Ok, time for something happier.

Tomato Planting:

Last weekend, I finished planting my little hardened-off seedlings outside! Here are some photos.

My tomatoes fell over under the grow light and grew in a n “L” shape. I saw this as a ‘fail’ on my part until I tried to plant them in the grow boxes – they were too tall for me to plant straight up and down and still have part of the stem in the ground. But if I planted them sideways, it worked out nicely! It’s almost as if nature planned for them to fall over and send more roots into the ground.

Here are all six Earth Boxes full of heirloom tomatoes. I still have to put up the trellis systems for some of them.

I haven’t had to water them all week! I bought them because they’re self-watering (just pour water down the tube that feeds into the base) and they’re durable.

My only complaint is this: I’ll have to figure out how, why and what to use for the dolomite and fertilizer next year. I don’t plant to spend money on six refill kits if I can do it myself for less.

Here are Earth Boxes and staking systems on Amazon.com:

Here are some articles about making your own self-watering containers:

• Homegrown Evolution: Self-watering containers
• How To Make A Self-Watering Container (using buckets)
• New improved homemade self watering container / Earthbox (using totes)

Cucumbers
I also planted some cucumbers and pear tomatoes in window box planters hanging off of the deck.

You deserve to see reality: This is what it all looked like directly after planting all of those boxes. I’m soaked. Who knew deck farming could be so messy?


Beans and Cucumbers:

I turned over the soil in my raised bed to find oodles of worms, yay!

I companion planted bush beans and cucumbers in my raised bed.

I’m going to stretch a net from the bottom of the raised bed to the top of the fence for the cucumbers to climb. Eggplants, more tomatoes, and herbs will be planted to the sides this weekend.

Crookneck Squash
The squash isn’t really loving the dirt leftover from the clematis vine – too much drainage. To do: mix in 2/3rds soil and save the rest of this peat-like stuff for something else.

French Heirloom Peas:
There are enough on my pea tee-pee for a veggie stir-fry!

Composter:
Just got it, hooray!

What’s next for the grow lights:
I’m still growing some herbs and a few cucumbers that I plan to donate to my son’s school veggie garden. After that? Kitchen grow-light salad!

Some day the earth shall weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice if you will help her or let her die, and if she dies, you too shall die.

John Hollow Horn, Lakota Shaman, 1932
(Quote from Carolyn Baker’s daily news digest today.)

See photos of the oil spill:
Oil reaches Louisiana shores: the big picture

We did this. This oil is on our hands, too. And by us, I mean anyone on the earth who is living an over-consumptive middle-or upper-middle class lifestyle, we who aspire to look rich but go in debt to do so. I know this lifestyle firsthand because we’re a recovering wannabe-glittering-rich baby-has-only-the-best duel income family who will finally be out of credit card debt in a few months, I hope. We had the fortunate good timing of learning about peak oil last year and stopped short of buying a honking big SUV and a McMansion in the exurbs (all on credit.) We’re making do with an old Honda Civic and Accord and now I shop at thrift stores, but more on that in another post.

We, the wannabe-glittering-rich, had to have that oil for what? So we could cart our butts to the nearest big-box retail store where we could buy stuff that doesn’t ultimately make us happy anyway. It took fossil fuel energy to produce this stuff, oil to truck it to the store, coal to keep the lights on, and bigger houses burning coal to keep it air-conditioned. And for what? To be tossed out or donated away? My garage is full of this garbage right now and I can’t tell you how unhappy it makes me. Even the process of planning to sell it is exhausting. But I’m learning to see, I’m climbing out of denial and complacency, and I’m doing a little more each day to slowly (very slowly!) get my family un-hooked from fossil fuel and consumerism. I wish I were moving much faster.

The oil keeps our food supply chain going, too. We truck in our organic food from thousands of miles away instead of bothering to get up off of the recliner and get our hands a little dirty or bike down to the farmer’s market. Shame on us. I’m guilty of all of it, too. What fuels the tractors, or do you buy food from an Amish farmer? How do you think that petroleum-based fertilizer is made? In a solar powered factory? Ha, no! Have solar panels on your roof? What do you think we burn to get the raw materials for solar panels out of the ground? Coal! And how do you think those solar panels are shipped to us? Oil!

Updated:
So don’t be angry at the oil companies or the government or the people who have no idea how to properly lay a boom. We have only our lifestyles to blame.

Do this instead:

I agree with Asher Miller – Yes, you should be angry that BP got away with this b.s., that their employees were goofing off in bars instead of learning how to properly lay a boom.

Once you’ve exhausted your outrage at the idiocy of it all and are ready to move on, here are five constructive outlets:

1. Be sad. Experience your grief. This is incredibly depressing and we all need a period of mourning. Need some help shedding a tear? Go look at picture #38. Mourn the poor souls who have been making a happy living near the gulf. Mourn the days that you will not be spending with that white sand between your toes and for the future generations who may not be able to do the same. And please, mourn for the poor creatures. Mourn the pelicans and the flounders and the ghost crabs. They didn’t need recliners or cars or toys or exotic fruit. They only needed the ocean, a marsh, an ecosystem, and we destroyed it.

   Requiem
   by Robert Louis Stevenson

   Under the wide and starry sky,
   Dig the grave and let me lie;
   Glad did I live and gladly die,
   And I laid me down with a will.

   This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
   Here he lies where he longed to be;
   Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
   And the hunter home from the hill.

   But no, this is the poem for the happy end to a life well-lived. Perhaps this one is more relevant:
   from Joanna Macy

   We hear you, fellow-creatures. We know we are wrecking the world and we are afraid. What we have unleashed has such momentum now; we don’t know how to turn it around. Don’t leave us alone; we need your help. You need us too for your own survival. Are there powers there you can share with us?

   (I was first introduce to this, and Joanna Macy, in chapter 19 of Sacred Demise.)

2. Wake up. Learn what’s going on around you. Read about the issues on Post Carbon Institute’s site. Check out my links in the sidebar. We’re on the down-slope of the oil age anyway – you may as well get off of it.
3. Now that you’ve scared the crap out of yourself, find support amongst friends, in a group or with an eco-psychologist. When I found out that my life wouldn’t play out in a period of continuous growth, that everything I thought I knew was going to be changing, I freaking panicked. I got depressed. My husband thought I had lost the last of my marbles. For those of us who have been in a daily routine of work-eat-sleep, this is tough material to digest. Start with Carolyn Baker’s book Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse.
4. Find a new way forward. Take steps every day to get fossil fuel out of your life because volatility is going to be the new norm for the price of fuel (and everything that depends upon it). Find or start a Transition Movement near you. Replace ‘oil-soaked’ food with local, organic, in-season choices. Learn how to grow something. Figure out how to get yourself around with less gas, and coal-powered electric cars are not the answer – have you seen the mountaintops in West Virginia? Take a look at Community Solution’s Smart Jitney idea. You can partially do this now with carpools. When thinking about where to live, find a small, walkable town to live in or live near public transportation if you can. If you need to have a face-to-face work meeting but don’t actually need to shake hands, try a Telepresence meeting instead of flying or driving a long distance.

   Take the future into your own hands and stop waiting for a hero to arrive.

   “I wondered why somebody didn’t do something. Then I realized, I am somebody.”

   — Source Unknown

5. Take some classes from people who understand what’s going on. Here are a few:
   - Carolyn’s class: Navigating the Coming Chaos of Unprecedented Transitions: be guided though the process of denial, soul-sickness and stages of grief that we’re all experiencing over the loss of our habitats, the faltering of our economy, the depletion of our natural resources and the shattering of every idea upon which we’ve built our McCastles in the air. I just finished this class and it was a transformational experience.
   - Other classes I plan to take from Post Peak Living include the Un-Crash Course and Sustainable Post-Peak Livelihoods.
   - I’m hopefully taking an Adapting in Place class from Sharon Astyk – fingers crossed that there are still openings. Getting off the grid right now really isn’t financially feasible for us – I need to know what I can do where I am, and I’m betting some of you do as well.
   - I signed up for an Urban Gardening summit. I really want to be involved in urban/suburban gardening initiatives and want to know more about what’s going on.
   - But first, I need to take lots of organic gardening and food preservation classes! Our community has some great ones – I took a class on building a cold frame last year. But I also have a full-time job and a family, so I’m learning as I go and am pestering my gardening friends for advice. I’ll post what I’ve learned (usually the hard way) on my site.

We don’t need to blame others or shame ourselves, we need to empower ourselves and our communities. Trying to get myself off of fossil fuel is something that I can get pretty far with on my own, and I could get even farther if I banded with a group of like-minded citizens. It won’t be easy. It’ll take time. But we have to get started now or we’ll destroy everything good that is left on this earth as we engage in ever-more risky behavior to extract the remaining fossil fuels. It’s time to redefine ‘the good life.’ My husband and I used to think it meant a designer house in the ‘burbs with a BMW or two in the driveway. But to pull off that kind of lifestyles, we would work and commute so much that we’d have little time to actually enjoy the house or the cars. We would be happier, I think, with a yurt, a garden, a bike, and time spent together as a family.

I’m leaving you with some moving videos and a poem. It’s time to remake the way in which we live upon this Earth. We can do it, but we have to open our eyes and our hearts first.

Carolyn Baker, The Thread:

What Uncertainty Brings Us:

Joanna Macy at Bioneers 2009 from Defend theCommons on Vimeo.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save.
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who,
age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

from Adrienne Rich, through Joanna Macy’s Bowl of Tears practice

So many things to post, so little time! Here’s what I’m writing for this week

- Links to resources for building your own grow light shelf
- A look at my newly planted self-watering container garden on my deck plus links to plans for building your own self-watering containers
- My low-carbon lifestyle to-do checklist: what I’ve done, what I’m working on, what I aspire to do
- Need a basic understanding of peak oil? I’ll post some great resources.

Leave a comment if there are any other topics that interest you.

Thanks!
Jen

Hello and welcome to my small-space gardening experiment! I live in a townhouse in Northern Virginia. As part of my greater plan for personal and community resilience, I am:
1. Learning how to grow my own food while the mistakes are cheap
2. Seeing what can reasonably be grown in a townhouse (on the deck, in the courtyard and in the kitchen)

Here’s what I’ve got going on in my kitchen:

The Setup

Shelves: I purchased mine at CostCo and left off a fifth shelf. In hindsight, I would have made about 3 feet of space between shelves for my veggies. They’re similar to the Seville Classics Shelving System with Wheels, Chrome on Amazon.com.

Lights: If I had to do it over again, I would buy one or two of the Hydrofarm 4′ Light Fixtures. They look easier to hang and manage.

Light Bulbs: I use AgroBrite lights (Agrobrite Lights 48
) but I’ve heard that you can use regular flourescent lights as well.

You could also just skip putting together the light fixtures and buy this kit: Hydrofarm Jump Start T5 Grow Light System

Seedling Heat Mat: Gotta have heat. This heat mat looks like it would span the entire shelf: Large Hydrofarm Seedling Heat Mat. I have a smaller two-tray Hydrofarm Seedling Heat Mat

Seed starter kit: I found the Jiffy Greenhouse to be easy to use.

Peat pots: I planted some seeds directly into Jiffy Peat Pot Strips.

The Seeds

I’m growing the following varieties of tomatoes. I was given most of these seeds in a seed swap with a gifted gardener friend at work. (Thanks, Julie, for teaching me everything about tomatoes!):

From Seeds of Change
-Red Calabash
-Amish Paste

From Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
-Large Red Tomato
-Brandywine Tomato

From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
-Cherokee Purple

From The Cook’s Garden
- Red and Yellow Pear Mix

Crazy tomatoes my mother-in-law planted (12 of them!). I’ll try to grow them upside-down from the balcony.
- Climbing Trip-l-crop

Other veggies and herbs under the grow lights right now:

from The Cook’s Garden
- Parsley Catalogno
- Basil Marseille
- Stevia

From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange
-Lemon Pickling Cucumber

How to grow:
1. Consult the calendar for your zone to see when you can start most vegetables.
2. Start your seedlings in their little Jiffy greenhouses. Put about 3 seeds in each jiffy pod or peat pot. No lights needed yet. But keep the heat mat on!
3. Set up your lights – hang them from the shelf using a hooks or carabiner
attached to chains.
4. When the seedlings appear, remove the greenhouse cover and turn on the lights for about 14 hours per day. (My times varied and sometimes I forgot to turn on the light. They were fine.)
5. Keep the lights as close to the leaves as possible by lowering them on a a chain. Raise the lights as the plants grow.
6. When the second set of leaves appear, thin the plants to one plant per pellet or pot.
7. Watch them grow! Consult the calendar for your zone to see when it’s safe to plant outside. Don’t forget to harden them off!

Right now, it’s too late to start most summer vegetables indoors. Start herbs and lettuce indoors anytime then pluck what you need while you cook.

Lessons learned the hard way:
I would have had more (much more!) growing, but I didn’t water my seedlings enough before heading out of town for a week and forgot to remind my husband to do it. Almost everything that I had planted in a shallow seed tray wilted and died after a few days of no water. Heartbreaking, but a lesson learned.

Next step for me: plant everything outside!

Some of the items I used: