Will and others,

To grow fruit trees nearer each other and in the same space as a veggie garden you espalier them. This sounds scary and fussy, but is not. We have about 30 espaliered fruit trees in the border around our veggie garden, in Wisconsin. Briefly, an espalier is a fruit tree that is trained on wires on a fence or wall, rather like a grape vine. it is kept in a flat plane and not allowed to grow above ,say, 7 feet. This makes for much easier care and harvesting. The crops are still large once the trees have matured but not overwhelming. The pruning and training takes about a half hour per tree per year. yield, last year our Reliance peach bore about 150 peaches. Most of our trees are still young and just coming into bearing but this gives an idea what you can get from a single espaliered tree. We grow European pears, apples, peaches, nectarines, apricots, cherries, Japanese plums and European plums, plus blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, grapes and both red and black raspberries. All in the 2 foot deep border bed surrounding the veggie garden.

Do not over fertilize. This weaker growth can attract bugs and diseases. We planted apples in our first planting but have not added more. They need more anti-bug care than any other fruit ,at least here in Wisconsin. the others have needed nothing but water and some modest care.

Good article!

A lot of beginners plant fruit trees too close together;good results depend on each tree recieving adequate sun , preferably full sun, from all sides.It has been my experience that most newbies seriously underestimate the importance of PLENTY of sun;nothing much can be expected to do well in the shade.

Larger trees need to be pruned to a haystack or Christmas tree shape, and have sufficient space around them to manevuer with the necessary ladder when harvesting.This takes a lot more space than you would guess.

Sometimes you can grow a cool season crop such as kale and get a decent yield in partial shade in hot weather so long as the crop gets at least a few hours of direct sun.But in general yields of most crops fall off faster than you would believe as the amount of shade increases and the hours of full sun decrease.

One strategy that works very well for homeowners is to grow some crops in movable containers.I use heavy plastic drums sawed off about fifteen inches high with a hand hole cut into opposite sides with about ten to twelve inches of soil to raise herbs for our own use. Two adults can easily move one as needed to keep it in a sunny spot through the growing season.I didn't lose any perennial herbs to the nasty winter as I was easily able to move the tubs inside .

Most of my nieghbors who don't farm or have regular gardens have a few tomatos and peppers, etc, growing in such drums and get truly excellent results.

I reccomend that folks who are not already well acquainted with ladders and used to climbing stick to fruit trees that can be harvested with no more than a short step ladder at the most;lots of experienced pickers suffer serious injuries.My next door nieghbor is crippled up for life as a result of a fall suffered picking apples-and he had many years experience.

The risk is excessive in relation to the payoff if you have no experience and only a couple of large trees.

Don't be fooled by a few years of warm winters-it's one thing to lose a few tomato plants to a late frost or freeze;replacing them is easy.It's another to wait for Fruit and nut trees that winter kill to grow back.

We lost a bunch of new peach trees this last winter to winter kill even though we have been growing peaches in the same place for fifty years.We saved a few by mulching heavily and wrapping them up in burlap and plastic but by the time we realized how bad the weather situation was, it was too late and too nasty to do much to save the little trees.

As a practical matter, it might be better for most folks with jobs,kids, and commutes to seriously consider the low labor choices first; for example blueberries are a lot easier on the back and knees than strawberries, and they are much less time consuming.

I have done espalier and another method to keep trees short and compact that involves top pruning in the summer (keeps height down without causing lower buds to break) and thinning in the winter (allows plenty of light to get through to branches being kept). You need to start this process right after getting the trees into the ground by establishing a growth frame where you keep and train only 4-5 main stems in a candelabra or modified leader structure (depends on species and the shape of the young tree). I would push stems apart to train for more spreading growth using thin slats of wood with notches cut at both ends.

This is somewhat similar to espalier, only you let the trees have a circular canopy that is no more than 7 ft high. It allows for tighter spacing in the yard, such as 10 ft between trees.

One problem with short trees and pruning systems like espalier is that the fruits are more likely to have their skin burned if the sun is particularly fierce.

Spacing of fruit and nut trees will depend on the cultivars to be planted and the type of planting arrangement. As you will see in the next post, spacing of apples depends upon whether they are freestanding or in intensive arrangements such as espalier, tall spindle, super spindle, etc. Nut trees tend to be planted primarily as freestanding, so their spacing remain rather steady (for each type).

You may want to consider your statement "We have an eventual goal of not one single plant in the yard that doesn't contibute to the food/medicine of the household in some way." from another perspective. Such a landscape will be difficult to keep fertile over time without soil amendments. The permaculture approach would be to include supportive plants in the landscape even it you may not be eating them. For example, we also live in the Northwest and are interspersing native Red Alders and some Red Maples into our fruit and nut groves. These provide nitrogen fixing and mineral dispersement through roots and leaf drop. We have several acres and so can accommodate these large trees. For a smaller space there are many more compact alternatives, such as seeding Red Clover under a tree to help fix nitrogen, or consider grey water and humanure systems for mineral supplementation. Edible Forest Gardening http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/ is something that can have potential for human sustenance in almost any yard, but a guiding principle might be to design it to be as self renewing as a natural ecosystem. That means looking for and encouraging beneficial interdependencies, even if you can't eat everything directly.

I have resigned myself to having to give up peaches/nectarines, the fancy fungicides that can keep this pretty little tree going are just not a sustainable option.

Actually, the best treatment for leaf curl is old-fashioned dormant spraying. (Bordeaux mixture is the usual.) Two applications during the winter is recommended. Since it's in the winter, it's less likely to affect desirable critters. (If it's so bad that it's killed a tree already, you're probably in the wrong climate zone for peaches.)

Borers are a lot harder to deal with.

I believe that is "canker."

The goop-oozing disease is most likely a bacterial blight. We get one here called "shot hole disease", in addition to the ooze it looks like the leaves have caught a blast from a shotgun. It came in from a neighbor's ornamental weeping cherry. As far as I'm aware, there's no cure once a tree is infected. I have seen recommended the use of copper based fungicide as a preventative spray; but copper is a nasty toxic that can build up in the soil.

This is part of our self-teaching here; we dig up all the info we can and then try it. If it fails, we might give it one more try, if it fails again, forget it. Anything that isn't naturally tough enough to endure the wet cold conditions we have here, we refuse to keep limping along with fungicides and such. If nothing else, the feral blackberries always endure :)

Unfortunately we seem to lack "plant doctors" that can accurately diagnose these diseases (seems like a great business opportunity for unemployed biologists), so you just have to investigate on your own. One possibility: a fungal infection. If your observations support this hypothesis, please investigate Lime Sulfur as a possible remedy, which is on the Allowables list and the fruit can be harvested a day after application. I have had great success in treating "oozing goop" (sap) from various fruit trees using a high-concentrated lime sulfur sprayed directly onto the woody parts only.

I love cherries, but because of diseases and bird damage, I've held off planting my own. There are so many other excellent fruits that require less care that I demurred on cherries for now.

Would you build raised beds with treated lumber?
Growing a food plant in a tire strikes me as very foolish.

Yes, about half of our plantings (100+ trees/shrubs/vines) are from Edible Landscaping, as we are not that far away (and transport miles factor into our decision). I've had a few discussions with Michael, and happened to visit one Sunday morning when the International Plant Propagation Society (IPPS) dropped in, so we joined in on the $100 tour.

We'll be talking about a lot of interesting fruits and nuts in the coming article (including the ones you named). Speaking of mulberry, we have two Chinese mulberry (Che) from EL, and the fruit is succulent. Also growing kiwi.

There are other suppliers as well, which we will address in future articles.

(dup)

(dup)

Homeowner Assoc rules, grrrrr! We are supposed to be limited to 10 x 10 feet for veggies. But we discovered an advantage to the general ignorance- none of our neighbors know what chickweed looks like! And we got such compliments on "those pretty plants with the lovely little flowers"- potatoes! Go go guerilla gardening!

I second the recommendation of "Seed to Seed" by Ashworth. Heirloom varieties, yes; you can plant the seed of a hybrid but what you get the next generation looks nothing like the parent at all. All the hidden genes of the grandparents come out. With heirlooms all the "grandparents" were the same to start with, so no worries.

There was this hippie kind of guy, Chris Nyerges, who also wrote a fairly good book about edible weeds. "Guide to Wild Foods and Useful Plants". Includes stuff like soap-from-plants and sewing-thread-from-plants.

Your third point is an especially good one. A couple of years ago, an old cookbook fell into my hands, containing many recipes making use of wild plants/weeds. I have to admit that I was not interested in it from a sustainability standpoint, but rather from a pure culinary perspective. Since then, I am off to regular scavenging trips to stock my kitchen. Unfortunately, though, I do not have a garden at the moment and can't grow more than a handful of herbs on my windowsill.

Thanks - this has become my desktop background pic of the week. :)

Yes, there are a number of food pyramid models, and one should look them over and use the one that best suits their needs.

I have 2 jujubee from Edible Landscaping that seem to be on different rootstocks. The So doesn't sucker and seems to be capable of sending roots 50 ft deep, as a friend from China described. The Li sends up suckers, and I have managed to yank a few and put them in pots for rootstock. Nothing wrong with that. The roots are numerous, extremely long, fine like pasta, and fleshy. The suckers are green and fleshy, whether they come from the trunk or out of the ground.

I think a formidable hedge could be made from jujubee rootstock, especially along the curb on a hot street where it would thrive in the scorching heat.

I have great success with delicious pears and sour cherries using *zero* spray. Peaches get occasional lime sulfur only after extended rain events. Keeping the grounds clean (i.e. allowing deer access to forage fallen fruit for brief periods) and pruning for disease resistance (i.e. ventilating center of peach trees) are some methods to avoid spraying. The more you spray, the more you need to spray.
Also, the local Wegmans market offers dandelion greens in the fresh vegetable section, which is very encouraging.

A hearty double ditto there , Falcon

If the audience is beginners , you couldn't be more right.

That's why I mentioneed earlier that low labor crops shoi;d be considered first.

For those of us willing and perhaps even eager to eat like our forebearers did, there is a good to excellent chance they can grow some tree fruits at least without much of anything in the line of chemical inputs.

Thre are lots of old apple trees around here that bear plenty of good edible apples, apples that taste great and store well;but they aren't pretty apples.

W e don't even know the names of them anymore but you can find one around lots of old houses or home places. A cutting and a little grafting and you have an ornery ugly but bullet proof apple tree and you even stand a pretty good chance digging up a seedling from nearby of getting a good tree.Such a tree might bear for sixty years or possibly even longer.

This is well worth the time and effort involved for those who have ample space and can afford the gamble; nothing is at risk except the loss of use of the spot where the tree is planted.

The same applies to a degree to other trees such as pears and cherries but the opportunites to find them for free are much morelimited, at least in my area.

It seems that some of us have been at this so long that we have forgotten that not everyone we talk to are jaded green thumbs. So you are right to think about this in the fashion that you did. But that being said, nuts have good uses and should be added to people's diets again. Fruits that can be grown in your areas that you might like, taste test fresh kinds from the store to see if you like them, (never eaten a pear? I was surprised that some people don't even know what they are) then try to grow them in your yard.

My parents grew up in the depression and I have had exposure to the purslanes and dandelion greens and all kinds of other plants. I am 46 and they are 74 and 80. So there is a generational gap.

What we are seeing is the results of a food desert in American Culture now. If half of your foods are grown on Agri-farms and processed before you see it, you have no clue what fresh tastes like. And you have maybe 200 kinds of fresh plants in the green isles of the best stores. It is a desert compared to the number of things you will find in local markets around the world. The USA mindset which has been tagged as the BEST way of doing business is to slice out the oddities and push the single things that plant seed makers and Business interests can control. Monocultures are a big bad thing, that modern farming has pushed, and it limits your choices and limits your ability to try the things your parents and grandparents had in their diets.

As we see more people from over there, come over here, we are seeing local shops open up with odd plants from the old world. I have always been interested in other cultures. Dad was in the Air Force so I was exposed to all kinds of people living on military bases in other countries. And my dad being a Chef by training, along with several other schools he has went too, High presure Boiler operator, Cabinet making, car repair, Hard line Phone repair, plumbing, electrical, radio repair, generally he can fix most things in anyone's house or yard. But his overall learn everything you can about everything you can, has pushed me toward doing the same thing.

So I have a vast food background, and I have tried foods that most americans have never heard of, unless they come from that culture, or eat their foods.

Sure grow the standards, but 500 pounds of potatoes and 500 pounds of tomatoes would not be a great way to feed your family every year.

Grow a lot of variety, grow things you have never tried growing in test plots, grow more than you need. If you have a wide variety of things growing and half of them die for whatever reason you still have something to eat.

If you have everything come in and you have tons of stuff more than you can use, give it to nieghbors, friends, local food pantries, the needy folks in your area, sell it or something just don't waste your extra.

It is a learning process that will never end, enjoy the trip, and by all means start small, and be prepared to grow in all directions. If you get the green thumb bug, you'll have a great hobby that will last a lifetime.

Hugs from Arkansas,
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

"Most fruit is *very* difficult to grow without major chemicals"

If you step back and consider this statement, I think you'll agree that fruit trees grew just fine all by themselves for millions of years.

The problems have started coming in with human expectations of yield, quality and appearance. "Wild" fruit varieties are very hardy. Years of selective breeding for certain characteristics e.g. color have contributed to some varieties being less pest-resistant, and needing continued pesticide application - granted, there are also some that have been bred for more resistance.

Nevertheless, the biggest challenge we have today is the image of the "perfect" supermarket fruit. Large, colorful, shiny and blemish-free, and suitable for cold-storage. Often rather tasteless.

The real truth of growing fruits in the future will be in learning to "accept" fruits that have a bit of scab, or the odd worm-hole or bird-peck as perfectly edible if you just cut off the "bad" bit.

Instead of planting one of the half-dozen "popular" varieties, we will learn to rediscover varieties that are less fussy and more tolerant of local conditions.

Another thing to consider is that diseases and pests often attacks weaker, unhealthy plants. If a certain plant is consistently doing badly and getting plagued by pests, better to remove it and replace it with an alternative, or a healthy plant.

Also, consider that missing elements in soil could be a cause of the issues - maybe the soil can be amended to improve conditions, maybe not.

You live in Arkansas?

I live in North Little Rock,

Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.
Hugs from Arkansas

I had good luck with low bush blueberries mixing about 1/3 peat moss, cheap bagged compost, bagged topsoil, and some bagged manure. The cheaper compost and soil has lots of white sand. The peat moss and sand recreate the loamy sand of the coast.

We've had good results with both blueberry (required soil amendments) and serviceberry. Indeed, the serviceberry is ripening now, and the blueberries are just beginning to turn. I find serviceberries to be a bit more flavorful than blueberries.

-Please advise me on how the future will unfold.-

For you?

I see pot plants in your future.

Arthor, Ignore the pot plant comment.

But don't ignore potted plants. Do you live of the Boat full time? If you do, you can get an extra holding tank for more water, and set up a small recycling system so that your grey water from your sinks and your head go into the tank, if you set it up with composting in mind. depending on your boat size you can just direct the sink's flow to the extra holding tank, and use that water to water your plants. You can do all sorts of things, but I'd really need to know what size your boat is and stuff like that, so send me Email and we can talk about it.

I got bitten by the boat bug early in life, and though I only know a bit about sailing, I love boats, and used to do designs for them before I was into Landscape Architecture. Love the sea and all that is in it. In fact I love pretty much everything, and people too. Even though people can be mean and cruel I still love them.

I only know what is not going to happen in the future. I know that the future is not for us to know, we can only guess at it, we can't decide right now that in 14 years Joey FernGully the 3rd will walk into the bar and grill on second ave in Jellyville, which used to be Benton Arkansas, (they renamed it after the tornado leveled the whole town 4 years before) they called it Jellyville, because of the new Jellifish Packing plant that was set up to feed the people of America, the only species of edible fish(jelli) in the oceans. And they got so good at making Jellifish taste better and in so many different ways they named the new town Jellyville in honor of the new way of doing things.

See I just created a plausible future, but we can't know it, and I could create it if I really had the time and money to do so. Just level the town, pay off everyone and rename the town that I would build Jellyville and then do whatever I said I'd do in the story.

But knowing the future is not something I worry about much. I deal with things as they come my way, I worry about as little as I can. I do a lot of Praying, but I worry about as little as I can. Worry causes stress, stress causes ill health, and ill health causes suffering. Why suffer if you don't have too.

So lets get together and talk about your boat and what we can do to better secure it for your future. ceojr1963@ Yahoo.com

Hugs,
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

We can't create a pattern for successful civilization. We've run out the clock and due to the economic situation and looming peak oil. We lack both the capital and the energy to transform the world according to new urbanist ideals. And there is no consensus on the part of the public to even attempt this. The public is busy chanting "drill, baby, drill" and denying global warming!

That's why even Kunstler has been losing faith in new urbanism. Not because he doesn't think it's the right thing to do, but because the odds of it being able to take place have receded into the horizon. And just about everyone has written off top-down solutions as a whole to mitigate collapse! (People like Heinberg are still at it, but not because he really thinks it's gonna happen.)

So where does that leave things? It leaves us to "muddle through" as John Michael Greer says. That means individual land ownership will be key.

I gave some fellow and his wife a tour of the the yard - they'd met when she was in the peace corp and he'd returned with her from Turkministan. He said my yard reminded his of home in Turkministan with its fruit trees and scattered vegetables. These people aren't growing fescue in their yards. And in many regions, the outlying areas are more arid pasture than fields.

I suspect quite a few of the houses in those villages have - or had - kitchen gardens in back. Probably not very many fruit trees - not enough room. Those mostly were in orchards surrounding the villages. There would also be forests not far away, and those would have a lot of nut trees and berry bushes in them, in which villagers would forage.

Regarding the comment: "Suburbia-with-fruit-trees pattern is a dead end"

To the contrary, suburbia-with-fruit-trees pattern is a hopeful beginning!

In a post-automobile landscape, suburban towns may contract around a core (or cores) as the inhabitants discover and reclaim useful spaces and abandon others. This process could begin today, as the effects of inflation, offshoring, massive unemployment, banksterism and debt force suburbanites to seek alternate arrangements.

Local zoning laws have been, and will continue to become, the greatest impediment to transforming suburbia into a walkable, human scaled, lower energy living arrangement.

The wonderful town-farm pictures above are totally and entirely illegal in the US because they do not conform to the specifications set by the military (how are tanks supposed to navigate those narrow streets?) and corporate planners (the potential for lawn mover sales is abysmal in these little towns). Suburbia was designed for *consumption* and *consumption ONLY*. Productive activity at any level, whether that be planting a potato or selling homemade applesauce out of a garage, is simply prohibited based on a contrived list of poor excuses: health and safety, vanity, congestion, noise, trash, and crime.

Suburbia is a rich vein of raw materials waiting for the hands and tools of the imaginative and purposeful. Consider first all the material and potential energies stored in the suburban architecture - large glass windows, bricks, lumber, steel, gravel - all available for refactoring and repurposing. Suburbian inhabitants can digest their own structures, either whole or in part, to build community greenhouses, graineries, stables, barns, dehydration and canning facilities, dry storage - you name it. The soils around suburbia can also be reclaimed and improved. (A retired local farmer-turned-builder told me that he used to till drywall scrap into the soil as a wonderful conditioner.)

As for your points about destinations and the means of travel: by virtue of the walkable community, single family detached homes can transform into small grocery stores, barber shops, butchers, hardware and used good stores, goldsmith shops (necessary for local currency), small scale schools and vocational training, music stores - in short, everything that was destroyed when cheap oil brought the Walmart to town. These activities can and should exist today, except for the artificial impediments enforced by HOAs and land use boards, violations of which ultimately resort to armed intervention, fines and prison.

Expressed rights required to transform suburbia will most likely not be gifted by decree of a wise and enlightened leadership, nor won in the costly, wasteful and arbitrary venue of the judicial system. Market forces are already signaling the true value of the existing suburban arrangement, which is exactly scrap value. Implicit rights to grow, trade, and shopkeep will increase as suburbia decays and homes abandoned, and the tax base required to support the bureaucratic monkeys evaporates.

These goals are certainly possible, but for reasons expressed so well by Jim Kunstler, threaten the current adult generation of home-value obsessed, media entranced, automobile fetished suburbanites. But let us see what the next generation of young people can do, assuming they somehow free themselves from the tyranny of "national debt to the twelfth-power" and War Without End bequeathed by their parents.

Hope for post-Peak Oil suburbia remains high if the American spirit of entrepreneurship and hardwork, free markets, and Constitutional Rights prevail. Let's get it done, one tomato and one chicken at a time.

"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few."
- Dickinson

A lot of such places in the pictures do have gardens, berry patches and espaliered fruit trees, also byres, cowsheds, chickens and manure piles. I often had to get out of the way (in my jeep, in the 80's, in industrialized West Germany) of the village cows coming home in the evening. I have no idea what the economic arrangement was, but one guy was in charge of bringing the cows back from where ever they been grazing and dropping each off at the proper residence.

The tight villages surrounded by fields in parts of Europe seem to be a shadow of medieval town planning and social arrangements. Other patterns exist. Vietnam has a rural landscape only slightly less dense than suburbia. Indonesia has a cultivated landscape so full of forest gardens that some visitors don't even realize that it is all tended private property; they just think villagers live in the forest.

A medieval villager with a quarter acre was a cottager. He had to have a day job, either a trade or laboring, as it wasn't enough land for subsistence. But there were a lot of cottagers, working partially in the cash economy and partially for their own subsistence. On that quarter acre, the cottager had enough going to keep another adult (wife, parent, sibling, grown child) busy in the domestic economy: garden, fruit trees, chickens, possibly goats, bees, a cow or a couple of pigs, beer to brew, cider to make, herbs, domestic products such as brooms, socks, candles, sewing, laundry to take in, other people's children to watch, etc.

As another commenter pointed out, it's not the density of suburbia, it's the segregation of economic and productive activity away from housing.

I actually agree with EconGuy about sustainable human settlement patterns. The European (and to some extent also Asian, African, etc) model of land planning focuses residency in villages/towns/cities, leaving the rest of the land available for agriculture and forests. I couldn't think of a better approach (and have stated as much in previous articles), though much of the US does not employ this model. So what do we do with the suburbs that we are stuck with? Reducing food bills through edible lanscaping and gardening addresses food miles, reduced (or absent) incomes, and the need for healthy outdoor activity. What else should we be growing - fescue and ornamental trees?

I have a hard time seeing the value of shade trees if they get tall enough to obscure potential PV or hot water solar panels. I took one of the two red maple trees down in my front yard and it enabled me to put two long raised beds in which get excellent afternoon sun. But the other maple tree is over the roofline and may have to come out eventually. For now it's a good source of compostable materials when the leaves drop.

We had an eco architect come speak to our town a while ago and he pulled up a powerpoint slide with the typical south-facing rooflines all with solar panels on them. The problem is in New England, aside from the rooflines facing some weird complex angles with dormers, most of the trees in the towns here are 30-50 feet tall and shade rooflines and potential garden areas. The only benefit to the existing treecover is the oaks (for the acorns).

So I really suggest that people take down trees on the sunny side of their property and put a combination of raised beds, shrubs, and small trees that won't grow over 20' tall. Where I took down the maple, I replaced it with a chinese hawthorn which won't get nearly as tall, still provides ornamental value in the front yard, in addition to the apple-like fruits.

"These do have a big downside: forget about growing anything underneath them,
the roots emit a substance that is toxic to many other plants."

The substance is juglone, and some plants are resistant (lima beans, snap beans, beets, corn, onions, parsnips, cherry, raspberry) while others are highly sensitive (tomato).

Try experimenting based on the information in these links:

http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/1000/1148.html
http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/fruits/blkwalnt.htm

Few plants need more or respond better to manure than does asparagus.

Tobacco. It is by far the heaviest-feeding plant I have ever grown. But a lovely source of nicotine for bug spray.

We have a spare refridgerator, we harvest some Jerusalem Artichokes and store them in the vegie keeper, almost 4 weeks or longer. But they know what time it is, and start sprouting about the time the ones in the ground are.

I have a small 10 foot by 10 foot bed of them, it is open ground, no sides and they have been in there for 25 years plus. About 40 pounds from the bed if we harvest them at all. Though my dad has planted them on the back fence as well. but they are coming up through some old railroad ties.

Right now mine are about 6 feet tall, and I have tomatoes about that tall. Soon I'll have to pinch them off and not allow them to get taller.

I am going to buy a few bags of miracle grow potting soil, and lay down a layer of cardboard then put a few holes in one side of the bag, and lay it that side down, then cut 3 holes about the size of my fist in the bag, Water it. And plant something in there and let it grow that way. Likely some more zuchini as I only have 3 plants of that, and I love it.

Oh by the way, I found a bush bean that has a nasty habit of being sick, it is Contender, They had them in several local seed racks, and I bought them, and planted them only to find out they have the disease( there was a research project where they were trying to breed this out of the beans in a control cross. )

I have blue lake that are doing fine, just a few feet away.

Hugs,
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.

You can pick up used 275 gallon "IBC Totes" for about $80, and two people can easily get one onto the roof racks of a small car.

Mine is at the low point of my system, and I can run a hose from the outlet of my most productive rain barrel down to the tote to catch water that would otherwise be lost. Not all tanks have to be connected to a downspout or even close to one.

wtxgeologist,

Indeed, watering concerns are important (it's difficult to discuss every aspect in an introductory article).

I also collect rainwater and employ drip irrigation in the garden AND the landscape (though I've blurred the lines between the two via permaculture techniques). There are many techniques, and once one does a few trees or garden rows, it becomes simple to get into the rhythm of doing many more. How one will water the permanent and annual plants is an important step in the planning process.

Ah yes, Kunstler. The man who wants to shove us all back into tenements helplessly at the mercy of vicious money grubbing Slumlords. Oh yeah, that's the future we should want for our descendents- the very thing our ancestors struggled for generations to escape!

They didn't struggle so hard to escape it because it was good...duh.

There is just a handful of books I would recommend. Gardeners should garden, not read.

Stay away from "movements." Agriculture has been practiced for millennia without the need to consult colorful manuals or magnetic speakers. Permaculture is a "cult" at heart. Organic is largely a scam. Yet some writers of organics books have great value, as well as their conventional counterparts:

The Victory Garden is a classic and should be on everyone's shelf. Take what you can use from it, and let the rest rot.

Elliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest was my main source for many years. He has since become rather insane, but this book is still a winner. Take what you can use from it, and let the rest rot.

Jeff Gillman's series of books beginning with the titles "The Truth About" are short, sweet, intelligent, and balanced. He actually is a good guide for the saying, "Take what you can use, and let the rest rot."

My mainstays: Coleman's Four Season Harvest; Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening; Seymour's Self Sufficient Gardener; and Hunt & Bortz's High Yield Gardening (OOP). Rodale's Organic Gardening encyclopedia is pretty important, too.

I also have Jeavon's book Grow More Vegetables. . .. Lot's of good information there. Do beware, however, that what he advocates is EXTREMELY labor intensive. Few have been able to achieve anything close to the high yields he claims are possible. IMHO, Square Foot Gardening is a simplification of Jeavons, and reliably achieves pretty good yields with a lot less effort - a better trade off at least as far as I am concerned.

If you grow fruit trees or berries you will probably want some more specialized books about those, especially covering pruning. The above volumes just don't cover the specifics of fruit growing in enough depth. I'm still exploring what's out there, don't have a specific recommendation yet.

I have a book called "Natures Design" runs off to get it....It is a book published by Rodale press. It is a called a practical guide to natural landscaping.

After all my once main study was in Landscape Architecture, only to find out that half of my save weeds and eat from the native landscape/places was going to get hashed out to the point of them trying to kill it. LA is more about making nature succoumb to human hands than anything else I know. And only recently has edible landscaping been hinted at in the landscaping feild. They don't really care for having to in and much about with rotting fruits and things that no one has picked, icky poo.

I have some of the books already listed. I always tended toward practical use books, a little bit of growing and a lot of uses for what you grew. Ortho the chemical company put out a bunch of all about herbs, all about vegatables, All season harvest and canning guide, green house designs and other books, I would guess that they are all out of print, but they are still in my book collection. The pickling and canning book is still in the kitchen, we have used it recently in fact.

Don't be fooled by all the great pictures. Makes you think your garden will look like that and it won't and it could. But a lot of that is staged to be that way. I have a very pretty tomato patch right now. But if you look close a bug is putting holes in my Amaranth leaves like mad. The bug is not a cuke beetle, but looks like one. I've killed a few of them by hand.

I don't use pesticides and herbicides. I hand pick the bad bugs and the weeds. I grow to many things in the wilder parts of my garden that an herbicide would kill and I don't want to do that for the first reason.

Another is cost, and the second is I don't know how they will react in the system. I promote as many sustainable things as possible. But I do use Miracle Grow, when I can't find local manure. I have compost, but can't generate enough of it yet. I compost in place a lot of the time.

Techinical speaking anything found on earth is found on earth and is useful. But man can make things that are found on earth worse for himself, and they can damage the systems called his environment so easily that he should have been more careful with anything he created. That is not going to happen, and has been co-opted by interests of power and profit to harming his fellow man and life around him. Since I don't the chemical structure of the pesticides, or herbicides, or the eithical stand point of the makers, I'll mistrust them first and trust them later.

People get my full trust first, then other degrees of it later. But companies I handle totally different.

There are just to many things we don't know about the world around us to go willy nilly about killing this and that just because we don't like the pink flowers in the green grass.( simple example)

I am a bit weary today, I had a very long day yesterday and my typing is bad as it is, my dyslxia has gotten so bad, that I can't type even simple words. When I am tired it gets worse. so forgive the mistakes and misspellings.

Books that you should buy, should have the word "FREE" on the front cover. Smile.

MikeB, I like the use the best and let the rest rot, statement. reminds me of a worm bed, you use the best and let the rest be eate by the worms. I do wonder how they are eating the cardboard under my beds. I had worm piles under some water filled rwh containers. I am going to try a new approach. Put down some cardboard in a spot, then put a rain container over top of it, with water in it. It stays cool and the cardboard might rot in a while via worm action.

Goes out to try it.

Charles,
Hugs,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed future.