annuals in the spring and bulbs in the fall.  Giving Tree Gardens landscaping  maintenance crew makes sure your organic gardens grow more lovely with each passing season.

Garden Installation

Giving Tree Gardens professional landscape and garden installation service crew work closely with our clients and with our garden designer Russ Henry to install award winning organic gardens.

The landscape installation services team at Giving Tree Gardens aim to make as little negative impact on the land as they can while landscaping installations take place

We use hand tools whenever possible and we keep our foot traffic to a minimum.  Our organic gardens and landscapes are installed so that they will have all they need to grow healthy and full, and our organic garden installation services are designed around our clients needs and dreams.

Organic Landscape Design

As owner of Giving Tree Gardens, Russ Henry works closely with each of his Landscape Design clients to create organic gardens that fulfill the needs and desires of each client. Giving Tree Gardens designs and services are each individually crafted to create functional enchanting spaces. We take the time to get to know how our clients will use their outdoor spaces, so that we can design their gardens to enhance the livability and pleasure they find just outside their doors.  Giving Tree Gardens are designed to preserve nature, and provide all year-long beauty.   "We aim for 100% client satisfaction" explains Russ Henry, "I want my clients to love the work I do for them, so I pay close attention to what they want to find when they step into the landscape."

Local Links

Here you’ll find links to some of our business, non-profit, and community partners in growing a more beautiful and bountiful Twin Cities for ourselves and future generations.

Comgar Listserv: Gardeners Unite, Connect, Grow!

The Seed Newsletter Archives: All Your Favorite Garden Reading

Giving Tree Gardens YouTube!: Garden Videos

Yards To Gardens: Connecting Gardeners With Places to Plant

Friends School Plant Sale: Best Plant Selection In MN and a Great Cause

Landscape Alternatives: Great Resource for Native Plants

Outback Nursery: Great Resource for Native Plants

Kern Landscaping: Got Compost?

Applied Energy Innovations: Solar, Wind, Geothermal?

Midtown Farmers Market: Local, Fresh, Delicious!

Capitol Region Watershed District: St. Paul Rain Gardens

Diamond Stone Oriental Medicine: Your First Wealth Is Health

Sue Hensel Designs: Communicate, Change, Share

Minneapolis Rain Barrel: Decorative and Useful

Reddy Rents: Huge Selection of Hand Tools For Sale and Rent!

Diamond Stone: Oriental Medicine, real healing.

Food Is The Second Medicine

Food is the second medicine.

We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.  When our feelings are hurt or we’re down we might say our spirits are low.  When we feel great we say we’re in high spirits.  Our feelings are one reflection or dimension of our spirit that our bodies can easily perceive.  

Our bodies’ condition can affect our feelings and spirit.

  Hormones, wounds, illness, health, touch and sensuality, all of these physical realities in our bodies interact with our spirits to help us feel emotions.  Water and food provide our bodies with the energy to continue hosting our spirits.  It’s common knowledge that our bodies absorb the physical qualities of the food we eat when we digest it and strip it of usable nutrients.  What would happen if folks everywhere started to recognize that the spiritual qualities of the food we eat are absorbed and used by our spirits? 

Have you ever heard someone say that

Love is the most important ingredient

in their cooking?  More then one professional chef has told me this and though I love to cook, I’m not a chef.  By trade I’m a landscaper and composter.  In my experience, the same ingredient that good chefs pour into every dish in order to bring flavor to life is also the most important tool we have for growing healthy food.  Love guides any holistically healthy growing operation.  Love of people, love of Earth, and love of life are a few of the tools that growers can use everyday in their pursuit of health.  

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Food_Garden_Back_Yard

Some folks understand the concept of voting with a dollar.  The idea is that when we spend money on something we are effectively voting to have more of that thing be produced.  By spending our money we are also asking to have more of the spirit or emotional energy that surrounds the production of the items we purchase be created in the world.  This all comes home to our personal feelings and spirits when we ask ourselves a couple of sometimes hard to answer questions: 

Do I know where my food came from?  Do I feel good about the place that my food came from? 

Do I feel like my food is full of healthy living nutrients, or is it possibly tainted with poisonous pesticides?  When we look at food from this angle we see that from the moment we purchase food, it begins having an emotional impact on our own spiritual health and the health of the planet, an impact that we are in control of by the power of our choice.    

When we honor ourselves we feel better. We honor ourselves when we give ourselves those things that are holistically good for us.  We are fully connected in every way to this planet, the condition of the planet’s living systems guide the condition of humanity.  

To honor our environment is to honor ourselves. 

Our ancestors made our lives possible and our descendants will only know life if we leave the world in functioning condition for them.  I’ve heard it said that we did not inherit this world from our elders, instead we borrowed it from our children.  

Prayers can come true if you live them.

If I pray for a healthy environment then I need to work for and make choices that promote health in the environment.  By this way of living I am empowered to work for a miracle, I like that because life on this planet seems like it needs a miracle right now.  

Water is the first medicine and food is the second.

  What is good for us is also good for our home planet.  Clean water and healthy organically grown food have the power to heal our wounded environments, bodies, and spirits. 

Growing A Sustainable City

The city that gardens together grows sustainably together.  Gardening is perhaps the greatest tool for building sustainability that we can all share

.

Gardens can improve water quality, air quality, access to food, and personal health.  Cities that actively nurture the gardening and urban farming efforts of their citizens reap the benefits of healthy communities.  The nurturing of

sustainable cities

starts with the roots of the community.  Wherever there is a strong activist gardener population, you will find wonderful green ideas and initiatives sprouting up all over!

Rain gardens capture and filter rainwater run-off, community gardens and urban farms grow healthy food for people, locally grown food requires less trucking which keeps our air cleaner, fruit trees on the boulevard provide habitat for migrating birds and meeting places for neighbors.  A city full of healthy gardens is a sustainable city full of happy people.  Each city in Minnesota has it’s own unique approach to sustainability.  In this volume of the Seed, we’ll have a look at two cities in the metro area to see some great examples of how local governments work with residents to incorporate all kinds of great gardening into their sustainability plans in order to grow happy, healthy cities.  

Minneapolis

Homegrown food, local food, or food security, however you want to look at it, Minneapolitans' taste in food is rapidly

evolving

.  

According to Gayle Prest, the city’s official Sustainability Director,

“Gardening is an integral part of the long term sustainability plan for Minneapolis”

With more then 100 community gardens and 33 farmers markets, this city is obviously hungry for healthy change.  Leading the charge for this change is an official city organization called

Homegrown Minneapolis

  which is dedicated to nothing less then building a healthy, local food system for all Minneapolis residents. 

Homegrown has recently been hard at work on an

Urban Agriculture Policy Plan

that will guide city land use decisions related to urban food production and distribution. The plan will help identify where and how land should be used to grow and distribute food through community and commercial gardens and urban farms.  In short, this new ag-plan will help Minneapolis scale up to the next logical step in urban food production.  By defining and allowing for urban farms, and market gardens, and by amending the zoning code to better accommodate urban agriculture this innovative plan will allow Minneapolis residents to have more control over their food choices, and more access to healthy homegrown food.

The time to support the Urban Ag Plan is now, call your

city council person

today!

-Update: Your Support Helped Get This Passed!-

“The key to all of this is to start with deep rich organic soil made from our own compost”

Gayle reminds me as we talk about the city’s goal for having curbside residential compostable waste pick up by 2014.  This point is especially powerful as it shows yet another great way to improve our environment and our gardening habits at the same time.  When we compost we reduce the amount of garbage going to burners and landfills and we improve our garden soil, that’s the kind of sustainable solution we can all grow from. 

Maplewood

Oakley Biesanz, Naturalist for the City of Maplewood, explained to me some of the gardening strategies that are helping to grow a sustainable future for residents there. 

Maplewood is a statewide leader

in controlling water quality through

rain gardening

.

  With over 620 city installed rain gardens now thriving in residents yards, 60 more growing on city owned land and many more to come Maplewood is proving that rain gardens are an effective and beautiful way to keep waterways clean and healthy.  With the city’s support and promotion rain gardening has become the  standard for dealing with storm water run-off in Maplewood.

At the

Nature Center

where Oakley works, the mission is to enhance resident’s awareness and understanding of land, water and wildlife resources; to empower the community to become stewards of the environment. This mission is clearly evident in the Demonstration Gardens, which include rainwater gardens, woodland wildflower and prairie butterfly gardens and a small section of no-mow grass.

For lawn enthusiasts, Maplewood has developed the

Mow-Hi Pledge

This pledge to cut the grass no shorter then 3 inches and leave all the clippings on the lawn will help residents reduce fertilizer and watering costs and environmental impacts.  Of course it doesn’t hurt that there’s a grand prize drawing for folks who are willing to take the pledge. 

Community gardens

are sprouting up in Maplewood this spring as part of a multi-city effort to improve access to food growing space.  Working with the Maplwood-North St. Paul Parks and Rec. department, School District 622 and a local church, the two cities will now be able to offer over 650 community garden plots available to the public this spring.

In the long run, sustainability is just a common sense approach to life, and gardening is the simplest approach to sustainability that we have available. 

Whether you’re filtering rain water run off through rain gardens in order to keep the ground water, rivers, and lakes clean or keeping nutrients in your neighborhood by composting in your back yard, or maybe even growing your own food and medicine at home or with neighbors in a community garden, these are all among the most Earth friendly, community building habits humans can all share.  

It takes a village to raise a garden and no one should be left out of the process.  From youth to elders, from city council members to dirt gardeners, we all have a stake in helping to grow a sustainable city right where we live and we all need to work hard and connect with our community if we are going to see success.

Gardeners, take the opportunity this spring to think globally, garden locally and start to grow a sustainable city!