Summary
Transcript
Okay. Welcome everybody. Today is another Wednesday webinar. Today is May 15, 2024, and today is going to be a little different because we’re going to talk about gardening. Before we get into that, just a few announcements. One is, which is, I would say, good news, is that the new biology practitioners are pretty much getting full up with as many of the members as they can comfortably see right now. So that means we are once again on the lookout for new practitioners. And I think right now these should be people who are probably either medical doctors, osteopaths, that is, dos, or maybe naturopaths, nD’s those.
That’s the sort of primary person we’re looking for. Now, there’s probably some of you who applied or sent us your resume the first time. Some of you, unfortunately, which is my mistake, maybe even didn’t hear back from us. Some of you were told that we were full up then and you should check back. And also the people who have graduated from the new biology curriculum. So anybody who would like to join us, please contact customer service. And we’ll probably ask for a brief cover letter and a resume. And then hopefully somebody will contact you and we can talk about it.
I think everybody understands the kind of practitioner we’re looking for. As an example, everybody would have to understand the non existence of viruses and just the whole basic principles of new biology. So if that is, that description fits you, please send us your resume and a brief cover letter, and we’ll see if you may be the right fit for joining our group. It’s a very exciting program and initiative, and the meetings we’re having with the doctors are, I think everybody, myself included, have learned a lot. And it’s really a fun group to be part of. The other thing is basically one of our signature plants.
Ashitaba is now on sale at Doctor Cowen’s garden. Ashitaba is one of the plants that we have specifically grown for us. And it’s grown biodynamically by, I think, right now, two different people. So this is a very. It’s one of the few ashitaba preparations or sources that I know of in the United States. And my guess is it’s the best quality and it’s the easiest way to use it. And it’s a very nutritious and medicinal plant known for a whole lot of things, including helping with longevity. And finally, the C plasma is back in stock. And that, as everybody knows, hopefully, is one of the main, I guess you could call it supplements, I would call it food sources that we use so let’s turn to gardening.
And I just always a few disclaimers. I’m no gardening professional by any means. I am not a gardening expert. I’ve read one book on gardening in my life, which was how to grow more vegetables by John Jevons. And I figured out was the only gardening book I needed to read. I rarely have watched youtubes, but I’ve been a lot around a lot of gardeners. And as is usual for me, I asked them a lot of questions. So I have learned some things over the years, but I do not mean this to be any gardening expert, but I do hope that there will be some things that I can point out that are mostly from just things I’ve learned over the years that may help you out.
And so that’s really the purpose of this, is to. I really think everybody should garden, not just so that they grow their own food and get the freshest, best food possible, but it’s a very therapeutic and educational experience. As I hopefully will point out, you learn a lot about health and disease by taking care of animals and plants, and that helps you learn a lot about yourself. So I would encourage everybody to do it. And when I thought about, why am I doing this, it’s partly to help people, maybe find out some things that most people don’t talk about and think mostly out of mistakes that I’ve made or things that I’ve learned or a perspective that I have.
So hopefully it will be a little bit fun and you may learn some things which may be of use to you. Just as far as my background with gardening, I graduated from college three years, had no idea what to do, except I didn’t want to be a doctor. Ended up joining the Peace Corps, getting sent to Swaziland to teach gardening. Never had grown a garden or even grown anything in my life, as far as I remember. They did about an eight week training in Huntsville, Texas, which we learned, I would say next to nothing, not completely nothing.
And evidence of that is when I was sent to a, my site where I was going to. Going to start the gardening program for the school. So that was our job, was to start a gardening program and teach swazis how to garden, even though essentially they had no use for gardening. But never mind. So I went there, and it turns out there was one other expatriate, that is white guy, who was a Rhodesian at that time, refugee from the army, who had started a little biodynamic garden at the school. And I remember going, I probably told this story before, but I ended up going to the garden, and he was about to leave the area in the next few weeks, and he was showing me the garden, which he had already started.
And I remember going in and looking around and pointing at something and saying, what’s that? And he looked at me and said, and you’re here to teach gardening. And I refer to that as one of the seminal moments in my life, because I quickly realized I had two choices. One was to somehow talk my way out of being an idiot and say, well, I was just wondering if you knew what it was, or something stupid like that. Or I could say, you know what, I don’t really know anything about gardening, and you seem to know a lot more than I do.
So I wonder if you could show me some things before you leave, which was sort of the definition of eating crow. But for some reason, I got myself to say the second. And he ended up staying an extra six weeks or so to teach me basically about biodynamic gardening. I had never heard of any kind of gardening, so biodynamics was fine with me. I knew that I didn’t want to do chemical gardening, but I didn’t know anything about different types. So he basically showed me how to garden in those six to eight weeks. And it was a sort of a biodynamic type type of method, not exactly.
So that was an introduction for me to a lot of things, including that it’s often and maybe always a good idea to tell the truth so that you can actually learn something. And luckily, I did at that point, it didn’t try to bamboozle him or talk my way out of it. So I went from there, and over the next 40 some years, I had a garden sort of on and off and started learning more and more about it. Eventually, I ended up being given a garden to take care of in Napa, which ended up a huge garden.
And that’s where I became a sort of production gardener and originally grew and produced all the things for Doctor Cowan’s garden, which is how that got started. But I realized I didn’t really want to be a kale farmer or a tomato farmer. And so we’ve got other people to grow the vegetables and the plants. And soon after that, I moved from California to upstate New York, where we currently live. And so we moved here in the fall of 2020. So the garden that you’ll see started in the spring of 2021. So 2021-2223 this is essentially the sort of the third 4th year of the garden.
So you can see how far along we’ve got. And basically, this garden you’re about to see, there was nothing there except a field with grass that was brush hogged once a year. Otherwise, it was just a completely open field with really heavy, dense clay soil that mostly nothing of use really would grow on it. We think that the area had been farmed or maybe an apple orchard sometime in the past, and they actually kind of strip mined the soil. So we were kind of down to clay. And so that’s how we started. And so with that, let me give you a tour of the garden.
And what I’m going to do here, which I think is best, is show you some clips that we made this morning. And then after the clip, I’ll highlight some points and do it that way. I apologize. It may be a little hard to see. This is not professional sound or photography, but it was the best we could do. So this is the first one. Hi, everybody. So this is going to be a rainy day garden tour, and I’m mostly going to just be pointing stuff out, and then I’ll talk about it in the webinar. So here is some of the compost that we buy and just wanted to show you that.
And then we have a number of gates. And I would say the only thing is, when you make gates, make sure you can get a car. The gate’s big enough so that you can get a car or a truck in. That actually really helps. So, just to say, I may be a gardener, you’ll, I guess, judge for yourself, but I’m definitely not a builder. So none of the things that you see that were built, you know, we did. I build myself. I didn’t build the greenhouse. I didn’t build the fence. I didn’t build the cat barn or the goat barn.
So I’m mostly. We work with some people that we’ve just discovered here. We talk about what we want, and we have the things built. And I do most of the gardening with a little bit of help with mowing and weeding and some other things that I don’t particularly enjoy. But pretty much everything you’ll see, except, like, the trees and the bushes. I started from seed and basically grew it like that. Okay, let’s go on to the next one. How do I move here? I’m going to have to restart this start share. Okay. And now entering the garden, and you can see Linda, my wife, has just started making this wildflower bed, which is hopefully going to be beautiful in maybe a couple years or so.
And you can see the compost piles that we made in the back. And I’ll be talking a little bit about those. I then want to point out the magic of rotted hay. So here you can see the rotted hay that we use. And you’ll see it all over the place. It’s really stinky and rotted. Then we, of course, get to the brains, or not the brains. The real center of the garden, in a way, which is the greenhouse. And here you can see we have another of tables. And that’s the cat castle, that has a warming light in the winter, which, of course, is not on now.
And here we have a number of beds, which we grow things, these beds. I’ll explain more. And I wanted to point out this is a zucchini, which is getting eaten by beetles. And I’ll talk about that some. Here’s a tomato. Here’s some broccoli and cabbage. Broccoli and cabbage. Here’s an okra, which is also getting eaten by beetles. And then we have some in ground beds, which is some watermelon and some onions. And then I just want to point out, these are perennial kale in pots in the back, also known as sea kale. Here are a few things I want to point out.
These tools that I use, they’re made by a company called pks. These are copper tools. So there’s a trowel. This is a weeder. And I wanted to point out my favorite tool, which is called a nunki, which is made by pks bronze. And I’ll talk more about that. Okay. I realize I could probably spend a whole hour talking about this. So this is going to be quick and brief. The compost, basically, we just. We don’t. I know a lot of people are very fastidious about how much greens to browns and. And very specific layering. I don’t do that so much as much as put garden waste and kitchen scraps and kitchen waste.
And I layer that with the bedding and poop from the chickens and the goats. And then I just kind of stir it up every once in a while. And I don’t really turn it. And it takes as long as it takes. And the only other thing I do is I put a skin on it, which is basically the rotting hay. So that sort of keeps the moisture in. And then I water it when it gets dry. And it takes probably about a year to decompose. And then you sift it and use it. In the meantime, as you saw, I have some compost that seems pretty good from a local place, Hudson Valley organics.
And so I. We use that to build up the beds. The hay is one of the magic ingredients in this garden. I get it from a friend who makes hay and then puts it in big round bales. And this is hay that is essentially gone rotten, and it’s really rotten. Like, there’s worms crawling in it. And a lot of it’s just sort of gooey, mushy, stinky mess. But the gooey or the stinkier and the more worms, the better. And we put that on everything. And the benefit of that, as opposed to straw, is straw has a lot of weed seeds in it and grass seeds.
And so you get a lot of grass growing in your bed, whereas if you use really stinky, rotten, decomposed hay, you get almost no weed growth in your beds. And as hopefully you’ll see, I put a very thick layer, like maybe a foot on each bed, which seems like a lot. And then I basically don’t dig anymore. I just separate the hay and plant either a plant or seeds in the soil underneath it. And so there’s really no digging. And what you see is underneath the hay is just tons and tons of worms and decomposition and new soil growth.
So I would really encourage anybody who’s gardening who doesn’t want to spend all their time putting more compost on and weeding to get some really rotten, good hay and just put that really thick on everywhere. You did see an electric motor, electric lawnmower. So in the garden, we use only a push electric mower around the grounds. On the outside, I have a gas riding motor, but we don’t want to have gas fumes in the garden. The beds that you saw in the greenhouse were based on this, a method called a hugel culture. And I think this comes from Switzerland.
There’s some guy, Sepp Holzer, somewhere, he started it. And it’s basically, a lot of gardening is just recreating what nature is doing. So we made these, like, three to four foot high beds. I didn’t make them, but I told the guy what I wanted, and then I put rotten logs in the bottom and then branches, then leaves, and then compost and then some topsoil. And you just keep building it up until it’s right at the top of the bin. And that’s what we plant into. And every time we put a new crop in, we put a new layer of compost, but nothing gets dug.
It’s just more compost on the top. And when you stick your hand down there, that’s just full of decomposing leaves and sticks and worms and. And all kinds of good stuff in there. I wanted to point out the zucchini, which is. I actually pulled it out about a half an hour after this video because the zucchini and the okra and two of the watermelons were completely eaten by beetles. Now, the zucchini had been eaten a little bit by beetles, and then it came back and I thought it may be resistant, but now it’s just getting totally eaten by beetles.
I’m not sure what they are, but they look like sort of beetle y things to me. And the reason I wanted to point this out is also to point out that this is not a perfect garden. So I had. This is a, you could say a crop failure. And I would also point out that, as you’ll see, no professional gardener would do things like I do because I waste a lot of time and there’s sort of wasted money because everything isn’t as efficient as it could be. But I’m not a professional gardener and I’m not doing this for money, and probably you won’t either.
But the lesson I wanted to demonstrate with the zucchini is, for me, like, I would never spray anything or even try to kill the beetles. I have a deep belief, I guess you would call it, that plants don’t get sick or get eaten by insects unless they’re not in the right place or the right time or getting something they want. So my interpretation of this is the first time we’ve had beetles in the greenhouse. But interestingly, they don’t eat the tomato plants and they don’t eat the broccoli, and they don’t eat the kohlrabi, and they don’t eat the carrots.
And the zucchinis out in the garden are doing just fine. So it’s not got anything to do with the genetics of the seeds. They’re same seeds, same plants planted at the same time. One of them was planted in the greenhouse and the others were planted under cloches in the garden. The three in the garden are doing just fine. The one in the greenhouse is not, the way I look at it is the zucchini didn’t like to be in a confined plastic space. So be it. The beetles took care of the problem so that I could grow something that likes to be in that space.
And that’s how I see gardening, and it’s pretty similar to how I see medicine. I did want to point out the PKS bronze tools. I’m a big fan of tools, and my philosophy, even with buying most things, is hopefully buy the best and buy it once. I’ve had those bronze tools for probably eight years. Schauberger, the water guy, said bronze is the best material to make tools out of. They last the longest. And they actually put copper into the soil, which seems to help the plants in some ways. They’re extremely well made. I use that nunki, that wire copper thing, as the only tool that I ever use to weed and aerate gardens.
And they’re a little more expensive, but they’re extremely well made, and that’s the way that I like to do it. So it’s PKS tools. They’re not so easy to find in the US, but you can find some. And I wanted also to point out the sea kale, which is a perennial green. It’s basically in the kale family. And we had that growing pretty much all winter. So we have it in those pots and it pretty much. It doesn’t grow as fast in the winter, but even in an unheated greenhouse. So if you like greens, you can pick off a few leaves and have the greens in your soup or whatever, pretty much all year.
We also had spinach and some lettuce growing there pretty much all year. Okay, let me just see. Yeah. Okay, let’s go to the next video. Here’s. Here’s sort of the end of our seedlings. Most of the seedlings are already planted. And I just want to point out there’s three different ways that I grow seedlings. One is in these peat or cow manure pots. Then there’s plastic containers, and then there’s these expensive bronze, sorry, copper ones that are open in the bottom. And I’ll talk some about the pros and cons of why to use either one of those.
These are just the end of the seedlings. Most of them are planted. Here’s some beets and leeks back here. And this has been. We’ve been eating these greens and lettuce for probably weeks now. And I just want to point out the way. And I’ll explain a little bit about why I think this is the best way to grow greens and lettuce. And now this is goat food. Here’s a bed of carrots. And again, I’ll explain why I think this is the best way to grow carrots. And then we have more brassicas, which means cauliflower and broccoli, and cabbage and kohlrabi.
You can see a kohlrabi that’s almost ready to eat down there. So this is the. This is the greenhouse. Okay. Just a few things. The seedling pots. Again, I use. I’ve tried three different types. One is the peat pots, or sometimes they’re made of cow manure. The other is just the usual plastic ones. And the third is those copper ones with the open bottoms that you get from a place called Garrett wade. And the main thing I’ll say is that I do not like the peat pots. And I. Every year I think I’m just going to try it.
Because you grow it in the peat pots and then you don’t have to take the plant out of the pot. When you transplant it, you can just plant the whole pot. And that’s how they say to do it, so you don’t have to disturb the roots. But over and over again, I find that the peat pot somehow absorbs all the water and it dries out the soil and the plants don’t grow well. And then I plant the whole pot. And then three weeks later, I. If I had occasion to dig up the plant, the plant is still in the pot.
And so I don’t think I’m ever going to do use peat pots again. I don’t like them. Maybe other people have better luck, but they’re expensive and they don’t really work. I don’t really like the plastic, but they seem to work fine, especially the harder plastic. They do make the root circle and that’s not good. So I tend to transplant things younger and earlier than most people, just so the roots aren’t hitting up against something which tells them that it’s time to go to flower or fruit. And that’s not what you want. You want plants to grow as quickly as they can, with as much vigor.
And so that’s one of the reasons I like these expensive copper, uh, planters, which are just a little copper tube. And so they’re open on the bottom, so the roots can actually look for water and nutrients in the pan that they’re in. They also make them out of steel, which are cheaper. But I like the idea of the copper. And then you just push them out and transplant them so there’s very little root disturbance. And I’ve personally had the best luck with that technique. I wanted to say about the spacing, which I learned from the get go from Jevons, which is what you’re trying to do always, is maximize the space.
And so when the plant is mature, it should be. It should make a like a living canopy, like a rainforest, so there’s no light getting down to the soil, so the soil stays moist and you don’t even really have to put mulch on those kind of plants, because the plants themselves make a living canopy. And so when you saw that the lettuce, what you do is basically just broadcast, which means just throw a handful of lettuce seeds onto the prepared soil. And I use mixed greens, and you can see there’s arugula in there and kale and bok choy.
And then as they get big enough, you just keep thinning the ones between out, and then you do that with the lettuce. And there’s different colored lettuce and different kinds of lettuce. So it’s true, you never get a specific, like, quote, head of lettuce. But at any time, for the last, say, six weeks, we’ve had pretty much any green that we wanted and any kind of lettuce, all you did was thin. And eventually we just basically got sick of eating greens and lettuce. And so now it’s goat food. And the same thing with those carrots. So they’re basically just broadcast and then thinned a little bit.
I mean, you can put it on a grid if you want. And then you just thin as you go, and you’ll have tiny little carrots. And then they get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then eventually, as you thin them out, as they grow, they keep making that canopy which protects the soil, and you’re getting bigger and bigger carrots until at the end of it, there’s just big carrots like you would expect. And I found that that’s the best way to get the quickest harvest and the most productive harvest. You can see also the brassicas, the college cabbage, and collards, and broccoli and cauliflower, kohlrabi.
They’re pretty mature plants by now. So even in our climate, you know, they were started in February, even in an unheated greenhouse. And now the leaves are touching and they’re just ready to make mature, uh, you know, products like broccoli or cauliflower or kohlrabi. And then you pull that one out and then it gives room for the next one. And of course, that’s not the only way to do it, but I think it’s a good way to, to go about doing things. Okay, so let’s take a look at the next video. So these are seedlings, which I take outside.
These don’t look great, but that’s partly because the good ones I’ve already planted out. And so these are just kind of the leftovers. And there’s some winter squash and cucumbers and eggplant and okra. Yeah. So a little bit more about this. So not much to say there, just that these, like I said, like I said, are the leftover so they don’t look so great. But the good ones have already been planted out. So let’s move on to the next video here. So now this is a grove and just to say the timeframe. So we moved here at September ish, 2020.
And so. So this garden started in 2021. So this is the fourth year, I guess. So this was a field. Third year maybe. So this was a field just like the field out there, which is overgrown grasses. And now we have, you can see all these currants and gooseberries, and there’s two pawpaw trees. One’s not doing well. We’ll probably replace it. There’s three apple trees, two persimmon, aronia berries, saskatoons, an herb bed, and a cherry tree that unfortunately died. So we’re going to replace that with a lilac and. Yeah, I’ll talk more about how we did this in a minute.
And then these beds were laid out by a woman that we met who does sort of professional garden design. So we did it in sort of circular and spiral fashion. These two beds are all raspberries, red raspberries. I happen to really like red raspberries. You can see the new cat barn that we built, which is mostly Lucy’s home, because they didn’t like being with the goats, so we had to build them a new home. There you can see the strawberry bed, which our friend Gina weeded for us. And here’s another bed with some lingonberries and massive rhubarb, which is flowering, which we’re going to have to take the flower stalks off.
And here’s an asparagus bag, which we’ve been eating now for a couple weeks. And you can see some nice asparagus right here coming in, which we might even eat tonight. So just to say when I said about the technique that we used. And again, there’s some controversy and some people won’t like this, but seems to be working out pretty well, basically because we knew that we couldn’t really plant in this soil. And again, this was a field. So what we did was we in each of these little circles. So these are this a gooseberry and currants.
And you could see there was two pawpaw trees and apple trees. We marked out a layer of very rough, like tree mulch. It was basically just chopped up trees, very rough. And it was a layer, maybe a foot, uh, deep. And so we put we made the. The outline of the circle or the bed or the tree area, uh, however big that was going to be with that, uh, bark mulch or, it’s not bark, it’s just tree mulch, rough cuts of tree. And also what that did is suppress the weed growth. It’s not 100%, but it makes a big difference.
So that kills the weeds underneath it. And then we put another foot of compost and maybe another foot of topsoil, and then we would plant on top of that either the tree or the gooseberry or the aronia berries or the saskatoon or the persimmons or whatever else, and the raspberries and the strawberries. And then over time, like a hugel culture, it just, the bottom breaks down, and you can actually see that with all the worm growth. And even though there’s some drawbacks, like they say, it binds, it puts too much carbon and binds all the nitrogen which goes into breaking down the tree stuff.
What we saw is that the plants don’t do that well on top of the mulch. But at a certain point, especially the perennials, they seem to go down through the wood mulch and hit the subsoil, the clay soil underneath, which is a rich source of water and nutrients, and then they really take off. And then you get a pretty good growth in the first year or so and an even better growth in the subsequent years, which is what we saw last year with the raspberries. We had, like, something like 50 gallons of raspberries. And the reason we only had 50 gallons frozen was because I got sick of doing it and harvesting them.
And we’re still eating raspberries and strawberries from last year’s freezer. So it was a huge yield, and it was all done. Every bed in this garden was done. It was mapped out. And then this rough bark mulch was laid down on top, and then a thick layer of compost and soil, and then we planted on top of that, and you can see the abundance of worms decomposing the stuff underneath as we go. So let’s move on. So here we’re going to get into the more annual part, the vegetable garden part of the garden, vegetables and herbs.
So these are we, when we first, the first beds we made were on the perimeter, just so we could have a fence like a trellis, so you can see the peas growing up there. And Linda has been planting a bunch of different herbs, and we have. Comfrey, maybe I’ll stop. You could see the peas right there growing up along the fence. So we use the fence as a trellis. And again, this, even the beds along the perimeter were made with putting a rough layer of bark mulch. So we never actually dug into the soil here. We just put bark mulch and then compost and then some topsoil and then lots and lots of this rotted straw, which has even built up the soil even further.
And then we just planted the pea seeds in there early March. And you can see they’re now over a foot high and climbing up the trellis. And those are other herbs. There’s a ginseng and there’s sorrel and ladies mantle and has been planning a bunch of different herbs. And we have Comfrey, which I’ll talk about, which we make. Maybe I’ll stop as we go on this one. So Comfrey, I’m sure a lot of people know this, and Linda makes salves and stuff, but the main reason we use it is comfrey, which was actually outlawed by the FDA for causing cancer.
But the reason was because it stimulates, like, wound healing cell growth. So nobody has ever, as far as we know, gotten cancer from doing anything with Comfrey, but they just saw, oh, stimulate cell growth. Must be carcinogenic. So outlawed, but it’s an amazing plant growth stimulator. And so we have these three comfrey plants grown, you know, as far away from the usual plants as we can. And you can see even this early stage, and this is still very early for us, the abundance of the growth. And we basically just chop it off about halfway up the flowers and all and put it in a big bucket and fill it with water and leave it sit for somewhere between two and four weeks.
And it gets like really, really stinky. Uh, it was interesting that actually saw, uh, pumpkin once knocked the lid off and started drinking from the comfrey water, which I thought was weird. But anyways, he did it anyways, you get this really stinky, gelatinous, gooey stuff, which then you, we strain. Uh, and so you get this sort of comfrey compost tea liquid. And we put that into bottles and you mix like a quarter of a cup of that with a half a gallon of water. And we water the plants, especially tomatoes and peppers and just about everything with that two, three, four times a year.
And I think it makes a huge difference in the growth and in the stimulating the health of the plants. So thats one trick that anybody can use. Its basically just growing your own fertilizer. And for most people, just one comfrey plant out of the way somewhere would be enough fertilizer for your whole garden save you from buying fertilizer, things to add to the soil. Ill talk about that in a minute. Theres ladies mantle, which is a womans herb. And then you see this whole bed is devoted to potatoes and sweet potatoes and it’s got a few carrots in the beginning.
This whole bed is devoted to winter squash and pumpkin. So these were, those were seed potatoes that I just got from. I usually get things from either Johnny’s selected seeds or Baker Creek or turtle tree or occasionally from a local, you know, gardening store. And a friend gave us those sweet potato slips. And the goal is that should be enough potatoes and sweet potatoes for us to use for the entire year, which is storing them and maybe freeze drying them. And here on the right, you can see the, this whole bed is basically winter squash, like butternut and pumpkins.
And of course, we have to grow a lot of pumpkins here and different sorts of pumpkins, like jardale and Long island cheese and different colors and different flavors. And a lot of what we do is store those and we also dry some. And the other thing I do is just make butternut squash soup and freeze that. And we have that once or twice a week in the winter. So we have already made butternut squash. And so we’re really focusing on things. We grow and eat a lot and provide a good amount of our plant food. You can also see little nasturtium plants scattered in some of these beds, and they seem to help keep away the bugs and the plastic cloches I used to, just because these are really hot weather plants.
So this makes like a little greenhouse. And I would love to use glass ones. I don’t like using plastic, but they’re like $120 each, so there’s like 60 of them. And so that’s too much for me. So I, that’s why I use the plastic ones. And there’s a few care carrots at the end. This whole bed is, believe it or not, melons, because I really like watermelons, which is, again, the principle of growing what you like. And I like, I said I like watermelons and I give them away. And you can also see how thick the straw is.
This is not straw, actually. It’s rotted hay that was sitting out probably a year or maybe more. And it’s all stinky and worms growing in it. And we put a really thick bed over this whole bed in the fall. And then all I do is move, move it or move a little area, stick the plant in with my copper trowel, tack down the plastic cloche. Make sure the vent is open on the top. Water it with a little comfrey tea. Uh, and these are already growing really well. It’s hard to see, but you can see that plants look, they’re really looking very healthy underneath there.
And we’re really focusing this year on growing the things that we like to eat. You can see some more strawberries back there along the fence. And here you see a bed of corn. And I just. Yeah. Oh, let me just point out that in between the corn are just newly germinating lettuce plants, and I’ll explain why I do it like that in a minute and how. So again, you can see that the whole bed was straw. Then I just moved it apart and planted the corn seed. You could even do it by just moving individual little circles, but that seemed to be too much.
So I basically made a planning surface. There was no digging involved. I just smoothed it mostly with my hand. And then I planted two rows of corn. And then in between, I planted lettuce. And you could say, well, isn’t that too close? And I planted lettuce seeds in between the two rows of corn. But the reality is, is that we’re going to eat the lettuce when they’re pretty small, and they will be around the same size as the corn plant. And then by the time the lettuce is big enough to, say, compete with the corn, we will have eaten them and they’ll be gone or given them to the goats.
And so you end up getting a sort of a whole crop for free between the corn, which doesn’t disturb the corn plants at all, because you’re going to get rid of them before they get big enough to compete. And as far as I can see, everybody wins with that strategy. And again, we planted a whole bed of sweet corn, which we freeze and dry and use in soup and dishes throughout the winter. That helps to maximize your space. Same thing here. This bed is going to be all beans. These are pole beans, and those are bush beans there and in the middle.
Yeah. And so you can see, again, the beans are just starting to germinate. They’re on the outside two rows, and in the middle are the radishes. And the radishes will be gone by the time the beans get big enough to interfere with them. And again, the whole bed was thickly overlain with rotting hay. You can see this was last year’s potato bed, which are growing. So some of them I didn’t get out. So we’ll have to get rid of those but that’s a really good way to maximize your space. And if. Just think living canopy radishes.
So I’ll explain why I would put radishes in the middle of beans in a minute. And then we have a whole bed devoted to medicinal and pretty herbs and aesthetic herbs. There’s yarrow and a whole bunch of other things. Linda has really been organizing this to make it. Otherwise it wouldn’t look so beautiful. Here’s another bed of different herbs. I just want to point out the catnip, which is the place where pumpkin and I hang out. He really loves to roll around and smell and eat the catnip. And then you see, this is next bed. This winding bed is a mixture of different okra, which is under those cloches, and patty pan squash, tomatilla ground cherries.
There’s some fennel and radicchio. And then you see onions. And then you see two beds under the rime cloth of all brassicas, which is cabbage and kohlrabi, and two whole beds of that. And then some more flowers and I think herbs and sunflowers, which the goats love, along the fence. And I think that’s pretty much it. You can see the goat barn in the background. And the goats have three areas. You can see their play area in the back. So that thing with the roof on it is in a different space, which is bordered now by an electric fence.
So they can go out there. And they have rocks to climb on and, like, balance beams and a slide. The only one I’ve seen go down the slide is June bug. He’s the most adventurous. But they love to climb on the rocks, and they love to sleep in this, under the canopy and the shade. And then, as you’ll see, a little hard to see, probably. And then on to the left, you see a new electric fenced in area, so they have some room to roam and just be a little freer. Yeah, so we made a whole electric fence so they can eat the brambles and eat the leaves of the trees and just sort of hang out under, in the shade or out here and eat branches, etcetera.
And we have some chickens over there, too. And I think that’ll do it. And then I will explain some of the things, reasons I do this in the talk. Okay. And then the final one. So a very simple and cheap way to make a temporary sort of greenhouse or insect protection is just to use these wires. And you put one in and then bend it sort of like this. And then you can buy this cloth. And this is insect cloth. So it keeps the flea beetles away from the plants. You can see the brassicas growing there and over there it’s the same.
We just. You just make hoops with these and lay the cloth over it. One thing that you might not think about is I put these staples at the place of the hoop and a friend told me to do that so you don’t lose the staples and you don’t have to go looking for the staples when you pull them out. I used to just put them any old place and I could never find them. So this one is the same, except that’s more of a. It’s called Remay, which also warms up the area underneath. So it’s like a very small hot house or of thing.
So that’s a good way to protect your plants from certain insects and also to keep it a little warmer. Yeah, so a lot of people, you’ll see, use it. Use these remay or insect cloth to keep the. The bugs off the plant. And to keep it, you get about four degrees of protection and you don’t get such killing frosts if you do it with Remay. You can buy the rolls of it from Johnny’s selected seeds in Maine. And they also sell the wires. And it really just takes, you know, half an hour to set it up.
And it’s really good to roll up the cloth on the outside and then to tack it down with a staple. And like I said, I didn’t know this before, but to tack it down at the part where the wire goes, which makes it a lot easier to find. So you don’t spend all time looking for the staple and then end up stepping in it. When you walk around with bare feet, which we do. There’s a whole lot of other things I could say. One of the things that really surprised me with this garden, I think I’m done.
I can stop the share now. I remember going out there and there’s this big field, and we were wondering how to plant in all this clay. And so we got this idea to just build up, which seems to have worked well. We thought about putting bark mulch in between the rows so we wouldn’t have to mow. But that seemed like an extraordinary expense and also big hassle. And I remember asking a farmer friend of mine, well, you know, this is just going to be sort of nasty, like field stuff. It’s going to be hard to walk on, especially with bare feet.
He said, no, it’ll turn into lawn. And I said, how? There’s no. I. There was no way. I thought this was going to turn into a lawn. He said, just mow it every week. And so that’s what we did. And again, we used an electric mower. And I was. I’m shocked. But basically, without planting almost no grass seeds, there was a very few places that were really bare and muddy. And we threw a few down, a few seeds and covered it with a little bit of straw. Otherwise, it just was taking a field and mowing it week after week.
And eventually the only thing that lived, apparently, was the grass. And so that’s how we got what’s a very nice sort of grassy path in between. The problem with that, of course, is the grass starts to grow up into the beds. And so we actually have to do something called edging it, which is a big job. And actually, that’s one of the things that I don’t feel bad about hiring somebody to edge it and make clear borders. And then we put a really thick layer of. Of the hay in the borders so it hopefully doesn’t grow back for another year or two when we probably have to edge the whole thing all over again.
So there’s going to be a lot of ongoing maintenance. But, you know, that’s what gardening is all about. And, yeah, I don’t know if there’s. I’m sure I could say a lot more about where to get things again. The seeds all came from Johnny’s selected seeds, turtle tree and baker Creek. I get a few plants. If something doesn’t do well, like, I just bought a Jimmy Nardello pepper this morning. That’s probably the best pepper plant I’ve ever seen. I also like poblano, and I think it’s really important. And it almost goes without saying, uh, you gotta plant what you like because that’s gonna be what you’re eating.
And if you don’t like it and you just think, I should plant this, or you see a nice plant, but you really don’t want to eat it. Uh, the more you do it, the more you think we want to eat, um, certain amount of potatoes. If you eat potatoes, we eat a lot of winter squash and pumpkins. We make a lot of sauerkraut. I like kohlrabi. We freeze cauliflower, we freeze broccoli. It’s great to have in the winter, we use cauliflower instead of grains on dishes, you know, so you have cauliflower that’s baked in butter, and it’s really nice, and that’s how we do it.
So hope everybody enjoyed this. It’s a lot of fun. It’s some work, but it’s surprisingly less work than you would think. And thanks for listening and see you next week.
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