From April through September 2011 I participated as a blogger in a Home Farming Project sponsored by Nabisco / Triscuit Company at the Gather.com site. Some of my gardening articles survived the cut when Gather was sold, some did not. I am trying to save all the ones that did survive so will be sharing through this blog.
Filed in Gather Home & Garden Essential by Sonia Martinez on April 6, 2011
A few years ago when we first decided to start a garden in the only 'almost flat part of the yard we also decided we were going to work with 'recycled' materials and not buy anything new except a few plants and seeds.
We started out by mowing the grass as close to the ground as possible and then marking out one 4 x 8 bed and six 4 x 4 beds. We like using a depth of 4 feet across because you can reach into the center from all sides without too much straining.
We enclosed the beds by using some 4 x 6 cedar boards salvaged when the wooden slats in the living room windows were replaced with glass jalousies. We joined them in the corners with brackets we already had and reinforced them with short wooden stakes to help hold them in place; these were our edges or borders. After the beds were all marked out, we proceeded to lay down newspapers in thick layers to cover the whole enclosure and kept wetting it thoroughly as we continued layering to about a 2 inch thickness to discourage weeds from coming through.
Meantime, the young man who helps keep our grass mowed had gone to the town waste station and had returned with two pickup loads of free mulch / compost, which we proceeded to spread in all the beds all the way to the top of the wooden slats and continued to water it down so it would settle as much as possible before adding any more.
In the middle of the longer bed we staked down three sections of a dog fence from when we had dogs, in a zigzag pattern which we then used as a trellis to hold the tomato plants upright.
By this time we were ready to start planting. Hey, wait; we forgot to add dirt! No, we didn't. We already had some large plastic bins where we had mixed soil enriched with decomposed chicken manure and other organic matter which we used as our planting medium.
Using mainly mulch in each bed and only carving small pockets or narrow trenches in the mulch we filled in with the planting medium and then placed the small plant or the seeds; this helped us with weed control. With this method, each bed is technically, its own composting pile.
After the seeds came up or our little starter plants started to grab hold, we side-dressed with organic manure and a couple of weeks afterwards side-dressed again with more soil and some more organic manure, since the original soil had already started decomposing the mulch around the plants. When the plants started flowering and small vegetables started forming, we side-dressed again with a weak manure tea to give them a good jump start.
Each week as the beds settled, we added a little bit more mulch all around the beds and that seemed to help keeping the weeds down.
As time passed, we found other useful objects as planters and trellises that would probably have ended in the landfill otherwise.
Photo above - We also used an old wheelbarrow with a flat tire and rusted holes in the bottom as a planter for some of our herbs.
Look around you and see what you already have that can be used in the garden. You too can have a recycled garden for very little expense.
To read the previous posts on this same topic, please click on the following links:
The Home Farming Project - Edible Landscapes
The Home Farming Project - Victory Gardens
