Group 1's Organic Garden!

Welcome to Paul's backyard, where group one will host their organic garden!  Jackie, Paul, Laurel, and Maggie have been hard at work planning our garden.  As you can see in the pictures, there are three beds that appear to have hosted gardens before.  Bed one and bed two are 7 x 3 ft. Bed three is 6 x 3 ft and bed four is 5 x 7 ft.  Paul's yard is fenced in and sees varying amounts of sunlight throughout the day. The beds get as close as one foot to the wall.  We plan to take advantage of this when we grow tomatoes.  As the trees fill out, there will be more shade, but for now there is more than enough sunlight for the garden.  Another concern we have is the soil quality.  We have sent out a soil test and are awaiting the results.  We plan to transplant broccoli, tomatoes, and cabbage.  We will direct seed beans, radishes, okra, and sunflowers.  The radishes and okra will grow in the same bed, taking advantage of the inner cropping method.  We plan to plant the cabbage in the area that receives the most shade. With lots of planning, hard work, and a little luck, we're hoping that our garden will be a success!

THE APARTMENT CREW. you know it's possible!

THE APARTMENT CREW consists of Carli, Travis, and Lara Kate. As three young college students living away from home, we have discovered that all we have to work with for the gardens are at our personal apartments. Because we do not have a lot of space, we decided to give each person several things to grow based on the locations, weather conditions, and available spaces at each apartment. We will take advantage of containers, pots, and window boxes that we have used previously, gotten from available resources, or a reasonable price for our gardens. We get a lot of sun at two of the apartments where the tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, onions, and broccoli will be planted in pots and hanging baskets on the porch and inside climate controlled rooms. We will plant some of the herbs in the apartment that does not get a lot of sun, as well as in the shade at the other two apartments. The herbs include rosemary, lemon chives, dill, parsley, oregano, basil, thyme, and cilantro.

So far, we have purchased and gotten the containers ready. We have also picked out, distributed, and planted the seeds to see what all will come out first, and what other challenges that we are going to have to work with. We will try our best to keep up with everything, making adjustments as we go along. Our mission is to show that an apartment/dorm living college student can maintain a small garden for personal enjoyment. Who knows? Maybe this could end up saving the life of college students some money, time, unhealthy diets, and pollen distribution!!

First Blog, the beginning of a transformation.

Our group “THE CRAZY AWSOME THURSDAY GROUP…Yea,” Members are: Ginny, Will, Kelly, and Zack. We have chosen to rebuild and expand an existing garden at Wills house located of off Hargrove Rd E. Will had some success with the location but felt it was too shaded. To correct this we will be re-digging existing beds and shifting them further into the yard. This will keep the garden from being caught in the shade of a large pine tree.

The location of our garden works well for us because it is a situation we are familiar with. We are working with an average size back yard, with variable amounts of sunlight. Unlike a dorm or window box with limited space, we have plenty of room for composting projects, rain catching, several full beds, and a livable back yard. The area allows for the garden to be tucked away in between two sides of the house so that a lot of space in the backyard can still be used, as a regular yard; without fear of interfering with the beds.

One of the challenges we may face resides in the neighbor’s carport, yes, it is a basketball goal. Will says the kids next door have very poor hoop skills therefore; they are constantly hopping the fence into his backyard to catch their runaway ball. The helpless beds face very real danger from the stomping children feet that could damage the crops and potentially cause fatal soil compaction. The house also has rain gutters that empty toward the beds. We will correct this by redirecting and catching the rain water that flows from the drains so that it won’t wash our beds away. Hopefully we will be able to address all the problems that any person would face when planting a personal garden in their backyard. Through trial and error, we hope to provide useful tips and helpful tricks to others that want to create their own home garden. We will be addressing the neighbor’s basket ball problem; probably simply by putting up a mesh fence similar to Gene and Carrols. An additional challenge that may exist could be the overall condition of the soil. Once we take soil samples and find our results we will be able to address any problems or concerns the test presents.

The benefits of the area definitely outweigh the limitations. The main benefit is proximity. The location is not far from any of us so we are able to meet often and share the chores associated with everyday maintenance that could possibly fall squarely on Will’s shoulders if he lived far out of town. The space is also larger than what others have access to. Since Tuscaloosa is famous for having very thick packed clay for ground we will also be constructing a raised bed. We will compare the performance of the two and make a final judgment call at the end of the year which works better in this particular back yard and why.

Our Ultimate goal with this project is to take this

And transform it sustainably into this

Adam's Garden: Dig it, Tuscaloosa...

My wife and I are moving into a new house, and we have the green light on digging up the yard. Veggies, flowers...chickens? A goat? We'll make it happen.

When we went to see the house for the first time, all we could see was the yard. It was probably mid-day, so everything looked big and sunny. I saw a 50x20 space on the west side that could be fully planted...can you imagine the possibilities?

But after our last house and garden, I knew that tracking the sun mid-winter is trouble. Got sunlight? Wait until those trees fill out, and yer done for. So we've tried our best to take as many snap-shots, at as many different times of the day, while making predictions for the trees, to give us our best shot. I'm still worried about the difference between the sun at mid-day in February, and then in June, but there's only so much you can do.

After looking over our pictures, I realized there's more shade on the west side than I would have thought. So we reconsidered. We decided on two 23x4 ft east-west beds, starting a little further east, and as far north as possible. This would ensure long, south facing beds, which could be planted according to height and get the most sun possible. We also decided to plant a west-end bed for spring onions, garlic, beets, & etc (8x4, facing n-s) where mid-summer shade would come in handy, and an east-side bed (8x4), where, as it turns out, we seem to get a lot of sun (just to the right of that strange shrubbery).

That gives us roughly 240 sq. ft. of planting space (1/4 of the Whitehouse garden!).

The next step, of course, was to plan the garden. We factored in possible shade, and came up with (what I thought) was a brilliant list of veggies. The 8/4 on the west end is getting the onion business. Once they're out, we'll plant late-summer lettuce. The east side 8/4 is getting the 3-sisters--corn, beans and squash. And the middle. Well...tomatoes of course. And whatever else fits (eggplant, cucumbers, melon, herbs, brassicas...the list goes on.) We're going to plant intensively, instead of rows, so companion crops are vital.

So, once we committed, we dug. Emily measured out the spaces with string attached to nails, and we took turns forking, to aerate the soil. This is usually a bad thing--tilling expels vital gasses, like nitrogen--but because we're breaking new ground tilling is a must. We needed to break the ground to plant. This kind of tilling also breaks up the soil to help with tilth, and it allows it to dry out a bit after a heavy Alabama winter rainy season. Hopefully, if we do it right, we won't have to till again--we'll just fork in organic mater (like compost from the arboretum, or from our new compost pile! (more on that later)).

So...we've forked, and will probably till just before our first planting--maybe around March 15. We've also seeded our first plants (mostly lettuce and brassicas). We're probably a bit early, but it's hard to hold off. Emily and I have made a more comprehensive plan, which means pushing our next seeding back to March 4. It's hard to predict the last Tuscaloosa frost--we're going for St. Patty's day.

Capitol School Crew

Greetings from the students of Organic Farming II!

Our group, made up of six hep-cats by the names of Camille(myself), Justinn, Erica, Nicole, Andrew and Chance, has been blessed with the unique opportunity to start up an organic garden at the Capitol School, a small private school of grades K-12 located off of 28th Ave at the end of University Boulevard. The school consists of three adjacent buildings: a large preschool with a playground next door, and two smaller educational buildings.

Said garden will feature container-based planting, including several individual hanging plants and two large grounded terracotta pots. We will also be planting flowers directly into the ground.
There are several benefits that come along with choosing The Capitol School at our planting location!

Already present along the balcony roofs on either side of this building are six chains with hooks, waiting to be put to use.

We were lucky enough to have stumbled upon some small discarded containers with handles on the property, perfect for our plans to hang on either side of the building pictured above.

Also, beautiful discarded shutters on the property, ideal trellising for our cucumbers and tomatoes.

There is also an abundance of usable soil on the property.

Our flowers will go along the outside of the playground fence, located next to the preschool. These marigolds and sunflowers will be the only plants growing outside of containers.

Chance took soil samples from the land along the front of the picket fence and also in the wooded area outside of the metal gate and sent them out to the soil-testing facility at Auburn University. Results indicate that Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium levels are all adequate, and we have a neutral pH!

Pretty much the only negative aspect of attempting a garden at this school is the possibility of an abundance of shade, as the property features several giant trees (now bare, later surely fully foliaged). For this reason, we have chosen to place plants requireing high amounts of sunlight facing the Capitol Park, which is fairly tree-free and to the east.

As for composting, our group opted to test out an indoor vermicomposting setup. The location will be my (on-campus!) dormitory, either under my kitchen sink or in my room. After much research, and consideration of access to and cost of materials, we decided that a tiered system would be best, so that the worms can migrate out of the already composted material, and into the upper levels filled with kitchen scraps and bedding. In this way, we will also be able to catch the liquid gold that is worm tea, and use it to give our plants a boost!