Blue Ridge Gardener

Click on link below to get a full screen slideshow of the example gardens at Garden Supply:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28215248@N04/sets/72157617297675457/show/

I ran across this article today ar Global Guerillas-

RC (Resilient Communities) Journal-Square Foot Gardening

Excerpts:

One of the most obvious and critical first steps toward community resilience (in tandem with ruthless debt reduction) is to start a garden.  This provides you with:

• Fresh, low cost, and high quality food during the growing season.
• The skills and the head start needed to deal with systemic breakdowns in the agricultural supply chain or rapid price inflation of foodstuffs.
• Income potential/community connection through your local farmer’s market.

What would be interesting is to do an ROI calculation on this method.  Essentially, compare the investments in time/money etc. vs. the output (and the equivalent cost in food from grocery stores).   Given the ease of installation, almost zero reliance on tools, and low mx requirements.. I suspect it would do very well.   This method also looks fairly interesting for lawn gardening entrepreneurs (as in, everyone currently selling lawn mowing services should also be offering low cost garden services).

Compliments of the Old Farmer’s Almanac…

–weather saying from New Jersey

The heat broke today.  The high got up to about 81 and the low tonight will be around 55.  No moisture on the horizon, but the evening is gorgeous here in WNC.

I spent a little while in the garden after dinner (which included potatoes, onion, garlic and zucchini from the backyard).

A few things that got done:

• Planted a square of beans.  Every square in the SFG boxes has something in it at the moment.  The lettuce in three squares has been doing very well.  I have been surprised at how heat tolerant that the spring lettuces have been.  No signs of bolting.
• Watered the SFG boxes–they will get watered again in the morning, but the plants will have a some moisture through the night.
• Sprayed the squash and zucchini with Neem Oil.  I am trying to keep various pests at bay, especially vine borers.
• Spruced up throughout the garden and just enjoyed the cooler evening looking at all the growth taking place. There will be several zucchini and squash ready to pick tomorrow, there is a whole patch of turnips ready to be picked over, and the wildflower beds are going crazy.