This is the second time I've spent a summer out here on the Teaching Farm and both times I've worked in the vegetable garden. As I'm preparing the soil, weeding, composting and planting out here I'm comparing my experiences with plots in community gardens in Gainesville with what it's like growing out here and I think there is a world of difference.
The community gardens provided by the City of Gainesville are all, by law, organic which means that in the established gardens the soil has been built up for years with enormous amounts of compost material of all kinds. This past winter I gardened at the community garden near GRU, one of the first established community gardens in the city. I had the easiest most successful gardening experience ever. Anything I planted grew and I had no pest or disease problems at all. Such is a garden that is in balance. They have healthy populations of beneficial insects and a variety of organic materials as fertilizers: bat guano, traditional kitchen waste compost, leaf compost and horse/cow manure just to name the most prevalent.
Out here at the Teaching Farm our sources of compost are much more limited. We have a compost pile of leaves and kitchen waste but mostly to prepare the soil this year we trucked in loads of horse manure from a farm. It's good stuff but it's filled with sawdust and whatever chemicals or steroids the horse farm gives its horses. That's it; that's all we have. I'm not being pessimistic when I say our vegetable garden here probably won't be nearly as productive until we establish more sources of organic compost here on site. More compost means healthier plants and healthier plants mean more beneficial insects and more resistance to disease and an overall more balanced garden system.
So one of my goals for the Teaching Farm for 2007 is to work on establishing more on-site compost production. Because as you all know, to have a productive garden you can either use LOTS of organic materials or you can use chemical fertilizers but we should not expect a successful garden if we do neither (or if we don't do enough of the former). Florida soils are simply too nutrient poor to support a lot of vegetable crops without assistance. Here are some of my ideas for easy compost production we could do here on-site:
- Build a bat house. Bats are great; they eat insects (including mosquitos), kids love to get freaked out by seeing them at night and their poop (guano) is like gold to plants. I really hope we can build one or two out here this summer, maybe the kids at Peace Camp will do it, but if not, someone should (any volunteers?). As great as a bat house would be, it is not an immediate solution to the compost problem; it's hard to attract the bats to the place and it can take them up to two years to even find the house so there's a certain amount of luck involved but they can't come if we don't build it. This is a long-term investment in our gardens.
- Re-establish the worm farm. Worm farming also known as vermiculture is one of the best ways to create compost. You can buy bags of worm castings but they're very expensive and why buy it when worm farming is so simple! We used to have a worm tub out here but I guess it fell out of use. I would like to set up a worm farm out here again. Worms are similar to bats in a way: they eat things we don't like, kids love to get grossed out by them and their poop also is like gold to plants. In the past we've used an old bath tub and there are still 2 or 3 tubs on site here. While an old tub sitting in the yard may not be the prettiest sight in the world with some nice plantings around it, it might not be so bad. An alternative would be to set up worm bins in the pump house (the tub wouldn't fit). It's cool and dark and out of sight there. We could pull the bins out for demonstration purposes like when the kids come for camp but otherwise don't have to have them out in view. Bins in the pump house might have the added benefit of helping to deter ants from getting in (a problem with our current compost pile and a potentially lethal problem with compost ants).
- Rabbits. They don't eat anything gross but rabbits do have the latter two benefits: kids love 'em* and their poop (which looks like Coca Puffs cereal) is an excellent fertilizer. We could partner with the Gainesville Rabbit Rescue a nonprofit organization which takes in unwanted rabbits (a few months after Easter they have more than enough rabbits to go around) to become a foster home for rabbits while they are awaiting adoption. Rabbits are generally easy to care for and I have experience building rabbit hutches! Being a foster home for the rabbits rather than simply adopting them may more practical for us here since we have no long term permanent caretaker yet out here on the land. On the occasion when there is no one around out here to care for a rabbit we can simply suspend the program until there is.
And finally it goes without saying that I'm hoping to improve our traditional compost pile by turning it more frequently and maintaining it so that it produces quality compost more quickly than a neglected unturned compost pile does.
Doing any one of these things would help; doing all of them would mean the Teaching Farm would be much better positioned to become a real organic farm in the near future with each successive vegetable garden becoming more and more productive as we become better composters!
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* Rabbits don't make good pets for small children though. Being a prey animal they hate being held and take some training to not panic at being picked up. GRR has lots of good info on rabbits and kids. Having our younger Teaching Farm visitors see and pet our rabbits on visits however, shouldn't be a problem.
Were you able to get the compost heap completed? I have a few compost making videos on my site if you are interested.
Kind Regards
Tim Lester
http://www.nuganics.com.au
Posted by: Tim Lester | December 28, 2007 at 02:12 AM