Using sound judgment to be more self-reliant.
Often when people start talking about integrating a garden or other food crops into the landscape, the design ideas still tend to focus on two dimensional diagrams. How many fruit or veggie plants can I fit per square foot? While there's nothing wrong with this per se, it means you're missing out on some great opportunities to optimize growing space you might not even realize that you have.
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Small gardens have seen big growth in recent years. From rooftop gardens to urban homesteads, people are taking back the control of their food supply by planting gardens. Through creative gardening techniques, people are growing enough food to sustain their families and have enough left over to sell and generate an income on less than 1/10 of an acre, producing high yields in small spaces.
If you are like me, you don’t have the luxury of living on a farm or owning acreage, but that shouldn’t stop you from growing your own food.
Here are ten tips to help you grow more food in less space. [Read more…]
We grow pole beans because green beans are my boys favorite vegetable, and growing up instead of out gives us more beans in less space. We grow quite a few – two double rows of pole beans about 5-6 feet tall and 15 feet long. This provides our family of four (with two teenage boys) with enough beans for fresh eating, canning and freezing, plus extra to swap with the neighbors once we have enough preserved.
I haven't weighed out how much we produce, but once the season gets rolling our vines are generally productive until frost. We save some seed from year to year, so we've ended up with a pole bean that's well suited to our area. In this post I'm going to share some of my tips for growing abundant pole beans that are easy to pick, my favorite bean trellis set up, my favorite pole bean varieties, and seed saving basics. [Read more…]
When it comes to growing potatoes, many people are reluctant to dig up potatoes at harvest time. Planting potatoes in potato towers is an excellent alternative growing system to avoid having to dig up your potatoes (and risk injuring the potatoes in the process). [Read more…]
This year I've been experimenting with tomatoes in containers in the greenhouse, and was wondering how to build a tomato trellis that I could move with the containers. My standard tomato trellis option using pounded in posts was not going to work. While I was thinking, I got an email from Dominic of Better Bilt Products, offering to send me some of their Vine Spine™ garden trellises to try out in the garden – plus a set for a lucky reader. Here's my take on why the Vine Spine™ is the best all-purpose garden trellis I've seen to date. [Read more…]
