Making the Raised Beds

Now everyone needed raised beds. Well not everyone. I believe 1 or 2 families just wanted row gardening.

The majority of people were going to have wooden boards connected in a rectangle. It would be like a box with no top or bottom. I was at the Pennsylvania Association of Environmental Educators with a few classmates but my dad was there. His back was sore for a whole day. He said they had to construct the boxes, carry it down a hill and place it in the spot. And there were 180 of them, 3 for every plot. Each box was 16 feet by 4 feet. That's 64 sq. ft a box. The height was probably a half foot maybe more. Then we had to fill the 3 boxes with dirt. But even before that we had to pull out the weeds. I had chosen the middle bed with a medium amount of weeds. My mom's bed was really weedy so we covered the bottom in a tarp thing. I believe it was bio degradable but I'm not sure. It might not have been. My dad and I didn't have as many weeds so we opted out on this tarp material. Our community garden is right next to the place where all the leaf compost goes, so there are mounds and huge hills full of compost. We used that to fill our beds, about 12 wheelbarrows per bed. This was hard because the mounds were on the other side from our beds, and up a hill. Unlike other plots we filled our boxes almost to the brim. Then we realized that you can make the bed better for a plant by mixing in peat moss and such sandy fluffy material so that the soil isn't so hard for a plant's roots to breach through. It was about 2 bags to cover 1 box. We had to go to the garden twice that day to fill all the beds. In between the 3 beds there were walkways, which we covered with remaining tarp and wood chips. So by the end of the day there were three filled beds with two walkways, and a thin perimeter which made up our plot.                                

Here is what a bed of ours looked like.

Here is our walkway half finished next to two of our beds. The string you see on the right was the beginning of my square foot plotting. I already planted in this picture.

Here is part of the community garden with the beds filled.

The Experienced Dad

You might have seen from these past few blogs that my dad has a pretty good idea of what he's talking about with the garden. The reason for that is that when he was a child he lived on the property with the pond. If you remember I said it was rural so one summer I belive he went and worked with the farmer there in exchange for some vegetables to take home. That is how he became so experienced. He still calls himself an amateur which is true when you see some of the other gardeners beds at the community garden. But we're both learning fast

Square Foot Gardening

Whenever I pictured gardening, being the amateur I was, I pictured neat rows of plants with a hoe in hand. Okay maybe not the hoe, but I pictured this from
a)the various books like Peter Rabbit that I've read over the years and movies/ T.V shows.
b)From seeing conventional crops. That's different from a community garden because their crops are much bigger and are usually monocultures (1 type of crop). Also they use pesticides and fertilizers which help keep things tidy but in the long run are bad. Well, also in the short run.
   Anyway I was picturing this when my dad got a book from the library. All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.
  What is Square Foot Gardening? It is where you take 1 square foot of a bed and fill it with 1 type of vegetable. The number of plants per sq. foot depend on the plant size. For example you could have 16 carrots in 1 square foot, 1 squash in another. The number of plants per square foot could be 0.5,1,2,4,8,9,16. Square Foot Gardening works for all plants: fruits, vegetables, flowers, etc.
   The book provides more information on this plus many other facts and tips. The book is definitely something you should consider looking at. Another is What is Wrong with My Vegetable Garden? My family  thought we needed this before we even started. Talk about pessimists!  The book discussed the various pests and diseases and how to deal with it. It also had growing and regular facts about a lot of the common vegetables.
  Anyway getting back to Square Foot Gardening. There were some problems with this planting idea which I will mention in future blogs. The idea is a pretty good one though. It is supposed to be easier and give 5 times the harvest! That is because every part of the bed is used, unlike row gardening where there are walking paths in the rows. Though I was at first reluctant to the idea, my dad persuaded me to try it out. I've decided to do this more or less every year. In Square Foot Gardening you use raised beds: planks constructing a box with no top or bottom, which you then fill with dirt. Most of the people at the community garden used raised beds.

Seeds

       Now again I return to my garden. It seems every time I try to continue this story, other stories pop up.
       The beginning of my garden experiences was continued in Gentile's a fresh produce store. I've always known that Gentile's had many seeds so I knew I wanted to get my seeds here. You should have seen how many types there were for some vegetables. There were 8 types of beans! Every seed packet was $0.99 even though some were bulging like the peas and beans and others like the oregano and lettuce were so thin that it seemed there was nothing in there until you shook it, where you would be greeted by a pleasant rattle.
      I bought 16 seeds though some I couldn't find like onions, potatoes, and such bulbous roots. The thing was that these tubers don't have seeds in them. They can be started by planting small onions or the eyes of a potato (the black lumps). Had help from wiki about the onion; it turns out it bolts and sends seed heads up but there are none in the onion itself. So instead of waiting to get those vegetables I swapped for radishes and spinach. I then went around the store and found the prices.
      The herbs were pricey! $2.49 for 1/4 pound of basil! The rest was moderately priced. At least to me the inexperienced shopper. I couldn't find a couple of the vegetables so I'll come back in season. The crazy thing is, to a lot of people, everything is always in season! That's because of food coming halfway around the world. People have gotten used to that and have forgotten about "in season". Of course some vegetables like pumpkin aren't really needed in the spring so they're not bought, but I bet if there was a demand, pumpkins would appear any season. Anyway I thought I would have a savings. (My dad says profit sounds to industrial. True.)
       As we drove, I realised that one of the seed packets had hybrid on it. I looked at the rest of the packets. They were from the same company but didn't say hybrid. It just occurred to me I should have emailed the company to find out. I was feeling uneasy. To me this wasn't natural. Even to my teachers, they said that hybrids and greenhouses were natural. But I believe changing the way a plant lives is unnatural. I came to reluctantly change my mind about greenhouses, but hybrids... I don't know. My dad explained how most seeds sold must be hybrids, changed a little to be immune to some diseases or able to fight them off. He said Genetically Modified Organisms were very unnatural but hybrids weren't. Think about it. With GMO crops, scientists are changing the very being, DNA, of a living thing to be bigger. They're not breeding them which is what a hybrid does. They're changing the plant by itself. Breeding is natural in nature. Forced breeding may be not perfect but much better than GMO. Because of the fact I wasn't going to return a $0.99 packet, I used it, and it's actually not doing better or worse, I think.
       Here is a list of the seeds I bought.

•  Sweet Basil
• Top Crop Beans
• Carrot
• Cilantro Coriander
• Cucumber
• Lettuce- Salad Bowl
• Oregano
• Sweet Snap Peas
• Pepper
• Calabaza Pumpkin
• Radish- Early Scarlet Globe
• Spinach
• Squash- Zucchini
• Thyme
• Tomato- Early Giant
• Tomato- Red Cherry
• I also got sunflowers and zinnias though I didn't count it in my experiment.

A few had hybrid sounding names. I still got to find out.

A New Angle To My Animal Sketches

At my grandmother's I realised how difficult it was to sketch live wildlife, with it constantly moving. It was much harder than I thought. I decided that rather than sketching on site, if I could identify the animal than I could sketch it using pictures off the internet. My observation notes I could write when I saw the animal. It would let me see more animals, and would save more time. I would only be allowed to record a animal however only if I saw it.

Causes and Remedies

Here is a rough sketch of my grandmother's property.

So what really caused the disaster and how do we remedy it?
Here are the notes from my sketch book. They're only ideas, they might not work.
Causes:

• Grass Clippings, falling plant debris, feces, and dead matter.
• Lots of Nutrients 
• Aquifer (main supplier of water to pond) is dead. This causes less water
• Too many water plants
• Too warm (winter wasn't cold enough to kill algae.

Remedies

• Desludge Pond - NO  Too expensive
• Stop Cutting Grass Near Pond- YES 
• Pick Up Grass Clippings - NO Too hard or Too expensive (lawn mowers charge more to pick up)
• Riparian Zone (natural barrier of mainly vegetation which blocks bad runoff. Also will take nutrients)- YES  Might Spread Though. Find Non- Spreading Plants.
• Algae Eating Fish- MAYBE Can get too big and you need to take them out. Also you need a license.
• Nutrient Eating Plants Near Where Septic Water Comes Out- YES
• Fountain in Middle of Pond (Aeration is a way to get DO and will disrupt algae)- MAYBE Expensive, Electricity, and Do you need to Clean it out?
• Sprays and Such Methods- MAYBE Might kill beneficial plants and animals. Not natural. If natural use.
• Dig Back Small Outlet- MAYBE May lower pond levels but would get rid of nutrients and algae. Maybe if dig it so it loops around but goes through Riparian Zone again.

Before I had the idea of a Riparian Zone, I had come up with all these ideas from computers that would be expensive, so it seemed like we could do nothing. I had felt bad and said that my first job leading a restoration project and I had failed. My grandmother said I hadn't. Some things you just can't save, but  you can help them. So even if you can't save something in your neighborhood, or where you live, you can slow it down. You might not be able to stop the rain forest from being cut down, but who knows? Even if you can't, you can launch a campaign. Even if you don't have lots of time use some of your free time to do something, because if you don't sooner or later you'll have to. We'll all have to. So why not start now. The Earth still has everything we need to live, even if it's not a super comfortable life. We should keep it that way.

My grandmother said one time the pond was in this same state and had oil on the surface. She said it wasn't as bad as the current situation but she said, when the pond seemed to be gone, it just came back. She says she feels that the spring is gone this time, but I don't know. I'll guess I'll just see.

The Problem With Algae

When I saw what had happened to the pond I was aghast. My aunt was trying some things like putting in barley straw, but that seemed to have made it worse. Sadly, she also put in chemicals which I believe made it worse and better. Let me tell you a little about algae. Algae can be caused by huge amounts of nutrients in the water. These nutrients are made by grass cuttings, leaves, pretty much any decaying plant or animal matter, including feces. Algae is very bad for a pond besides being an eyesore. A little bit is good, for it provides shelter for animals, and some food. But excessive amounts is bad. Firstly it blocks sunlight from reaching plants and animals below so the temperature lowers. It also does not let air touch the water which is the major reason oxygen is in water. Though algae produces oxygen thru photosynthesis it takes oxygen at night. This is called respiration and depletes the water substantially of DO (dissolved oxygen. These two problems kill off the life. Plus, on the bottom of deep parts of the ocean are sludge and fish need special adaptations so that they don't sink in the mud. Is this a problem then for the fish in the pond? Maybe. So I was sure that it was a nutrient problem, but when I tested for nitrates it came out 0! What? Some explanations might be that I got this kit last December from my sister and it might be old. Also I never checked for phosphorous which is a lead cause in algae too. (Never had phosphate test strip). I don't really know.