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Garden Expansion

Hey guys I’m back after a week away from the podcast kinda. And I figured I would talk to you about some of the things I’ve been working on here on the homestead and go over specifically my thoughts on expanding our garden. What we’re doing to increase production for next year and why this time of year is actually a good time to consider doing so!

News

Right now all three kiddos are sick with something and I’ve had a fever for the past couple days so I may not be at the top of my game this week. So I apologize ahead of time if I seem a little off to you I haven’t been getting much sleep at night with kids waking up all night long and being sick myself of course. Catie told me to tell you guys that you’re lucky to be getting a show at all this week haha 🙂 Hopefully this will all be over by the weekend though and we can get back to normal.

I had a nice couple days off work last week during my birthday, and thank you to everyone who wished me a happy birthday! And a special thanks to those of you who sent me things in the mail, seeds and plants and stuff. I really appreciate it!

The ducks are laying well, and I have some big projects coming up soon. You might be seeing some teaser videos in july or maybe even sooner, it all depends on weather and how many times murphy drops in to say hi between now and then.

Plant of the Week

We’re talking about Daikon radish this week. And it’s one of my favorite fall through winter cover crops.

Propagation

You grow it by seed always, and there are a couple improved cultivars but they aren’t much improved from the regular so don’t get too hung up on it. Seeding is around 10 to 15 pounds per acre but to be honest I just don’t worry about it and throw out handfuls where I want it to grow.

Uses

Now, you might be wondering what in the world you would want this stuff for. Well you’ve come to the right place my friend. If you remember me saying this briefly before, well just hum a tune or something cause I’ll not be long…

When the radish matures in loose or sandy soil it will get as large as 3 or so inches around and up to 3 feet long! They get massive. So imagine when it summer kills and starts to rot, you have a rotting vegetable that earthworms and other critters will start to chow down on and leave behind lots of earthworm castings and other insect droppings. So it’s kind of like planting earthworm casting plants that will drill down in the ground and grow tons of earthworm castings and earthworms to till your soil. Pretty great.

Upgrade Your Garden?

I want to start out with a caution on expanding your garden. Lots of people, more so than not, jump into a huge garden and then even expand it the next year before learning the fundamentals and really getting things dialed in. I know from experience believe me! I’ve seen time and again, people put in a garden that will stretch their abilities to maintain and harvest, experience a mediocre harvest, then either give up gardening, or decide they need double the amount of space to bring their harvest amount up to a more acceptable amount. It’s really easy to just not have things optimized, or even doing well and to skip over that reality and assume you just need more plants to make up for the productivity. The problem with that is that you’re increasing the amount of work and energy you have to put into the garden to get more food. I’m going to use a metaphor to explain how I see it.

I have a sports car, let’s call it a really nice Corvette. And whenever I take it out to drive around, the handling just isn’t up to snuff. It doesn’t take curves like I think it should, and it kind of slides around on the road, and it rides really rough too. Add to that, the acceleration and braking are awful. No matter how much I use the brake pedal, I can’t come to a complete stop soon enough and I keep running into other cars. And it obviously doesn’t have enough horsepower because when I hammer down on the gas, it takes me a while to get up to speed. Basically my car is not performing like I want it to. So I take it to the shop. I have them replace the brakes and rotors, the suspension, add a turbocharger for more speed, that should fix all those problems. But the mechanic tells me there’s really only one problem with the car. There are no tires on the wheels…

So before you start adding artificial fertilizers, spraying insecticides, fungicides, bringing in expensive irrigation, buying an expensive tiller or cultivator, and expanding your garden square footage. Let’s make sure your garden has the basics down. Let’s make sure you have a healthy and productive small garden before you decide to grow a much larger garden. Because it’s a whole lot more responsible and smart to just make sure the basics are finished before running out to upgrade what you have.

How Much Garden is Enough?

Lots of people think that they need a huge garden to get enough produce to make it worth their time but in reality a small one is normally plenty. The less footprint you have, the less inputs it will need, it will be easier to get around in, and easier to manage. It’s cheaper to fence a smaller garden as well.

So I always encourage people to master a smaller garden first. Get those plants figured out, build fertility and health in your soils in a small area first and once that area is built up as much as is reasonable, then expand. If you don’t have fantastic soil in your current garden right now, don’t expand! If the plants are doing fantastically and you are still not getting enough zucchini or cucumbers, then plant more the next year but I guarantee, if you have good soils and healthy plants, 4 zucchini plants will produce all that a family of 6 could possibly need for a year in one short growing season. A dozen tomato plants is more than that same family needs as long as they can handle what they currently are growing. I always plant a garden that’s too big for my time investment. You can see with how wild and crazy and overgrown my small garden is right now. Weeds are going nuts because I didn’t get things mulched, the chickens had full run of the place all winter long so they scratched all my soil loose and mixed all the mulch into the soil and as a result, weeds galore! I am not immune to over extending myself that’s for sure! I often bite off more than I can chew. So when I say be careful about getting in over your head, I speak from yearly experience. You will be much happier if you stick with a smaller highly productive garden than a large garden that’s mediocre at best. I have a friend who’s garden is doing so well that he has only 5 or so cucumber vines and they are making gallons of pickles a week as well as giving away grocery sacks of the things. His spaghetti squash is larger than footballs and still not ripe.

Good Reasons to Expand

Now, if you have other reasons for wanting a large garden, like having the ability to drastically increase food production with little extra effort then that’s a completely different story. Let’s assume you have the materials and time to expand but you don’t actually need to grow in the new space, or you are just wanting to get ahead of the game and get a bunch of new growing space ready to go for future planting. This is entirely dependent upon you actually having the time to do this work and not neglect your current garden. I always say take care of what you’ve got first before you even worry about trying to bite off any more work. Cause how in the world are you going to handle twice as much garden space if you don’t even have time for the current garden. So let’s assume you have some good reasons to expand and it makes sense with your life and schedule as well as work load. Great! Because the late summer to early fall is one of the best times to be thinking about this if nothing more than to plan out your bed placement, find contour lines and source materials so they are all ready to go and easily accessible for raised bed creation week! It’s a lot of fun to see these things take shape and even more fun after they sat there all winter long maturing and developing fantastic earthworm rich soil. It’s just great!

The Ferguson Gardening Method

Let’s talk about the actual how to, and some strategies for setting yourself up for success!

The three M’s are critical to this being successful! Moisture, Manure, Mulch. Combine those three and you will be 90% of the way successful. That’s it. Seriously, that’s it. Everything after that is just fine tuning and nit picking. But I know, I know, you need more details. Well I’m working on a gardening course just for you guys that should be ready to go this winter just in time for you to get bit by the gardening bug but I can give you the broad strokes and get you going enough to have more garden beds set up for maturing and soil building before you need to have them ready to plant, and in my opinion, having them ready to go, rested and matured for several months to a year before you need to plant is the best way to do it for sure.

1. Site Assessment
2. Find and mark contour
3. Measure beds and footpaths
4. Break up soil in beds
5. Add soil amendments
   1. Manure 1”-2” thick (in order of best to worst)
      1. Rabbit
      2. Goat/Sheep/Llama
      3. Cow
      4. Horse (composted)
      5. Poultry (composted)
   2. Forest floor soil with leaf mould and rotten twigs/limbs ¼”-1” thick

• The following are optional but recommended and should be a light dusting application, not thick or in large amounts

1. Seed Meal ¼” thick or so (ground or cracked seeds of some kind) eg. Cottonseed meal, corn meal, flour, roasted soybean meal, chicken laying pellets, rabbit pellets, alfalfa pellets or most spoiled animal feed will work well. Caution!! – Do not include whole seed feed! Wheat and oats especially will sprout and be a real pain!
2. Earthworms and castings
3. Bone Meal
4. Azomite or other rock dusts
1. Water it in well
2. Mulch heavily
3. Enjoy a cold refreshing beverage of your choice.

If you want to you can tarp the whole thing to maintain moisture levels and promote rapid processing of the foodstuffs you added to the soil. Just be sure you have more mulch to add later if you do so because the mulch will break down rapidly if left covered. Here’s one real cool tweak you can do to make this even better. Above or below the manure layer, you can add as much shredded hardwood leaves as you want, then continue on with your additions, If adding it above the manure, I wouldn’t add more than 3 or 4 inches of shredded leaves. I guarantee if you follow those instructions, I don’t care what kind of soil you started out with, you will have some great soil 6 months to a year later.

I keep doing this with my garden beds and new beds I set up for expanded growing, and as long as you keep them covered in mulch, weeds are almost nonexistent.

Mulch

Since I know I’ll be getting questions on mulch if I don’t talk about it now, let’s cover (as always, pun is totally intended) a couple different kinds of mulch!

My favorites to use are wood chips, shredded leaves and wood shavings. If you can get organically grown straw, that’s also a fantastic mulch material for sure, but I can’t get that kind of stuff around here. In my experience, it’s easiest to get shredded leaves and wood chips, as well as wood shavings. You can get the wood chips from municipal services and tree trimming services, sometimes for free or the effort of shoveling it into a truck or trailer. Shredded leaves are all over the place in the fall when lawn services very considerately shred them and bag them to be picked up on the side of the curb by you that evening!  

Since I don’t live near a city where people throw away such valuable resources, I bought a leaf blower that also will double as a vacuum and shred the leaves that drop. I’ll be trying it out soon to vacuum up leaves on the paths and roads on the property here. We’ll be using that for mulch and soil building on our sandy soils, and I will actually probably be buying a load of red clay to incorporate into the soil of the garden to help increase the nutrient and moisture holding capacity. But if you don’t have any of those things available for mulch, just use whatever you can. Anything that will cover the soil and protect it from oxidization, harsh sunlight, and drying winds will help. Don’t be afraid of cedar mulch, it will break down, just not as fast as pine. And don’t be afraid of pine mulch either. I use it and never have problems with it.

Orientation and Other Thoughts

If you’re wanting to get those garden beds expanded, you might want to review the first couple episodes we did in the podcast where I talk about placement and go a little deeper into the actual building of the beds. But the general rule of thumb is that you want to get them set up where they will get some direct morning light, and be protected from the afternoon sun. So the west facing wall of a building is the opposite of a good spot to put your garden. The east facing wall of a building is perfect! South facing walls are also a little too hot and harsh unless you’re up north somewhere and have a shorter growing season, then you want to capitalize on as much heat and sunlight as possible. But down here in the south, it frustrates me when people plant on a west facing wall, or south facing wall. I mean, for goodness sake, even a north facing wall is often really good for a garden down here in the south.

Alright, well I better wrap this up so I can at least get the podcast published while it’s still Friday. This week has been exhausting. We lost 3 rabbits and a couple quail due to a problem with watering, so as soon as I’m done here I’ll be working on getting those problems ironed out and set back to rights.

I got a lot of questions on this topic so I plan on doing a followup Q&A show where I’ll be doing nothing but talking to you guys about your specific questions, so that’ll be fun and look for it to come out in the next couple weeks. So if you have any more questions on this topic before I do that show, you’ll still have time to submit your questions. Just send me an email to nick@homegrownliberty.com and if I can I’ll include your question on the air!

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”