Garden
General Data
- Last Frost Date: May 13
- First Frost Date: Sept. 30
- Zone: 6
- Garden Calendar
Resources
- http://www.therustedgarden.blogspot.com/
- http://www.familyhandyman.com/DIY-Projects/Outdoor-Projects/Yard/Planters---Containers/build-your-own-self-watering-planter/View-All
Logs
- 2020 Garden Log
- 2019 Garden Log
- 2018 Garden Log
- 2016 Garden Log
- 2015 Garden Log
- 2014 Garden Log
- 2013 Garden Log
- 2012 Garden Log
- 2011 Garden Log
- 2010 Garden Log
Plants
- 5/5 Roma Tomatoes: The classic garden plant for a reason. Canned tomatoes have bpa, fresh tomatoes are expensive. Growing is easy.
- 2/5 Onions: I haven't had good luck, but if I could grow them I might bump this up to a 3 or 4. Problem is they are cheap to buy and they keep well.
- 4/5 Soybeans: These are cheap to buy dried. But when I grow them, they are delicious as edamame and they're pretty easy to grow.
- 2/5 Garlic: almost the same as onion
- 2/5 Rutabaga: same as onion, though I would like to figure out how to make saurkraut from the leaves
- 4/5 Carrots: Once they're established, they grow easily if they don't have worms. And they're delicious.
- ??? Raspberries
- ??? Apples
Goals
The long term objective is to grow a significant portion of our food. But that will not be feasible for a while. Eventually I will buy land for Coltend and one of the the first things I will do is start gardening.
For now, the goal is to grow some useful foods and learn from the experience.
I believe we will stay in our current home for at least another 10 years, maybe more. Eventually, I'd like to convert more of the land to production. I'm not sure how much I can really do, but I should be able to at least triple what I have.
I should also be able to go back to doing pots on the roof at some point. Though I don't want to deal with the drip irrigation. I could also build a roof over the porch area and put more plants up there.
From a cost standpoint, anything that returns 1/20th of it's value is a win. But since gardens are unreliable, I want to shoot for something more like 1/10th. One wall 4' garden bed wall costs about $8, add the cost of the underlay for wicking and some chicken wire fence and call it $10. Running long rows, say 16ft means 10 sections per bed, or about $100 to build a bed. So it would need to produce $10 in vegetables to be "productive". I should also take the cost of the land into account, but the areas I'm looking at the cost is pennies per sq ft.
Sim
I wrote a simulator a while ago that evolved a garden layout from random mutations. I should take another crack at that. Update so that it values less wall area.
Unresearched
- wheat
- oats
- rice
- corn
- tea
- nuts(?)
- blueberries
- raspberries
- apples
- lettuces
- legumes
- garbanzo
- kidney
- pinto
- peas
- red lentils
- herbs
- basil
- dill
- peppers
- cayenne
- chili
- bell