Hey everyone. I wanted to share a video I posted on YouTube showing a great permaculture urban garden.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
Beautiful Permaculture Garden at The AREA in Inglewood Calgary
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Tag Archives: veggies
how to control pest insects in your garden using your garden
How frustrating is it when you put so much work and effort into a garden, and then like out of nowhere, your plants are nearly ruined from insects munching on them? I’m going to explain how you can control the insects that feed on your precious crops.
blossom!
The key to controlling insects is not pesticide. Pesticide will kill all the beneficial insects and microbes as well. The key is flowers. The effect of the flowers is at least three fold. They confuses insects that will attack your plants, they attract predatory insects, which are also pollinators.
diversify!
The important thing is variety. Scatter your flowers throughout your garden. When I say that, obviously you want to plan so they will be good companions to your other plants, but you want flowers growing along with your vegitables.
Here’s some flowers and plants I would recommend planting:
- A few marigolds (which are good with tomatoes)
- Borage is amazing for attracting bees (give it some space it will spread)
- Sunflowers and bird houses and feeders will attract birds (a bad thing if you have seeds starting, but a great thing if your plants are semi-established (birds will eat the bugs too)
- Herbs like basil, bee balm, catnip, dill, Echinacea, evening primrose, fennel, lavender, parsley, poppy, thyme and sage will all attract pollinators too.
- Check out this site too. It has some great information for specific insects.
The cool thing too is that everything I’ve suggested is edible! However, be warned that not every part of the plants I’ve suggested are edible. Do your research. There’s tons of info out there.
bee houses!
Some other things you could try is making a bee block. This will help support the bee population and give them a home right beside your garden!
They’re as easy as drilling some holes in a block of wood.
http://www.instructables.com/id/mason-bee-hotel/
Let me know what you do to control insects. Also let me know if you’ve tried any of these suggestions before and how they worked for you.
Thanks for reading!
Caleb
compost at lightning speed with a bucket worm farm!
Using worms to eat your food scraps is a great way to make use of almost all of your food. Red wigglers seem to work the best since they’re so active. One pound of worms can eat up to half a pound of food per day!In this instructable I will show you how to create a slick looking worm bin which will fit under your kitchen sink.
Step 1 – Stuff you’ll need!
The materials for the worm farm can run you anywhere from $0 to $20, however you can find most of the materials in garbage piles if you wish.You will need
- 2 Buckets – They should be 5 gallon, but I’ve used 2 x 2.5-3 gallon buckets. I don’t yet know if this will work with buckets this small. Check your local bakery for free ones that they’re throwing away. I tried that but ended up having to buy a couple cheap plastic garbage cans.
- 1 Shopping Tote – This needs to be polyester because if it’s cotton, the worms will eat through it.
- A newspaper and/or plain cardboard – A regular newspaper will do. Don’t use the glossy type. Strip anything non cardboard (like tape) off the cardboard.
- Some water
- Some method of drilling or puncturing holes in the buckets – a drill, knife, hammer, force of will, etc.
- A small amount of leaves and grass clippings
- Worms – I’d start small with a half a pound (500 or so) and if you need more, get more after
Step 2 – Drill holes in the buckets
Worms need air just like most other living creatures, so drill lots of holes in both buckets for ventilation.I put both buckets together like they are going to sit when they’re finished and drilled holes through both of them so that they would line up.
Make sure you drill a few holes in the bottom of the inside bucket. This will allow water to drain out so your worms don’t drown.
This is why you have two buckets. The bottom bucket catches the “worm juice” so you can use it on your plants to encourage microbial growth (this is a great thing!). I haven’t tested this, but I’m thinking you could dilute the worm juice in a 5 gallon pale with water and aerate the mixture with an aquarium pump and a tablespoon of molasses to create a type of compost tea. If you try this, please let me know how it goes. If you want to qualify your results, set one plant aside to try this on so you can see the difference in results. Remember, compost tea’s results are most noticeable in unhealthy soils.
Step 3 – Sacrifice one of your grocery totes
Take a fabric grocery tote and put it in the bucket. I took the handles of mine, wrapped them around to the bottom of the inside bucket and secured them with parachord so the bag wouldn’t move. Feel free to use whatever means you wish to secure the bag.The bedding and worms and “canopy” (for lack of a better word at the moment) will go inside the bag. The bag allows water to drain out freely and air to get in, while keeping all the castings and bedding and compost contained.
Make sure the bag is made out of polyester! If it’s made of cotton, the worms will eat through it. This wouldn’t be the disaster of a lifetime, but it would potentially make more of a mess than you want.
Step 4 – Time to tear some paper!
Find your least favorite newspaper articles and adverts and shred them into small pieces. Soak the paper in water for a minute or so and add them to the bottom of the bag. Shake off any excess water. This will serve as the bedding for the worms.I’m sure you may be wondering about the newspaper print being bad for the worms as I did, however when I googled this, I found out that most newspapers use soy ink. This doesn’t include paper with shiny surfaces. I’m talking about your typical newspaper…paper.
Feel free to read for yourself here, or google for yourself. I’m not going to claim I know everything on this topic. I’m only sharing what I’m doing and the research I did.
Step 5 – Add your worms
I picked up my worms from this nice lady. She’s more expensive than a lot of places, but she’s local and fairly close to me, so I know my worms won’t die in transit. She’s also very helpful.The worms came in a bag with bedding and soil, so I just had to gently dump the bag into the compost bin bag.
Step 6 – Cover the top
In order to give my worms a forest floor feel, I went outside my apartment and found the first pile of leaves laying around which happened to be on a lawn next door. While my wife and I were grabbing some leaves a lady who lives in the house came over and asked what we were doing. We felt kind of awkward, but we explained about the worm farm and had a really good conversation with her about her garden and compost. She was happy to let us take some leaves.Place the leaves on top of the worms to give them a nice homey canopy.
Step 7 – You’re done!
Now place your lid on top of your buckets and put them wherever you wish…well sort of. Keep them at room temp.
Place your veggie scraps under the leaves and watch them disappear. Well that would be boring. Just put the lid on after and trust they’re disappearing. Keep an eye on the worms health and make sure they’re doing okay. Research worm farms for yourself and make changes if you need to.
Please share any ideas you have or edits you’ve made.
Thanks for reading!
how to fertilize your soil organically, easily and cheaply!
A while ago, I learned a technique to fertilize a garden or lawn using a method that’s cheap, easy and organic! I’m so stoked to actually get to try it.
tea for your garden!
Now this method doesn’t actually put biomass down on your garden as fertilizer, instead, it increases the microbial growth in your garden by a million times! (results may very) Your plants will love this!
compost tea ingredients
You will need:
- very little intelligence – this is very easy!
- a 5 gal bucket (or 19L bucket for you metric peeps) – you can probably get them free from a baker or restaurant.
- an aquarium pump – $5 – $20 – get a medium-sized one. I think I spent $10, but this will last you forever if all you’re using it for is
- an air stone – $1 – $5
- about 3 feet of air tubing – $2 ish?
- a hand full of compost and/or manure – make sure if you’re using manure, it comes from a vegetarian animal or that it’s been in the compost for 6 months or a year or so. – I didn’t have any compost, but a dude at the hydroponics store near my house just gave me some.
- a water permeable bag – this doesn’t have to be fancy. An old pillowcase will work, a burlap sack will work too. I got this mesh bag thing from the hydroponics store, but that was before I thought about using a t-shirt or pillowcase.
- molasses – a few tablespoons or so
- water – you want non-chlorinated water. I’m not going to get into a water debate over this, all I’m saying is chlorinated water will kill the bacteria you’re trying to cultivate, so use a Brita to filter it or you can even pick up some activated charcoal (which is what is in a Brita filter) at the aquarium store for way cheaper.
put it all together!
- fill your bucket with water
- put the compost into your bag and put that in the water
- add your molasses and stir the water to mix the molasses in (maybe do the molasses and stiring before the bag goes in.)
- put your pump and hose and airstone together (this is really simple, just read the directions if you don’t know how)
- drop the stone in the water and let the pump run for 24 hours.
fertilize!
You have to use the tea immediately. About an hour after stop airating the water, your microbes start dying at a huge rate, so don’t store the tea.
The great thing about this stuff is it doesn’t burn your plants. You can dump the whole bucket on your garden and be fine.
Lots of people spray the tea on their plants as well as add it to their soils.
If you’ve tried this, let me know. I’d love to know what you use for your compost ingredients.
Here’s a video by John Kohler describing what I said.
Thanks for reading!
Caleb
sheet mulching to rebuild soil and resist drought
If you don’t read this whole post, please scroll to the bottom and check out the questions. I’d love to have peoples opinions and input.
I have been trying to figure out the best way to start a garden in Calgary Alberta. We have rich soil here and I’ve been hearing that if your soil is “too rich”, your vegitables such as carrots won’t grow as well.
sheet mulching
In my constant search of all things permaculture, I stumbled upon a series of videos a while ago put on youtube by the University of Massachusetts where they transformed a lawn into a very large permaculture garden. They did this without digging, and they didn’t even tear out the grass. Instead the sheet mulched the place.
Sheet mulching is where you put a layer of compost down on your lawn, and then put cardboard or newspaper on top of the compost. After that, you put a thick layer of mulch down such as wood chips or straw or whatever. The cardboard breaks down and the lawn dies underneath and becomes biomass. This makes a very rich soil to grow in and thickens the topsoil layer.
Check out the video.
the conundrum
While I was visiting Plantation Garden Center (again, very nice people), I was speaking with one of the people who helps out there and she was saying that this can be referred to as lasagna gardening and that it can have bad effects on our gardens. I am not about to say that she’s wrong in any way, however I was very surprised to hear this. I thought the richer your soil the better. It seems silly in my head to purposely have a lower quality soil so that certain things will grow better.
Maybe I’m looking at this wrong too. Maybe a healthy soil isn’t one that is jam packed full of nutrients. There is a balance to everything and perhaps this is just one example.
Another line of thought is, if certain things won’t grow in this climate in a nutrient rich soil, maybe we shouldn’t be growing them. I want to build the soil and make it deeper and richer. I want the soil to be healthier and deeper next year and the year after that. If carrots get stringy, then maybe we should grow tomatoes and other nutrient loving things instead.
I’m not trying to put that lady down in any way. I asked for her opinion and I accept it, and I’m not going to sheet mulch the gardens I’m working, so I’m taking her advice. It’s just something that struck me as odd from a permaculture standpoint anyway.
input
What are your thoughts? Have you tried sheet mulching? Have you had issues where your soil was “too rich”? Am I thinking totally wrong here?
Let me know. I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for reading.
Caleb
i just found the coolest website
Link
i just found the coolest website
This site shows you when to plant veggies, when to start them, how to, explains your city etc. Really cool!
grow tons of veggies and flowers while you live in an appartment!
This video shows demonstrations of a really cool technique of virtical gardening using a product called the garden stick.
I can’t stand buying something that I can easily make myself, so I’m planning on making one this year. It’s a great idea.