Growcology Takes To the Field

I am proud to present our latest milestone.  

The Growcology team headed out into a barren, sun baked, rock hard  field last week with the intent of making a fertile, productive, and long term drought tolerant garden to serve as our welcome area in front of the barn.  This evening we kick back with a few beers and enjoy the satisfaction of a day's end, having toiled together for a common cause.

What you see in the picture is the spirals halfway Lasagna Mulched.  

Following the recipe in Gaia's garden, we put down a thin layer of goat manure over the earth which we broke up with pick axes followed by a layer of newspaper about 5 sheets thick.  We then added another layer of goat manure followed by a foot thick layer of slightly decomposed horse bedding and manure.  The next step is to put down a good layer of compost and then a nice thick layer of straw over that.  

The principle of the lasagna mulch is not to have fertile soil right away.  It is actually to compost the way the forest builds soil, only in a highly expedited way.  The lasagna mulch will actually make nutrients like nitrogen unavailable for up to six months while it all breaks down, resulting in thick, rich, water retaining soil with a healthy microbial profile.  The way we plant it in the mean time is to carefully dig holes in through the mulch layers and fill them with finished compost or topsoil, plant our seeds or seedlings in them, and cover them back up with the straw layer.  

The lasagna mulch required quite a bit of water to get started.  We must have spent hours standing with hoses, hand watering every layer to make sure it was of the consistency of a damp, wrung out sponge.  Maintaining a proper moisture level is vital to the process, and it requires regular watering, especially in Riverside summer heat. Over the long run, however, the healthy soil with good mulch cover and shade from plant canopy will retain water extremely well and require much less than if done other ways.

I would like to take the chance to thank Frank and Lucy Heyming for allowing us this opportunity on the property, and providing us with most of our materials.  I would also like to acknowledge our rock star volunteer Twelve and his two children Ruby and Nova for showing up almost every day we've been in the field and putting in a few hours.  

Keep an eye out, as there is much more to come

A weekend in Paradise

Awesome Mizuna and Shungiku mustardy greens growing around some carrots, calendula, some really healthy tomatoes, some peppers, a forest of turnips, and some radishes.


SQUASH! Summer squash, or zucchini, the healthiest my mom has ever grown, with some volunteer onions popping up in between.


Spencer and Sarah's bed has a whole polyculture of spring and summer plants, with chard, mountain spinach, onions, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, yarrow, and arugula.


My nephew Owen and niece Addison helped plant the beans in this plot, which also has my transplanted tomatoes, tomatillos, purple mountain spinach, cucumbers (with their sweet bamboo pyramid), squash, and amaranth.


I designed a tree of life keyhole walkway in my mom's herb garden, where all different types of basil, thyme, oregano, marjoram, chamomile, lavender, agastache, savory, sorrel, geraniums, sage, rosemary, and more add spice to our garden and our meals.


Globe artichokes. Not quite as tender as the purple kind, but great producers!


Sarah designed this keyhole bed, where carrots share space with different chards, brussel sprouts, lettuce and mixed greens, arugula, tomatoes, and green onions.


Bianca pauses while she designs the three sisters' garden to take a breath and pose for the camera.


There is method to our madness. This will be the welcome area to our workshop space, with a variety of different warm and dry weather vegetable guilds as illustrated in Sarah's previous post.


Spencer irrigates.


Swinging a pickaxe all day in 100 degree weather is what my grandparents used to call a 'character building' experience.


Bianca and Rufus test out the new chicken tractor, as Sarah and Spencer attach the chicken wire. Our good friend Betty donated 5 more chickens to the flock, but when we introduced them to the old hens they nearly got pecked to death... hence, the new mobile chicken coop.


A finished three sisters garden bed. For now, the straw covered mounds have 4 corn seeds planted in each. Once the corn pops up, we'll plant the runner beans to climb up their natural 'trellis', and then we plant the squash in the other mounds to spread out and shade/protect the topsoil... All fertilized organically with goat and llama manure.

So thats what we were up to this past weekend at Growcology. We've also been developing an online resource that we'll mention in our upcoming newsletter, as well as some programs with the various community gardens in the city. More to come soon!

Stimulus Grant!

Great news! Growcology has been awarded a community stimulus check from BWB: here is the list of grant recipients. I'm so grateful and humbled to be among such great projects as Pisco Sin Fronteras, a group near and dear to my heart that arose from the rubble of the earthquake ravaged town in Pisco, Peru. There are fourteen total stimulus recipients, all of them are so inspirational.

We're going to be spending our grant on heirloom and organic seeds and materials for a localized plant guilds nursery and for building community gardens. We're working all tomorrow on our new welcome area for the learning center, hopefully we'll have all our planting done before it gets too hot...

We'll probably need to make a cooler structure for propagating our seedlings, as it can get ridiculously hot here in Riverside. Here is one of the designs we're looking at. We'd like to be able to grow more of all the great helper and useful plants already growing here and share them with the community.

Growcology spirals out of control!!!!

After much thought and deliberation, we would like to present our plans for the entryway of the Growcology site. The bottom of the design ends at the edge of the barn, to the right are the veggie garden plots, at the top is the solar panel, and to the left is a chain link fence and Spencer's and my driveway.

Revised irrigation plan

The spiral design and infinity symbol pathways were designed by Spencer, who, just the other night, reminded me how it was only a few months ago that he had so rudely scoffed at my suggestion that we make our gardens spiral shaped. * After everyone agreed that Spencer lays out a mean spiral**, I charted the veggie and groudcover layout/combinations, making sure to pair and group plants that benefit each other's growth and development (who knew that potatoes like to grow with watermelon?). Note that section A does not have little plant icons in it - simply due to my laziness. I think that section will be somewhat randomly planted (unlike, for instance, the Three Sisters area, which has a definite layout) so it seemed a bit of a waste of time to draw in little plants.

Finally, everyone decided on the irrigation layout, making sure to include both auto-sprinklers and standpipes for hoses (I love handwatering - I mean, who doesn't want to play with a hose in 100º weather), and now. . . now the fun part begins - digging trenches! WHEEEEEEEEEE!

*I would just like to point out that right here, I am using my amazing willpower to resist adding a pun about how Spencer came around to my way of thinking.

** I apologize for any images of Spencer pooping that I may have conjured in your head with that phrase. I do not, however, apologize for any images conjured as you read the sentence preceding this one.

Cool Website

I just was emailed a link to the Veggie Trader, a website for people with excess veggies so they can barter them with gardeners in their area. Its a nifty idea, hopefully more people will start using it so that we can all fill up our plates.

We've been really busy in the Growcology garden, we've planted all the rest of our bean and tomato seedlings in the solarized bed, and today we're looking to finish the "Three Sisters" guild bed as well. We'll be using the layout recommended by Renee's Garden for our first attempt at recreating North America's first polyculture guild, and as we finish our welcome area we'll try some variations on it.

Speaking of which, we're completely remodeling the welcome area to the workshop space in the barn. We're incorporating permeable walkways made from wood chips, spiral planting areas irrigated with well-water, and planting a variety of summer crops and herbs that will illustrate various symbiotic relationships between plants. The melons, squash, pumpkins, cucumber, tomatoes, corn, eggplants, and other veggies we plant will be ready throughout the summer and fall, while our spring garden is already providing us with more veggies than we know what to do with.

May is Afoot, What do I do in the Garden?

Here is an awesome link from Vegetable Gardens 101 that talks about the chores to do in May in your garden. I'd reprint it here, but the author expressly asked that we get her permission prior to publishing her material, so why not just click the link and read all about it?

Follow up on Earth Day how to guides

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth on Saturday. We had a great turnout and really were impressed by all of the enthusiasm.

I had quite a few people ask me for some further information or possibly a guide on how to make the recycled water bottle self watering planters we were demonstrating. I considered making a quick guide with some steps and some photographs, and came across some other guides that are just as good as anything I would make, so I'll just link to the following guide:

Instructables.com - Self watering recycled plant pot for growing herbs.

Stay tuned, as we have alot in the works right now with announcements coming soon.

Earth Day

We're going to be making our first foray into booth jockeying at green events: Saturday, from 11-4, we'll be at White Park in Riverside for the Earth Day festival. Its hosted by Habitat for Humanity of Riverside, and will feature all kinds of exciting booths and workshops.

We'll be bringing our tabletop gardens, to show the kids what they can do at home with a minimum of time and money invested. We'll also be showing how to grow using different reused cups, bowls, and pitchers, as well as newspaper pots and more painting and crafting activities.

So Saturday, if you're in the I.E. come by our booth and say hi. We'd love to see you, and we'll probably be going back to the property afterwards for some lemonade.

Community Garden!

Nova shows us his squash

Well, there have been some pretty exciting developments at the Growcology Learning Garden. Our first family plot is up and running, with our friend Twelve and his adorable children coming by and planting their tomatoes, squash, carrots, and other veggies this past weekend.

Twelve and his kids get plantin'

We've also been fortunate to have a soil scientist and landscape designer working with us. We met Sean Roulan at Oscar Clarke's house at the UCR botanic gardens, far from Sean's home on the coast of Massachusetts. He has been helping us in the garden for the past few weeks, sharing his knowledge about propagation and site design and getting dirt under his fingernails. We've been so blessed here at Growcology to have so many wonderful volunteers, our projects are really gaining momentum.

Sean spreads fresh compost in the herb garden

Now seems like a good time to introduce the Growcology team. We've written about some of our friends and volunteers, but I don't think we've written about our core founders. Here is me:

My nickname on the farm is the PoopSmythe. Can you guess why?

I'm Nick, the Chief Composting Officer for Growcology. My focus around the garden is making sure all the 'waste' stays put and the nutrients continue to cycle through our ecosystem (instead of sending them to the dump). I've been writing most of the posts on our blog so far, but hopefully the rest of the crew will be contributing their words in the coming weeks and months. My background is in Disaster Relief and food distribution. These days I'm trying to get as many people into gardening as possible, for lots of reasons.

Another one of our founders is Chief Money Officer and secretary Sarah.

Sarah has been designing websites for years, and we're lucky to have her attention to detail and impeccable editing skills. She's also a graphic artist and fire performer, and you can spot her in the garden by her fiery orange hair. She's also an excellent chef, and makes sure that all the delicious pot-herbs in the garden make it into our bellies.

Our Chief Buildin' Officer and resident carpenter and percussionist is Spencer.

Spencer fashions a fence around the community garden

Spencer spent many of the formative years of his life remodeling and building homes with his dad, a general contractor from Alabama. He's also a sound engineer, as well as an avid gardener and drummer. He and Sarah recently relocated from downtown LA to our garden in Riverside so they can stay on top of all the food we've got growing.

Our last founder, but certainly not least, is Chief Inspiration Officer Bianca.

Here Bianca chomps down on a stalk of Swiss Chard thats taller than she is!

When Bianca isn't chasing the chickens down so that she can hug them, you can find her tending the seedlings or pruning the orchard. She comes from a family of farmers and herbalists in New Mexico, and has studied and grown Ayurvedic, Chinese, and Native American herbs. She also is the founder of an inspirational media company, Words for the Many, and organizes motivational speaking engagements and backcountry retreats.

So thats our Growcology crew! We're few, but passionate, and we're lucky to have dozens of amazing volunteers helping us out. We've already profiled a few of them, and we'll continue to as the food keeps growing and experts and newbies find their way to our farm. We hope to see you there soon...

Permaculture in LA

This weekend the whole Growcology team is traveling out to downtown LA to learn from Larry Santoyo and Scott Pittman of the Permaculture Institute. Larry's company, Earthflow, is teaching their Permaculture Design Course at Project Butterfly, an awesome workshop space in the warehouse district.

So far, we've learned alot about the design principles and ethics that make permaculture such a versatile approach to problem solving. Both the instructors have great senses of humor, and they were keen on conveying to the students not to go out and preach before they've implemented aspects of the class into their lives. The last thing the environmental movement needs is half-informed, in-experienced, yet still preachy hippies.

Personally, I really respect it when people are opinionated, but not dogmatic. Larry Santoyo has been presenting the information in a very accessible way, but doesn't insist that we do things like he does. He and Scott Pittman both backed up their ideas with stories from their combined 50 or so years of experience, but they refused to give any "one size fits all" solutions. I can't wait until we implement permaculture design principles at our workshop location, and hope that we're able to bring these instructors out to teach a full certification course in the fall...