How to Make a Raised Bed Garden

I am a big fan of raised garden beds. They give you a real advantage when it comes to soil conditions, since you get to control the quality of their contents (think lots and lots of good compost). Our south garden consists of raised beds on top of nothing but rocks, and our plants thrive there! Raised beds can be constructed out of almost anything you can come up with, or even made with nothing at all (you can simply make large mounds of compost/soil over your existing space). Do a Google Image search for 'raised garden beds', and you will be amazed at the variety of beds that people come up with.

This is a good, basic article on some different ways to make raised garden beds.

How to Make a Raised Bed Garden
By Colleen Vanderlinden, About.com Guide

What is a Raised Bed Garden?

A raised bed garden is a garden built on top of your native soil, sometimes incorporating native soil, sometimes not. These gardens can be contained, such as when you build a wood or stone structure to keep the bed intact, or they can be more free form, with soil and amendments merely piled several inches high. You can plant anything from herbs and vegetables to perennials and shrubs in a raised bed.

Advantages of a Raised Bed Garden

Aside from avoiding the issue of gardening in poor soil, raised beds offer several advantages:

• They warm more quickly in spring, allowing you to work the soil and plant earlier.
• they drain better.
• The soil in raised beds doesn't get compacted, because they are constructed with accessibility in mind.
• It's easy to tailor the soil for your raised bed to the plants you plan to grow there.
• After the initial construction process, less maintenance is required than there is for conventional garden beds.

How to Make a Raised Bed Garden

Contained raised beds are the most popular type, and they're great for vegetable and herb gardens, as well as flower gardens. Fruits, such as strawberries, grapes, blueberries, andraspberries, also do very well in a this type of bed.

You can choose from a variety of materials to construct your frame. Wood is a very popular choice, because it is easy to work with and it is inexpensive. Concrete blocks, natural stone, or brick are also nice options, but there is definitely an added expense and labor to consider in using them. Some gardeners go the ultra-simple route, and simply place bales of hay or straw in whatever configuration they desire, then fill it with good soil and compost and plant it up. This solution will only give you a year or so of use, because the straw will decompose, but it's worth trying if you don't mind replacing the bales yearly, or if you're still developing a more permanent solution.

Since most contained raised beds are constructed from wood, here are instructions for building your own wood raised bed garden.

Step One: Select your site. If you know that you'll be growing vegetables or herbs, or sun-loving flowers in your new garden, select a site that gets at least eight hours of sun per day. A flat, level area is important, and you should also make sure that the area has easy access to water sources as well as room for you to work.

Step Two: Determine the size and shape of your garden. Make sure that you can access all parts of the garden without stepping into the bed. One of the main advantages of a raised bed is that the soil doesn't get compacted the way it might in a conventional bed because they are planned for accessibility. It is a good idea to keep the garden to around four feet wide, because this way you can access the middle of the bed from either side. If you're placing your bed against a wall or fence, it should be no more than three feet wide. Any length you like will work, as long as you keep the width in control. In terms of depth, six inches is a good start, and many vegetables grow well in a bed that is six inches deep. As with many things, though, if you can do more, more is better! Ten to twelve inches would be ideal. If you have decent subsoil (not too clayey or rocky) you can simply loosen the soil with a garden fork and build a six to eight inch deep bed. If your soil is bad, or you are planning to grow crops like carrots or parsnips that need a deeper soil, your bed should be at least ten inches deep.

Step Three: Prep Your Site. Once you know the size and shape of your bed, you can get to work prepping the site. How much prep you will have to do is determined by the depth of the bed you're planning, as well as the plants you're planning to grow there. If you are planning a vegetable or herb garden, a six-inch deep bed is perfect. To save yourself some labor, you can use newspaper, landscape fabric, or cardboard to cover and smother it, then put your soil and amendments right on top. However, to ensure that your plant's roots have plenty of room to grow, it is a good idea to dig out the existing sod and loosen the soil with a shovel or garden fork to a depth of eight to twelve inches. 

Step Four: Construct the Bed. Using rot-resistant lumber such as cedar or one of the newer composite lumbers, construct your bed. Two by six lumber is perfect, as it is easy to work with and will give you six inches of depth. Cut your pieces to the desired size, then attach them together to make a simple frame. You can attach them in a variety of ways. You can make a simple butt joint at each corner, pre-drilling and then screwing the corners together with galvanized screws. You can use a small piece of wood in the corner,and attach each side to it.

Step Five: Level Your Frames. Using a level, make sure your frame is level in all directions. This is a necessary step because if your bed is not level, you will have a situation where water runs off of one part of the garden and sits in another. If part of your frame is high, just remove some of the soil beneath it until you have a level frame.

Step Six: Fill Your Garden. The whole point of a raised bed garden is that it gives you the opportunity to garden in perfect soil. Take this opportunity to fill your bed with a good mixture of quality topsoil, compost, and rotted manure. Once they're filled and raked level, you're ready to plant or sow seeds.

Maintaining a Raised Bed Garden

Happily, raised beds require very little maintenance. Each spring or fall, it's a good idea to top dress with fresh compost and manure, or, if your bed only holds plants for part of the year, go ahead and dig the compost or manure into the top several inches of soil. As with any garden, mulching the top of the soil will help retain moisture and keep weeds down. Moisture retention is important, because raised beds tend to drain faster than conventional beds.

Original Article found HERE

Wow! This corn looks so beautiful! I'd love to try growing some! -Andi

The Story of Glass Gem Corn: Beauty, History, and Hope

  By Steven Thomas |

If you’ve spent any time online lately, you might have noticed a striking photo making its rounds. Feast your eyes on Glass Gem corn: a stunning, multi-colored heirloom that has taken Facebook and the blogosphere by storm. With its opalescent kernels glimmering like rare jewels, it’s easy to see what the buzz is about. This is some truly mind-blowing maize.
For the staff at the Tucson-based seed conservation nonprofit Native Seeds/SEARCH, the viral explosion of interest in Glass Gem has been thrilling—but not surprising. As the proud stewards of this variety (along with the bioregional seed company, Seeds Trust) we are lucky enough to have grown and admired this extraordinary corn ourselves. Rest assured, this is no Photoshop sham. It is truly as stunning held in your your hand as it is on your computer screen. When you peel back the husk from a freshly harvested ear to reveal the rainbow of colors inside, it’s like unwrapping a magical present. And this is a gift that is meant to be shared far and wide.
Like many heirloom treasures, Glass Gem corn has a name, a place, and a story. Its origin traces back to Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer living in Oklahoma. Barnes had an uncanny knack for corn breeding. More specifically, he excelled at selecting and saving seed from those cobs that exhibited vivid, translucent colors. Exactly how long Barnes worked on Glass Gem—how many successive seasons he carefully chose, saved, and replanted these special seeds—is unknown. But after many years, his painstaking efforts created a wondrous corn cultivar that has now captivated thousands of people around the world.
Approaching the end of his life, Barnes bestowed his precious seed collection to Greg Schoen, his corn-breeding protégé. The weighty responsibility of protecting these seeds was not lost on Schoen. While in the process of moving in 2010, he sought out a place to store a sampling of the collection to ensure its safekeeping. Schoen passed on several unique corn varieties to fellow seedsman Bill McDorman, who was owner at the time of Seeds Trust, a small family seed company then located in central Arizona. (Today, Bill McDorman is Executive Director of Native Seeds/SEARCH.) Curious about the oddly named Glass Gems, he planted a handful of seeds in his garden. The spectacular plants that emerged took him by surprise. “I was blown away,” McDorman recalls. “No one had ever seen corn like this before.”
The story of Barnes, Schoen, and their remarkable corn is not unusual. For millennia, people have elegantly interacted with the plants that sustain them through careful selection and seed saving. This process, repeated year after year, changes and adapts the plants to take on any number of desirable characteristics, from enhanced color and flavor to disease resistance and hardiness.
The bounty of genetic diversity our ancestral farmers and gardeners created in this way was shared and handed down across generations. But under today’s industrial agricultural paradigm of monocropping, GMOs, and hybrid seeds, this incredible diversity has been narrowed to a shred of its former abundance. A 1983 study compared the seed varieties found in the USDA seed bank at the time with those available in commercial seed catalogs in 1903. The results were striking. Of the 408 different tomato varieties on the market at the turn of the century, less than 80 were present in the USDA collection. Similarly, lettuces that once flourished with 497 heirloom varieties were only represented by 36 varieties. The same held true for most other veggies including sweet corn, of which only a dozen cultivars were preserved out of 307 unique varieties once available in the catalogs. Though this data leaves some questions around actual diversity decline, the trend toward dwindling crop diversity is alarming. In just a few generations, both the time-honored knowledge of seed saving and many irreplaceable seeds are in danger of disappearing.
Though much of this diversity may be gone, all hope is not lost. The emergence of a breathtaking heirloom variety like Glass Gem reveals that the art and magic of seed saving lives on. It reminds us that we can return to this age-old practice and restore beauty, wonder, and abundance to our world. Indeed, this renaissance is already underway. The rising seed library movement is encouraging local gardeners to become crop breeders and empowering communities to reclaim sovereignty over their food. Our pioneering Seed School program at Native Seeds/SEARCH is training people from all walks of life in building sustainable local seed systems rooted in ancient traditions. And as eye-popping images of Glass Gem continue to spread around the world, Carl Barnes’ kaleidoscopic corn has become a beacon—and perhaps an inspiring symbol—for the global seed-saving revival.
To Purchase Glass Gem Seed
Many people have contacted us looking to obtain Glass Gem seed. We are currently sold out of the small quantity we had in stock, but there are plans to grow out a substantial amount this summer. Fresh seed should be available by October 2012. In the meantime, we have set up a waiting list for all who wish to purchase Glass Gem. Click here to be added to the list, and you will be notified as soon it becomes available. Native Seeds/SEARCH members will get priority access; click here to become a member. For those that have asked about its edibility, Glass Gem is a flint corn used for making flour or as a popping corn. Unlike sweet corn, it is not edible right off the cob. However, it was likely bred as an ornamental variety—for obvious reasons. Many of these exquisite ears are simply too beautiful to eat.
We encourage everyone who grows Glass Gem corn to rejoin the ritual of seed saving by setting aside your favorite selections for replanting the following year. Share seed with your friends and neighbors, organize a seed swap, or start a seed library in your community. Support Native Seeds/SEARCH in our work to conserve and protect Glass Gem corn along with the nearly 2,000 rare, aridlands-adapted crop varieties we steward in our seed bank. Your efforts and energy make a difference. As Carl Barnes has taught us, all it takes is one person to create a more colorful, diverse and abundant world—one seed at a time.

Original Article HERE

Sprouting an Urban Farm

Hey, Fort Wayne folks! Right here in our neck of the woods, Matt and Ann Merritt are attempting to accomplish exactly what I feel like the future needs for our food production. Kudos to their hard work. I plan to visit their booth at our new year-round farmer's market that gathers every first Saturday of the month (see details here), and begin to get to know them. I especially like that as they searched for land, they were dedicated to finding a space that would be accessible to urban and suburban areas, even though they could have found a more rural property. When I picture the future of locally grown food, I see this! I'm so very excited to see real people putting into action all of my ideals!

Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Matt Merritt tours his greenhouse at ATOM Acres. The Merritt family grows vegetables and herbs to sell locally.

Published: November 11, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Sprouting an urban farm

Couple hopes to expand operation with CSA, classes

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Merritt checks his kale for bugs in the greenhouse.

Merritt carves away the comb to harvest his honey.

Matt Merritt, wife, Ann, and sons Trace and Oliver plant kale in the greenhouse at ATOM Acres.

Matt Merritt is standing inside his kitchen on a recent sunny, if chilly, October morning. A beehive, honey dripping from honeycombs, lies in partial disassembly on and under his family’s round oak table.
Merritt pulls out a shelf and starts scraping the caps off one of the combs. Then he’ll place the rack in a hand-cranked centrifuge to extract the honey – a job, he says, that his blonde-haired 3-year-old son, Oliver, likes to “help” with.
“This is our sugar. Well, we sometimes use regular sugar, but we also use this,” the 30-year-old says. “It’s great stuff, because it smells so great.”
His wife, Ann, 26, smiles, while crocheting on a step nearby while the couple’s second son, Trace, 1, naps in another room. “Matt comments all the time about the smell. He says he likes the job because he smells like honey afterward.”
Yes, to Matt and Ann, this is the sweet life – life on what they hope will become a sustainable urban farm.

They call their nearly 6-acre patch of ground at the corner of Bass and Thomas roads ATOM Acres, an acronym made from the initials of family members’ first names.
From their land – across from a housing development and around the corner and down the street from a major local shopping strip – the Merritts plan to provide year-round vegetables, herbs, flowers and other products to area residents – while educating them about food production and preservation.
“This is everything that I thought that I’d need,” says Matt, who came to farming after a stint as a helper to a personal chef in Chicago made him curious about where the high-quality ingredients he was using came from. “Everything,” he says, “just felt right.”
Nonetheless, the two acknowledge theirs is a long row to hoe.
For now, after being able to purchase the land with the help of Matt’s mom and stepfather, Bobbi and Jerry Suetterlin of Fort Wayne, they’ve started with what growers call a hoop house – a plastic sheeted greenhouse – that Matt found at a public sale.
Inside, rows of beds are sprouting spinach, kale, Swiss chard and several kinds of leaf lettuce ready for harvest. The produce will be sold at the year-round farmers market at Parkview Field that is open the first Saturday of each month.
There are also several kinds of herbs and tiny pea vines that will be planted outdoors in the spring – and a germ chamber for sprouting seeds.
On the grounds, about 2 1/2 acres of which are tillable, Matt has eight beds for other vegetables, including broccoli and cabbage now, and tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce next year.
His goal, he says, is not just to sell at farmers markets, but to start a community-sponsored agriculture program, or CSA. He’s not quite sure what form it will take – “Winter is a good time for mapping that out,” he says.
But it likely will involve recruiting shareholders who will pay an entry fee and would determine at least in part what foods they’d like to receive.
Still in its earliest stages is converting an existing equipment garage into a facility where produce could be sold – with a kitchen where food could be preserved and classes given.
If all that sounds idealistically lofty, Matt says, well, it is. But he and Ann, who met in a health foods shop when both were living in Hawaii – “I overcharged him for peanut butter one day, so he remembered me,” she says with a smile – also come to the task with a well-suited background.
After working with the chef, Matt went on to study organic farming in a nine-month program at Michigan State University, commuting weekly to East Lansing, Mich., while Ann lived with his parents. There, he learned to manage a hoop house and flower fields, as well the business of structuring and marketing a CSA.

He says with the amount of land he has, and only a slightly larger growing space, the university program supported a 160-member CSA, farmers markets and wholesale sales. “That’s a lot of food,” he says.
Ann grew up on a 400-acre ranch cooperative in Washington, where dairy cows, pigs, goats, chickens, sheep and horses were raised. She says she started gardening, growing “strawberries, potatoes and petunias” at the age of 9.
Later, she lived in Florida and worked for a tree farm and plant nursery while taking botany and related courses at a community college. She says she knew when she met Matt that their goals and experiences meshed.
After leaving Michigan State, Matt tried helping friends raise chickens on a farm for a time. But when his parents said they wanted to help him farm on his own, he started looking for a suitable property.

“We looked everywhere – Waterloo, Syracuse, Bluffton, Avilla. We looked at a place in Leo. We wanted to be within close driving range of markets,” he says. “That’s the problem with famers – they’re not where the people are.”
The land they found was a fluke. It seems as if the land should be within city limits. But it’s actually in Wayne Township and zoned residential/rural agriculture. Other conventional crop lands lie nearby.
By going to farmers’ markets this summer, he’s been building an online newsletter subscription list that he hopes will become a customer base.

“One of our biggest goals,” he adds, “is to have heirloom varieties of vegetables that are beautiful and different,” he says, adding he’d someday like to start another Michigan State idea – “an edible forest” of fruit and nut trees.

“The whole idea is to get back to local food – food that hasn’t sat in a truck for a week and in the store for a week. We need to get out of the industrial revolution mindset when it comes to food that bigger is better. It can be useful in some ways, but maybe it’s not the safest way or the most economical way,” he says.
“Maybe we all need to eat more like farmers eat.”

rsalter@jg.net

Moving Away from Chemicals--It's not All or Nothing

Have you heard of the Marsden Farm Study? No? Me neither, until just a couple of days ago. Yet the results of this study are so important, I think they should be published, advertised, spread like wildfire. It represents a successful guideline for changes we so desperately need in our chemically-driven agricultural model. 

Marsden Farm is a model that's in between 'strictly organic' and 'strictly conventional'. Since I've long struggled with the fact that changing agriculture overnight, or even in one or two generations, seems like an impossible task, I read these kinds of studies with a practical eye and new hope in my heart. 

Experimental farms like Marsden are crucial for showing farmers what can be done now. These methods will not require re-hauling the entire system in one day, but will greatly reduce the severe ecological damage we wreak, year after year, with conventional farming.

Here is a link to the basics behind the study. Or read on, and I can paraphrase for you. 

Marsden Farm (located in Iowa) began in 2003 to try reintroducing the concept of 'integrated pest management' on a large scale. Integrated Pest Management involves the use of prevention, monitoring, physical removal of pests, biological controls, and even the limited use of pesticides. It's a range of responses to pests. It's nothing new. But through the years, chemicals have trumped all other techniques. Spread over the fields on a regular schedule, chemicals are used now to repeatedly douse crops, a sort of preventative cure-all. As we know by now, a 'cure-all' is the last thing massive amounts of chemicals represent, and the costs to the environment are long lasting, complex, and often irreversible.

Integrated Pest Management is more time intensive, certainly. However, labor hired to 'watch the crops'--assessing the types and quantities of pests, manually removing pests or applying biological controls, and yes, using chemicals as an absolute last resort and in small quantities--money spent in this way seems to make more sense than pouring money into the chemical companies for year after year of poisons to be saturated into the ground 'on schedule'.

Pest management is not the only factor in Marsden's study, but also ear-round crop rotation and the use of animal inputs (reintroducing animals to the farm--what an idea, right?). The Marsden study is aimed at larger-scale operations, which I think is important. Even though my personal opinion is that we will eventually turn to many small-scale, diverse operations in the future, it's going to be a gradual process. We need as many great models and ideas for drastically reducing the chemicals we use, on larger farms, now.

Mark Bittman (whom I primarily know as the author of some really amazing cook books, like "How to Cook Everything") wrote this article about the study, which I find insightful. Hopefully the ideas presented by farms like Marsden will catch on, and changes will start happening. .

Sustainable Farming: A Simple Fix, Zero Cost

By Mark Bittman (original article here)

t's becoming clear that we can grow all the food we need, and profitably, with far fewer chemicals. And I'm not talking about imposing some utopian vision of small organic farms on the world. Conventional agriculture can shed much of its chemical use - if it wants to.

This was hammered home once again in what may be the most important agricultural study this year, although it has been largely ignored by the media, two of the leading science journals and even one of the study's sponsors, the often hapless Department of Agriculture.

The study was done on land owned by Iowa State University called the Marsden Farm. On 22 acres of it, beginning in 2003, researchers set up three plots: one replicated the typical Midwestern cycle of planting corn one year and then soybeans the next, along with its routine mix of chemicals. On another, they planted a three-year cycle that included oats; the third plot added a four-year cycle and alfalfa. The longer rotations also integrated the raising of livestock, whose manure was used as fertilizer.

The results were stunning: The longer rotations produced better yields of both corn and soy, reduced the need for nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides by up to 88 percent, reduced the amounts of toxins in groundwater 200-fold and didn't reduce profits by a single cent.

In short, there was only upside - and no downside at all - associated with the longer rotations. There was an increase in labor costs, but remember that profits were stable. So this is a matter of paying people for their knowledge and smart work instead of paying chemical companies for poisons. And it's a high-stakes game; according to the Environmental Protection Agency, about five billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the United States.

No one expects Iowa corn and soybean farmers to turn this thing around tomorrow, but one might at least hope that the U.S.D.A.would trumpet the outcome. The agency declined to comment when I asked about it. One can guess that perhaps no one at the higher levels even knows about it, or that they're afraid to tell Monsanto about agency-supported research that demonstrates a decreased need for chemicals. (A conspiracy theorist might note that the journals Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences both turned down the study. It was finally published in PLOS One; I first read about it on the Union of Concerned Scientists Web site.) 

Debates about how we grow food are usually presented in a simplistic, black-and-white way, conventional versus organic. (The spectrum that includes conventional on one end and organic on the other is not unlike the one that opposes the standard American diet with veganism.) In farming, you have loads of chemicals and disastrous environmental impact against an orthodox, even dogmatic method that is difficult to carry out on a large scale.

But seeing organic as the only alternative to industrial agriculture, or veganism as the only alternative to supersize me, is a bit like saying that the only alternative to the ravages of capitalism is Stalinism; there are other ways. And positioning organic as the only alternative allows its opponents to point to its flaws and say, "See? We have to remain with conventional."

The Marsden Farm study points to a third path. And though critics of this path can be predictably counted on to say it's moving backward, the increased yields, markedly decreased input of chemicals, reduced energy costs and stable profits tell another story, one of serious progress.

Nor was this a rinky-dink study: the background and scientific rigor of the authors - who represent the U.S.D.A.'s Agricultural Research Service as well as two of the country's leading agricultural universities - are unimpeachable. When I asked Adam Davis, an author of the study who works for the U.S.D.A., to summarize the findings, he said, "These were simple changes patterned after those used by North American farmers for generations. What we found was that if you don't hold the natural forces back they are going to work for you."

This means that not only is weed suppression a direct result of systematic and increased crop rotation along with mulching, cultivation and other nonchemical techniques, but that by not poisoning the fields, we make it possible for insects, rodents and other critters to do their part and eat weeds and their seeds. In addition, by growing forage crops for cattle or other ruminants you can raise healthy animals that not only contribute to the health of the fields but provide fertilizer. (The same manure that's a benefit in a system like this is a pollutant in large-scale, confined animal-rearing operations, where thousands of animals make manure disposal an extreme challenge.)

Perhaps most difficult to quantify is that this kind of farming - more thoughtful and less reflexive - requires more walking of the fields, more observations, more applications of fertilizer and chemicals if, when and where they're needed, rather than on an all-inclusive schedule. "You substitute producer knowledge for blindly using inputs," Davis says.

So: combine crop rotation, the re-integration of animals into crop production and intelligent farming, and you can use chemicals (to paraphrase the report's abstract) to fine-tune rather than drive the system, with no loss in performance and in fact the gain of animal products.

Why wouldn't a farmer go this route? One answer is that first he or she has to hear about it. Another, says Matt Liebman, one of the authors of the study and an agronomy professor at Iowa State, is that, "There's no cost assigned to environmental externalities" - the environmental damage done by industrial farming, analogous to the health damage done by the "cheap" standard American diet - "and the profitability of doing things with lots of chemical input isn't questioned."

This study not only questions those assumptions, it demonstrates that the chemicals contributing to "environmental externalities" can be drastically reduced at no sacrifice, except to that of the bottom line of chemical companies. That direction is in the interest of most of us - or at least those whose well-being doesn't rely on that bottom line.

Sadly, it seems there isn't a government agency up to the task of encouraging things to move that way, even in the face of convincing evidence.

Organic Methods Hold Water

Here is a good article that explains why organic farming/gardening...which aims to protect the soil, helps fend off some of the devestating effects of drought.

Organic Methods Hold Water

The Rodale Institute celebrates the success of its 30-year Farming Systems Trial.

Photography by Andrew Norelli

When rain gets scarce, we turn a tap, and water flows readily from hoses and sprinklers in yards across the nation, making it easy for us to take the resource for granted. But with climatologists predicting weather extremes in all corners of the globe in the next century, wise water use will become even more critical for all American gardeners and farmers. Hardiness zones have already changed in just the past 20 years; warm-region growing conditions are moving farther and farther north. And drier conditions are racing north, as well. Drought already costs U.S. citizens $6 billion to $8 billion a year on average, and according to a study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, we could face extreme drought within just 30 years.

This could mean devastating crop failures, water shortages, and widespread water restrictions. With a warmer, drier environment on the horizon, turning on the hose or sprinkler to quench a thirsty garden might not be an option.

In response to the changing climate, the big three chemical-producing companies—DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—are in a heated race to be the first to release a drought-tolerant variety of corn. Both genetically modified and standard-bred hybrids are in the works. They may claim feeding an ever-expanding world population as their altruistic motivation, but making millions from drought-stricken farmers makes for a lucrative incentive: Feeding the bottom line is any public corporation’s duty.

While drought-tolerant varieties are a valuable piece of the puzzle, another solution already exists—one that farmers and gardeners can practice immediately, without paying for specialized seeds. And it’s a solution that has scientific research to back it.

The Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial (FST) has been tracking the performance of organically grown grain crops (such as corn and soybeans) and conventional, synthetic-chemical-reliant grain crops for the past 30 years. As America’s longest-running side-by-side comparison of these farming systems, the FST has revealed that crops grown organically are truly healthier and hardier in the long run, and better able to cope with weather extremes. Organic fields in the FST produce just as much as the chemical-reliant fields, despite claims that organic farming uses more resources to produce less food. But it is the performance of the organic fields during drought years that is truly amazing.

In four out of five drought years, the organically grown corn produced significantly more than the conventionally grown corn. The organic corn of the FST was even more successful under drought conditions than the drought-tolerant seed varieties were in the industry trials. The Rodale Institute’s organically managed fields produced between 28.4 percent and 33.7 percent more corn than conventionally managed fields under drought conditions.

Monsanto boasted that its genetically modified drought-tolerant corn was “one of our most significant R&D milestones,” producing between 6.7 percent and 13.4 percent more under drought conditions than other corn varieties. DuPont touts hybrids that produce 5 percent more on average, and Syngenta, which is leading the pack, has managed to produce 15 percent more with its drought-tolerant seeds.

So why does the FST’s organic crop outperform the chemical crop? “The current toxic-chemical approach to growing our food destroys the life of the soil with pesticides, herbicides, and high levels of inorganic fertilizers,” says Elaine Ingham, chief scientist at the Rodale Institute. “They are destroying the support system, developed by nature over the last 4 billion years, that grows healthy plants.”

That natural support system of organic practice is what makes those crops more drought-tolerant. Fertile soil, rich in organic matter and microbes, creates a more stable environment for plants. Rather than crop failure in times of stress, the organically cultivated plants can rely on the soil to provide what the weather has not.

“The organic matter in soil acts like a sponge, providing water reserves to plants during drought periods and preventing water from running off the soil surface in times of heavy rains,” says Rita Seidel, agroecologist and FST project leader at the Rodale Institute. “This organic matter has significantly increased in the FST organic fields and is actually diminishing in the conventional fields.”

Even in times of severe water shortage, not only can organic fields produce a more successful crop, but they continue to contribute to our drinking water reserves. In the FST, the organic fields recharged groundwater at rates 15 to 20 percent higher than the conventional fields.

Whether you are cultivating 40 acres or 40 square feet, compost, mulches, and cover crops create a well-balanced, fertile soil that can absorb more water, which buffers plants from drought stress. And avoiding toxic herbicides and pesticides and synthetic fertilizers keeps the community of soil microbes actively processing organic matter.

Thirty years of research proves that organic farming and gardening grows food and grows it well even during extreme weather conditions. Good news, for in the face of a warmer, drier future, the more we can rely on our soil rather than our hoses, the better off we’ll be.

Link to original article

Rain Barrels Rule

Once again, the local newspaper's Home and Garden section has come through for me! I have a barrel that I scored for FREE (which is another story to be told soon), and I am planning to make a rainwater barrel out of it. I can't think of a more sustainable way to keep the Little Hands Garden happy and thriving.

Here is the article posted last Sunday that will be a great help as I set out to turn my free empty barrel into a rain barrel.

Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Gardeners can customize their rain barrel setups as needed, such as with a diverter assembly.

Published: June 12, 2011 3:00 a.m.

Build your own rain barrel

Tap downspouts for free source of water for yard with master gardener’s advice

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Rain barrels can help gardeners save money on watering, and they don’t have to be expensive. Kyle McDermott demonstrates how to make one from an old rolling trash bin at the local Purdue Extension office, which offers advice on building and using rain barrels.

Parts for making a homemade rain barrel should cost about $20.

The Journal Gazette

For gardeners, the concept of a rain barrel isn’t too hard to grasp.

You just catch the free water that flows off a roof now and use that instead of expensive tap water later to refresh vegetables, shrubs and flowers.

The mechanics of actually setting up a functioning rain barrel? Now there’s a problem. But it’s one that Lyle McDermott of Fort Wayne is trying to help solve.

McDermott, a master gardener, has been teaching area residents how to assemble rain barrel systems. And you don’t have to be a mechanical or botanical genius to get them working for you, he says. You just need to be willing to do a little math and have some rudimentary assembly skills.

“I’m a simple guy, so I believe in simple,” says McDermott, 68. “I show the easy and inexpensive way. For something like $20, not including the barrel, they can have one put together.”

McDermott says there are three major issues to consider in setting up a rain barrel system.

The first is figuring out how much storage capacity is optimal. Many gardeners, he says, drastically underestimate both how much rain will run off a given roof and how much water it will take to quench the thirst of a drought-stricken garden.

“A 1,000-square-foot roof – that’s only 50 by 20 feet – will produce about 500 gallons with an inch of rain. That’s 10 of these (typical) rain barrels,” McDermott says.

While 500 gallons may sound like a lot of water, it probably can be used up in a couple of days in a proper deep watering of a 10-by-16-foot vegetable garden, he notes.

Given that a house could have 5,000 square feet of roof, it might take 50 barrels to catch all that rain.

“So you have to be realistic in your expectations and not expect to collect every drop,” McDermott says.

Still, the problem of a lot of water is not insurmountable. McDermott has devised a way to link several rain barrels together with inexpensive hosing to fill them successively. An ideal system, he says, places two or three connected barrels under the gutter downspout at each of the four corners of a basic roof, hiding them behind shrubs, he says.

If they still can’t catch all the rain, a hose connected to the third barrel can direct water to a rain garden, a garden filled with water-loving plants, he says.

Or during heavy rainstorms, gardeners can always disconnect the downspout from the barrel and allow the water to go where it would if there was no barrel. McDermott stresses that it’s important to divert overflow water away from the home’s foundation if large amounts of overflow are anticipated.

The second issue, he says, is that standing water, especially if there’s any organic debris in it, can be a breeding ground for mosquitoes, which can carry West Nile virus.

So, McDermott says, any barrel should be tightly closed with even small openings screened. Ideally, its top should not be flat so as not to gather standing water, as mosquitoes can breed in just a couple tablespoonfuls of water.

McDermott likes to use barrels from Sechler’s Pickles in St. Joe, which are slightly domed. Barrels are available to the public for $10 to $20, says Max Troyer, Sechler’s owner. He advises an advance call to 260-337-5461 to check availability.

Pest-control devices called mosquito dunks and mosquito bits are another way to prevent breeding, says Ricky Kemery, horticulture educator with the Allen County branch of Purdue Extension at IPFW.

The dunks and bits contain harmless bacteria that kill mosquito larvae, he says. Dunks are put in the barrels, and bits can be sprinkled on top.

“They won’t hurt the plants,” he says. “You above all don’t want the barrel to be a mosquito breeding pit.”

The third issue is water transport. Yes, water is heavy – it weighs more than 8 pounds a gallon. That means in most cases, there should be a way of connecting a hose near the bottom of the barrel, although a simple spigot works for those willing to carry water to their plants.

McDermott says the pressure of the water above the hose connection is usually enough to get liquid through a length of hose or to a soaker hose.

The need to get a hose or container easily under the spigot makes him advise gardeners to place a rain barrel or barrels on top of sturdy, stacked concrete blocks or bricks or a platform made from treated lumber.

If multiple barrels are linked, the barrel connected directly to the roof gutter should be the highest, to allow gravity to assist in getting the water to subsequent barrels, he says.

The weight of the water in the barrels also leads some gardeners to affix them to the side of the house with metal strapping to keep them upright and avoid a safety hazard, Kemery notes.

McDermott says his system uses simple-to-find plumbing fixtures and standard hoses and nylon screening. The only tools required are a drill or knife and a screwdriver.

McDermott says that with an investment of less than $40, a gardener can save $200 to $400 or more in the cost of water over a single growing season if he or she is a city tap-water user. For a well user, the benefit is conserving water for household use at a time when wells might dip low because of drought, he says.

Another benefit of a rain barrel, Kemery says, is that research suggests plants prefer rain water to treated water. While tap water tends to be on the alkaline side, rain water tends to be slightly acidic, he says. That aids plants in absorbing nutrients, he says.

Kemery has a linked rain barrel system at his own home that incorporates about a half-dozen barrels and a kiddie pool outfitted with a small pump to help transport water to nearby gardens.

Although he doesn’t know how many Fort Wayne- area residents use rain barrels, he says more seem to be thinking about doing so.

“We do know calls (to the extension service) from people who ask about them seem to be increasing. We’ve had more than 20 so far (this year), whereas five years ago it would have been zero,” he says.

He adds that kits are now available at area home stores and garden centers for those who don’t want to go the home-made route.

“Five years ago, would you have seen anybody offering a rain barrel kit? No,” McDermott says.

“But,” Kemery adds, “water is a precious resource, and more people are seeing you need to start using it more effectively.”

Get a barrel

A limited number of rain barrels put together by master gardener Lyle McDermott are for sale at the Purdue Extension Service office for $35, with proceeds benefiting the master gardeners program. There also are instruction sheets available from the office; call 481-6826.

McDermott and fellow gardener Larry Bracht of Fort Wayne are available to speak to groups about rain barrels. McDermott can be reached at 402-5779.

rsalter@jg.net

Link to original article: http/www.journalgazette.net/article/20110612/FEAT07/306129937/1031/BIZ

Here's another helpful link from fortwaynehomepage.com that includes a video:

http/fortwaynehomepage.net/rsh-fulltext?nxd_id=2565