Growing Your Own Food

Eat Organic, Save Money, Know What You Eat and Have of Peace of Mind

I have been venturing into non- medical territory with these last few Substacks on being prepared but I believe it’s important that we can focus on positive things without the constant fear and worry of what could happen to make our lives miserable. Besides securing your food source and eating healthier, gardening is also great for connecting with nature, grounding, physical fitness and recharging your mind.  In the long run it will save you money as buying organic food is becoming very expensive. There are many sources of information to teach you how to begin growing your own food. The information below is based on 20+ years of learning by doing, information from people I know who grew up on farms and a few books. My paternal grandfather and my uncle planted and tended to fruit trees in Miami all their life. My maternal grandmother in Switzerland planted a vegetable garden before and during World War II.

Beginning a Vegetable Garden

As I described in my Substack before last, you can build above ground planter boxes with 8 to 12 foot long 2x10 or 2x12 wood planks. Each box needs 3 boards whereby you saw one in half to make up the two short sides and simply screw them together at the corners with 4 inch long wood screws for outside use. Then order planting soil by the truckload or buy planting soil in bags from a garden supply store like Home Depot in the US. Fill the planting boxes and even out the soil with a rake. You can add a few bags of cow manure and worm casings.

Planting Season
Do some research to find the appropriate planting season in your area. In Switzerland and most of central Europe it begins after the frost is gone from the ground, usually mid to end of March. This will also be true for most of the US. In South Florida our planting season begins in mid to late October and lasts until April/May.

Direct Sow versus Seedlings
You can sow seeds directly into the soil of your planting boxes for carrots, corn and onions. Often this also works for beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, butternut squash and melons. For other vegetables it’s better to sow seeds into little round, cup size planters where they can grow to a decent size before transplanting them into the ground. You can also buy ready seedlings from a local garden supply center and plant them directly into your planting box. It’s faster to grow but they are more expensive than growing your own from seed.  If you buy some ready seedlings you can reuse the containers, fill them with planting soil and insert seeds into them. Buy some tongue depressors and a marker pen that’s water proof to write the name of the seed you put into them as long as you don’t have the experience to know what plant is what just by looking at it.

Growing Seedlings

Use a liquid or granulated fertilizer and water them daily or install a simple irrigation system. It takes between one to two weeks depending on the seed and the weather to grow seedlings large enough to transplant into the ground.
Potatoes can be planted directly into the soil. Buy a bag of organic potatoes and leave them in a box in a dark room until they grow out some “eyes” which turn into roots. Cut the potatoes into pieces so that each piece has an eye or a root, and then plant them into the soil with the eye looking up and cover with soil. After about 4-6 weeks it will grow green plants above ground. In the soil it will begin making new potatoes. It takes about 3 months until you can harvest smaller potatoes.

Dealing with Weeds and Pests that eat your crops

To prevent most weed growth in your planting boxes, cover the soil with a weed barrier. It’s a plastic or cloth like material you stretch over the soil in your box and fasten with metal sticks into the ground or staples to the wood frame. The black material below shows such a weed barrier. You then simply cut an X into it where you want to plant your seedling. This obviously does not direct sow seeds like carrots, onions and corn.

A huge problem is insects and small wild animals that eat your crops. To deter insects but still do organic gardening, you can mix Neem Oil with natural dish soap and dilute it with water. Fill it into a sprayer and spray your crops once to twice a week. To deter small critters like Raccoons, Opossums, Cats, Turtles, Coyotes and others, you can stick plastic forks into the ground.

Battery operated back-pack sprayer. Use 6 Teaspoons of Neem Oil and 2 Teaspoons of natural dish soap such as from Method soap for each Gallon of water. Be mindful of the weight you can actually carry on your back.

Fertilizer
You can buy fertilizer in liquid or granular from. Some come with an attachment for a garden hose into which you can fit a bottle of liquid fertilizer or it comes with a container that attaches to the hose into which you can fill granular fertilizer that dissolves quickly once you spray your crops with the hose. You can also add granular fertilizer directly to the plants in the soil. As a rule fertilize about once per week depending on your water mineral content. Look for fertilizer for organic gardening.

Irrigation
You can irrigate your crops by hand with a garden house once to twice per day if there is no rain, but that can get quite tedious, particularly if you are working. You can build an irrigation system yourself using a main garden hose that runs from the main water faucet to your garden. You then hook up a hose splitter to hook up several hoses running to various sprinklers. In between the splitter and the hoses you can insert an automatic, battery operated timer and set it to two waterings per day. If you have more than two hoses splitting off, you need to use several timers as the water pressure may not be enough to sprinkle more than two sprinkle systems at once. You then set the two timers to different times. I have well water which passes through a whole house reverse osmosis system. If you have city water that contains chlorine and/or fluoride you need to look into a good filtration system.

Main hose coming in from the faucet on the top, attached to a splitter. One side then attaches to another splitter with timers inserted between the first splitter and the second splitter from where hoses run to the sprinklers. On the other side of the main split is a hose (green) to feed a faucet on a table to clean the vegetables once they are harvested. This is to prevent dragging ants and lots of soil into the kitchen.

Ultimately this system feeds four sprinklers whereas only two sprinklers are active at a time due to water pressure issues.

Close up of a sprinkler. Each sprinkler can water two planter boxes

Some crops require less water such as onions and corn. Plant those in a box that doesn’t get sprinkled as much or not at all and water them sparingly once a day by hand.

Pollination Issues

The bee population has massively diminished in the past five to eight years and some vegetables now require us to pollinate them by hand. Among them are Zucchini and squash. These are special anyway. The female flower will grow a small zucchini or squash which will fall off when it’s not pollinated by the male flower. In essence we now have to take a male flower and stick it into the female receiving part to pollinate it by hand. It’s basically Zucchini and squash flowers having sex with you lending a helping hand.

When to Harvest

You need to keep an eye on your crops to determine when which vegetables are ready to harvest.
Tomatoes should be taken before they are completely ripe to prevent them from being eaten by bugs (despite the Neem oil) and from cracking in the sun. To determine if carrots are ready for harvest, stick a finger into the soil where the green part of a carrot comes out and feel the size. They take quite a long time to grow (3-4 months) as do onions. Pole beans grow quite fast and start making beans before they climb all the way up the pole. Green leafy vegetables like Bok Choy, Swiss chard and Collard greens grow pretty fast as well. Cucumbers take about 3 months to grow to edible size. Rutabagas, Turnips, Fennel and Peppers grow to edible size in about 2-3 months. Once you begin harvesting, you should have new seedlings ready to plant to keep your garden going. Get yourself a basket to put your harvest in to make transporting it easier.

Pausing and Crop Rotation
In South Florida it’s quite impossible to keep a vegetable garden going through the summer months as it’s simply too hot. The same will be true for the winter months further up north. It’s a chance to give the soil a chance to rest. As weeds grow like crazy during the summer with the heat and the rain, I cover the soil with a black plastic cover. It’s called solarizing the soil. It prevents weed growth. This also saves buying more soil for the next planting season as pulling out weeds drastically reduces the amount of soil in the boxes.

Once the new planting season begins, don’t plant the same crops into the same boxes as last season as every crops pulls different minerals out of the soil. There are books or online articles that explain what crops pull what minerals. For example, tomatoes use up potassium, calcium and nitrogen. Legumes and cruciferous vegetables replenish nitrogen in the soil. Thus don’t plant tomatoes two years in a row in the same box, but rotate crops and plant beans, broccoli and cauliflower in the former tomato box.

You probably will have to add some new soil into the boxes before you can plant. To make life easier to mix the new soil with the existing soil, you can get an electric or gas operated tilling machine. There are arguments not to use such a machine as it may damage worms. However, in my experience worms are still roaming the soil after using the machine. One pass through the soil is usually enough to mix it up well, and then use a rake to even it out.

Electro Culture

I have only just started investigating electro culture and have thus far wrapped copper wire around wooden sticks and inserted them into the soil in each planter box. It’s supposed to pull energy from the ether to further the health and growth of the plants. So far it hasn’t made a big difference but more research is needed.

Contamination by Chemtrails

A big problem is the raining down of toxic metals and who knows what else due to the constant spraying of chemtrails. To prevent this, one would need to cover the entire vegetable garden and basically build a greenhouse to enclose it. We have been sprayed daily since three days before Thanksgiving and the sky has been overcast every day except for 3-4 days these past six weeks. This has stunted the growth of vegetables as there is no direct sunlight coming through. I have spoken to others who planted vegetables and they notice the same issues.

Covered vegetable garden

Don’t forget to plant some herbs as well such as Parsley, Dill, Thyme, Basil, Cilantro, Oregano, Rosemary, Mint.

I hope this information can shorten the time for you to become a proficient vegetable grower so it doesn’t take you 20 years to get there. We simply don’t have the time for a learning curve that long in current times. Enjoy the time in your garden, connect with the land, use your bare hands and don’t shy away from becoming dirty and soiled. It helps with grounding and it washes off easily in the shower. When you pick a vegetable, thank the plant for growing it for you. Your positive vibes do effect the plants. Happy veggie farming!

Resources

Seeds:
www.seedsnsuch.com
www.superseeds.com
www.marysheirloomseeds.com

Seeds don’t last very long. Keep them vacuum packed to extend their shelf life.

Gardening Tools: www.wolf-garten.com
These are the most versatile and long lasting gardening tools I have ever had.

Organic Gardening Pesticides, Fertilizers:

www.spray-n-grow.com

Electric tilling machines, back-pack sprayers: gardening supply centers, independent sellers on Amazon