Pittsburgh Garden Experiment

Hello Everybody,

After touring the Polish Hill Wilds and seeing the oppurtunities that exist for the urban gardener or designer I want to give a brief description of making and using a hugelkultur raised bed.

The basic idea is a deep layered bed composed of mostly woody debris, topped off with great stuff like leaves, straw, woodchips, manure, and or compost and soil.

With the abundance of nonpervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt, as well as invasive and spreading plants such as certain vines, knotweeds, and tree of heaven throughout urban environments, hugelkultur beds can turn problems into solutions.

A hugelkultur bed can be built on top of bare ground, concrete, gravel, or just about any other surface formidable to traditional gardening.

A hugelkultur bed can also make use of the abundant and under utilized invasive species, using them as the main ingredient in building rich fertile soil. These beds are basically a big rough compost pile topped with a medium to plant into.

The Process

Step 1:  Gather course woody debris like rotting logs, branches, twigs, and brush.  Apply these as the base layer of your future garden.  They take a long time to decompose, but are great for building complex soil biology, and do a great job of holding moisture on nonpervious surfaces.

Step 2: Gather and Apply a layer of finer organic material to fill in the spaces and gaps in the coarser materials.  This is where leaves, vines, straw, woodchips, and hay come into play.

*Optional* Add a layer of mulch innoculated with gourmet mushrooms...oysters are a good choice.

Step 3: Apply a couple inch thick layer of topsoil, compost, and or manure to create a nice planting medium, and top off/cover over the debris to aid decomposition.

*Optional* Topdress bed with mycoryhzal fungus innoculum...this aids plants in nutrient absorbtion and promotes extensive and healthy root systems.

Step 4: Seed and or transplant as usual, water heavily at first to speed decomposition, liming may be nessesary as woody material tends to be on the acidic side.

 

The hugelkultur bed tends to be somewhat disorderly and upon completing construction they should be relatively huge and bulky, up to 2 or 3ft tall.  As time passes the bed will settle and the once hard woody tissues will be converted into a rich dark humus that vegetables love.

Hope this sparks some urban creativity

Wiggy

Check out this video that I found on how to design a food forest.

 

The basic idea is to start with the natural processes of nature and manipulate them for permanent food production.  A food forest may take 5-10 years to become productive, but it is essentially a self-sustaining organism once planted. 

 

 - Food Forest Video -

 

Making seed balls or bombs is a great way to plant large areas with little input, and can be used with any kinds of seeds and for many purposes.  The basic idea is to roll little 1" balls of clay, compost, and seed and throw them on where you want them to grow.

My favorite way to do it is to select a "guild" of companion plants that will help eachother grow, and initially mix these seeds together.  For instance, lettuce, carrots, green onions, and radish's will all grow well together and prefer to grow in similiar conditions. Mix the seeds with clay and compost and roll into balls.  Seed balls are thrown out into the desired area...perhaps an old flower bed...and a light mulching can be applied.  Once the rain comes or the bed gets enough water the clay balls fall apart as seedlings emerge. 

 

Another option for seed balls is forming soil building guilds of plants and fungus that will nuture your specific soil.  Traditional cover crops such as clover and rye can be planted with seed balls, and peas and beans will help the soil and help feed people too.  More specific plants can be used to mine nutrients from the sub soil...stinging nettle for instance helps to mine calcium and iron from the subsoil, making it more available for neighboring plants.  Perennial rootsystems help to aerate soils and prevent compaction.  Beneficial mycorrhizal fungus can be mixed into the seed balls to help plants roots form and they provide extra water and complex nutrients that plants cannot process alone.  With a little research and a big enough bag of seed balls whole acres of plant communities can be established.

 

The Material Mix Options

1. Seeds, preferably beneficial guilds

2. Dry sifted clay

3. Compost (fresh goat, sheep, and rabbit manure works  great if you don't mind handling it)

4. Beneficial mycorrhizal fungus (optional but super beneficial)

5. Lime or other mineral additives to balance soil PH ( beneficial but optional)

6. Water

The Process

1. Mix equal parts seeds, clay, compost and anything else you're using

2. Mix water in until the mix can be rolled into 1" balls

3. Allow to dry until hardened

4. Look like a maniac throwing manure balls all over the neighbor

5. Wait

6. Wait

7. Rain

8. Be amazed at the pure potential of seed

Hey everyone,

Check out the Permaculture Institute @ http://www.permaculture.org.  They have a bunch of great information.

 

They also offer a PDF Permaculture Design Manual.  It's a great reference and FREE to download!

Hey All,

In a different post, Hugelkultur for Urban Conditions, I asked Wiggy if we could use Japanese Knotweed stalks to create a raised bed.  I thought his response deserved it's own post.  Here goes:

 

****Wiggy's Response on 07/31/09  ******

Yes, Jap. Knotweed (Fallopia japonica, Polygonum cuspidatum, Reynoutria japonica) seems an ideal species for building up soil.  It's listed in the worst 100 invasives list, but is really an underappreciated and under utilized plant. 

After studying invasives in school, and observing them daily with a permaculture mindset, I want to let everyone know invasives are not going to go back to where they came from, they've naturalized so well they can outcompete most native plants. Humans did this, Knotweed seed pods and branches were great packaging material for Asian markets. As soon as we put the first crate full of goods from Asia on a train we started planting knotweed in it's prefered riprarian habitat ( railroad cooridors). 

This plant is tough, growing in a wide range of soil PH's, and very salted soils, knotweed's roots can spread 32ft horizontally and 9ft deep from a single seed (goodluck digging it out), not to mention being capable of resprouting from a little bit of root cutting. I'd imagine the seed germinates amazing well with the smallest amount of soil and moisture.

The problem is the solution however, and our opinion of invasives is all about perspective.  The plant is a commercial source for resveratrol supplements, Hu Zhang root extract is a traditional Chinese medicinal treatment, along with being a source of emodin (a bowel movement regulator). The young spring stems pealed of leaves are a choice edible with a flavor like rhubarb, and I'm sure livestock would have no problem consuming the entire plant. Interesting also is it's potential as a good honeybee plant, being in the same family as buckwheat, it's flowers produce a nectar that bee's convert into a high quality monofloral honey.

The fast seasonal growth, hollow stem structure, and light woody texture make it ideal for composting, growing mushrooms, or launching diverse soil biology. Caution should be used to eliminate mature seeds before using it in composting or mulching applications, roots should also stay out of the beds and compost piles as they quickly resprout.

The method of control or elimination used by our lovely government agencies is the widespread spraying of heavy duty herbicide poisons (great for our drinking water and native plants).  We can either utilize knotweed positively, or waste lots of energy and money poisoning ourselves and what seems to be a very useful food, medicine, and mulch plant.

The future potential for utilizing this "Nasty Invasive" is unlimited and well suited to urban environments. I see future farmers using it as a keystone species in mushroom and composting operations, livestock forages, bee forages, and edible greens, along with it's current commercial use as a source of medicinal compounds.

Be creative and remember the problem is the solution.....and may feed many hungry mouths in Pittsburgh's future.

Isaac

 

Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture(growing fish) and hydroponics(growing plants in water).  These systems seem to fit together well for maximum productivity in your ponds or even in plastic barrels indoors.

This is a great resource for pond management and indoor fish farming.  It's called Faith.And.Sustainable.Technology, a non-profit organization which works to teach people how to grow their own food efficiently.

They have a ton of downloadable documents on topics like aquaculture and animal husbandry, .  There are plans for a fish farm which uses plastic barrels.  I have the barrels, I just need a place to put them!  Anyone with some greenhouse space?

 

I have had several people ask me about where to get rain barrels. I have two on my house, they are 133 gallons a piece, so I have about 266 gallons of rain water storage which can be used for house plants or the garden or simply to let out during drier weather. These rain barrels were installed by Nine Mile Run Watershed Association, which, since i am in the watershed, installed the first one for $100 and the second for $90. This is an amazingly good price.

Here is their website: http://www.ninemilerun.org/

 

Peace.

Troy

 

 

SPIN farming - grow commercially on under an acre.

This site was recommended to me by a fellow urban farmer.  Last night I bought the series and read through most of it. 

As far as I can tell it's a great guide to growing and marketing your produce.  It definitely will help me get a head start.

There's a lot of hype right now about soil biology. Here's a (very) brief summary of what I know.

Basically, healthy soil is made up of thousands of species of microbes. They can be broken down into bacteria, fungus, protozoa, and nematodes. Each has a specific role in the breakdown of organic matter and the overall health of the soil. Together they make up what's called the "soil food web."

Nutrients aren't available to the plant until they are broken down by bacteria and protozoans. Soil is also held together and protected by many species of fungus. The ratio of bacteria to fungus determines what type of plant can thrive there. Early in soil life, bacteria are hard at work breaking down organic matter and sequestering nutrients. As soil naturally develops into forests over hundreds of years, fungus creates structure in the soil and sequesters different nutrients. Plants such as vegetables require a bacteria to fungus ratio of roughly 1:1.

Think of chemicals as a communication tool between microbe species. A plant growing in the soil will send out sugars which attract a certain type of bacteria. Bacteria will cluster around the roots and be eaten by protozoa. The protozoa release the nutrients into the soil for absorption by the plant root. In this way, the plant asks for the correct nourishment, and the soil system is healthy enough to deliver.

Maintaining healthy soil is a delicate balance. The greater the active life in the soil, the easier it is to disrupt the balance. Certain populations of healthy nematodes and protozoa can be killed by a heavy rain. Healthy biological soil, however, has shown resiliency against disease, pests, drought, and flood in tests around the world.

Out of the hundreds-of-thousands of microbe species, only small percentage can be identified or grown in a lab. The best way to ensure that your soil is maintaining the correct levels is to use quality compost from a variety of quality sources. Compost can be applied to the soil or as a foliar spray. As microbe levels stabilize in the soil, less compost will be needed to maintain soil balance. Non-native species may die off after a few years though. The only way to tell right now is to have your soil biologically tested.

A conventional chemical analysis of nutrient content will only tell you what's currently available. It does not take into account the living aspect of the soil. The best way to check the biology of your compost or soil is to get it tested under a microscope by a trained eye.

 

Please comment or suggest good websites.

 

Hey All,

 

I'm currently reading Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway.  I think it's a perfect read for urban farmers.  It contains practical advice and a fresh look how to apply permaculture techniques to smaller properties.

In it, the author talks about "ecological gardening" as a way to get more out of our small, urban properties as well as re-stitch the ecological fabric of our farmland.

The PDC design manual is pretty thick, so it's nice to see a less technical version aimed for backyard gardeners.