Gardening this summer (2008) - what are you planting?

[PeakOilBoy]

Hi everyone.

In case you want some help planning your garden, I suggest heading over to GrowVeg.com - they have a free trial you can use to set up your entire garden.

I am wondering if anyone is going beyond the normal garden suspects like tomatoes and other easily available seeds - to do anything out of the ordinary.

- Is anyone planting grains? (Rye, buckwheat, etc.)
- Anyone cultivating mushrooms?
- What annuals are you planting VS perennials?

[john]

Hello,
The garden planner is cool, but in an energy constrained world good ole' books are your best bet. I'd suggest the following:
How to Grow More Vegetables The small space gardening bible. Sure doubling digging is work, but the end result is worth it!
The New Organic Grower A great reference on nutrients, crop rotation and growing year round even in the wintery north.
All New Square Foot Gardening For container gardeners or those with limited space.
Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times The antithesis of Jeavons, but well worth it if you grow in an arid region or with limited water resources.

As far as this years planting my list is too long. I have 4 varieties of tomatoes, 4 varieties of peppers. Head & leaf lettuce. Chard, carrots, radish. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage. Potatoes.

As far as out of the ordinary I'm experimenting with my own energy crops mostly to learn if I can grow them and to increase the amount of seed I have available for next year. I'm trying amaranth, sorghum and flax; however, finding space for all this limits me. I've not committed to digging up the entire yard, yet! My plan is primarily to collect the seeds, but I'll likely try and process the stalks for syrup and fiber. In Fall I'm looking to plant a winter cover crop.

I'm also making some of my landscaping edible or medicinal. I'm using blueberries as shrubs, horseradish, echinacea, and other perennial herbs as my flowers.

John

[PeakOilBoy]

Awesome John.

I agree on the books - we have plenty of them and I will gladly lend them out to my neighbors or let them use my living room as a library. Ultimately, I see understanding the dynamics of soil as the first step to learning how to get the most from your land.

Then there is getting things to grow, canning - all the fun stuff that can bring communities together.

[KBDuluthian]

One thing that we are doing differently is trying to find ways to extend the harvest. We live in northern Minnesota, and the season is short. We are building PVC trellises for our tomatoes and peas and we intend on covering these with heavy poly plastic in the fall and planting lettuce and spinach to see how long we can grow in these "hot houses." We also planted cattle beans for drying. If those do ok we'll expand to kidney beans and great northern beans.

[JT]

I've gotten off my lazy rear to see what is out there (here) in terms of converting acres of grass into something that does not cost money, and could be used for fuel instead. I live in a P.U.D. (Planned Unit Development) A somewhat failed idea of the 1980's where houses were grouped together on small personal lots, and the rest of the site was turned into common open space, which the PUD association took care of with dues. My neighborhood is very pretty looking, no fences and lots of open space and random patches of shrubbery. Mostly, we have a ton of green grass, which is the largest cost to maintain. The thought occured to me that one way to lower our landscape costs would be to dedicate a portion of some of these open spaces to some form of permaculture. Now that I've gotten on board with the Blume idea of making Ethanol, it raises an interesting opportunity.

We could convert the grass to crops which are optimal for ethanol production, thus both lowering our costs to maintain the development, and subsidizing the cost to produce ethanol, plus the waste could be used for fertilizer on the remaining grass (another large cost factor in our development; oil based fertilzer)

But, the issue will always be the resistance to any form of change. I love the idea, but getting it going, overcoming the lazy inertia already in place, is no simple task.