Urban Gardening

Here is a shallow pool garden, made by laying out a layer of rubber, maybe from an old innertube, with something to hold up the edges slightly. Then you can plant and use a mulch of some sort to help support your plant and hold the moisture in. Here we used small stones as a mulching substance. This bed also uses the Bucket irrigation as explained in the previous post. 

This picture is a wick bed with sweet habaneros demonstrating different methods of mulching, in the front we have soda cans, middle is composting matter and the back has wood chips.

Here is an example of a roof top chicken coop. The chickens provide eggs, meat,and manure (for fertilizing). And as you can see it is not a waste of space the chickens have a wick garden on the roof providing a place to grow vegetables and shade for the chickens.

This is a wick garden at another level, say you were a woman who sold herbs in the market and you go out and cut your herbs in the morning and take them to market to sell, by midday they are wilting and at the end of the day you have to dispose of what you have left over. Well if you were to make a portable structure such as this one, by placing a piece of rubber over a bamboo frame and then make a wick garden on top of that and grow your herbs in this garden. This would give you the opportunity to  carry your garden with you to the market and therefore have fresh herbs to cut all day long and not waste any.

This is and example of some gardens made out of old gutters. These tend to dry out quickly and could use some brillient brainstorming to make them more effective. 

Well I hope you have enjoyed a brief tour of the Urban Garden area of the Global Village I hope to introduce you to all the areas over the next few weeks.

Here is a way you can make a hanging garden in case if you don't have any patio or roof space, but you have somewhere to hang things.

This is an example of a compost garden, where you change out the composted dirt every year and place compost materials down first and then just a inch or two of good soil on top and you plant in the top layer of soil while the underlayer of compost decomposes throughout  the year. creating a fertile soil.

Here we have a wick bed and in the next picture you will seed a close up of the carpet used as a wick. Basicly you take an old carpet or blanket to act as a wick and lay it down on your roof the cover it with an inch or two of soil or composed material and plant in that. You always want to becareful to mulch these roof top gardens to help hold in the moisture. 

Here you see  the carpet underneath then the dirt and a mulch on top.

Finally so that you don't have to continually water these shallow beds you can see the 5-gallon buckets in a couple of pictures, which are used to water. You drill a small hole in the lid and fill it with water and fertilizer and then invert the bucket on to you carpet and the carpet will wick the water throughout the entire bed. You only need to fill the buckets 1 or 2 a day and have one or 2 buckets per bed, depending on the size and the weather, then your bucket waters for you while you are accomplishing other tasks of the day.

An example of what your house might look like in an urban area, if you are poor. You would pick up scraps from the dump and make a home. You could put tire gardens on your roof to help keep it from blowing away.

This is a method of urban gardening that is a light weight solution, it is called a sock and can garden. Plants need 4 things to grow Air, Water, Light and.....No not soil, but nutrients. So the way the sock and can garden works is you take old pop cans and old socks and make holes in the cans and stuff the socks with the cans and place them in an old container. Then you can plant plugs (plants that have been started in a tray) of some sort of plant in the rows of cans and mulch them, you must water with some sort of fertilized water to feed the plants and the socks act as a wicking material to spread the nutrients around to the plants and eventually the roots grow into the socks and cans and the plants grow (as seen below). As you can see in the picture above there is also an old pot with holes in it in the middle so you can keep an eye on the water level in the container. This container is very light weight.

Another small container garden you can make is with the use of an old tire. Cut off the top and line the bottom with plastic and then invert the top part that you cut off and place it on top of the plastic so that  it hold the plastic in place. You can fill with dirt, compost, some cans and then dirt etc. depending on how much weight your roof, balcony etc. can hold. Then plant something in it and you have a  source of vegetables growing at your urban home.

Here you can see some examples of tire gardens and other discarded containers used to hold dirt and plants.

Let me introduce a few of the people who have to put up with me now.

This is Heidi displaying some of her amaranth she had to harvest early because her amaranth is being grown for seed and a couple of the plants appeared to be a hybrid and we don't really want that for our seed mix. Heidi is the monsoon intern and works with me in the seed bank on Tuesdays and Fridays, she the one teaching me how germination is done. Heidi is from Canada and is about 6' tall!

Jason is the Rain forest intern and he LOVES snakes and reptiles. Here he is talking to a tour group about the rain forest as well as getting ready to plant yams at the bases of the melaleuca trellises seen on the right side of the picture. 

This is Jenna her official title is Intern Wife, she is Jason's lovely wife and volunteers many hours every week in various areas and is giving a tour on this occasion.

Debbie our New Zealand native, who is currently responsible for the Lowlands area of the Global village. She will be training me to take over next month AHHhHHHhhhh! 

Danny (farm manager), Debbie and Phoebe working on setting poles for a new trellis in the Lowlands. Phoebe is my roommate, she is from Champaign Ill. area and is the other new intern at ECHO. Phoebe is also around 6' tall and Debbie is about 5'10". In all the height average among the 6 female interns is rather high. I think the shortest female intern is 5'7". I am thus far still the tallest intern.

So here are a few of the people I rub shoulders with everyday hopefully it will help to have a face to put with names as I throw them out from time to time. 

The past two weeks have consisted of orientations most mornings and a fairly regular schedule in the afternoons. 

What do I mean by regular? Well usually our afternoons go like this...

Monday and Wednesday are either seminars or hands on learning as well as some study time occasionally  on Wed.

Tuesday and Fridays are either seed bank or nursery afternoons, depending on if you are a seed bank intern or a nursery intern. I am a seed bank intern so I spend those afternoons germinating seeds. Every year we make sure that the seed we 

send out is still viable.

Thursday afternoons are designated for Farm work. Where basically we all do whatever Danny the farm manager decides needs done. Usually this consist of a larger project we all work on together. Last Thursday we planted a variety trial of amaranth. We planted lots and lots of amaranth I think there were 10-12 different varieties. Amaranth is a grain that is very nutritious, it contains a complete protein, lysine, a very high fiber content, as well as many vitamins and minerals. So if you want to enhance you bread to contain a complete          

 protein and be a lot more nutritious, 

substitute amaranth flour for about 25% of your flour.

This past Thursday the majority of us worked on preparing a large garden plot for a Papaya variety trial that needs to be planted out in a couple of weeks. We had to rake up most of the mulch and remove it, because Papaya's don't like to be wet and then form raised beds by mounding the dirt. After about an hour of raking I got thrown into fire duty. We had started burning our enormous burn pile in the morning and my job was to go around the fire and throw the big stuff back into the inferno. So the rest of my afternoon was spent dancing around the fire. Pictured Top: A small portion of the amaranth we planted. Middle: the bed we were preparing for the Papaya variety trial. Bottom: the fire at about 7 pm that night.

Beautiful landscaping around the Community Center.

Joanna playing ping pong.

That was Monday, the past two days I have been in various orientations, working out on the farm with various interns, and working in the seed bank. Hopefully all our orientations will be finished by the end of next week and I will be able to be out on the farm learning from the other interns. I am still adjusting to getting up early and getting enough sleep in a new environment. 

Burgess' workshop (renovated to be a guest house)

Formerly a radio control house, now a mini museum.

Battery  cases that were left on the island.

Other inventions that Burgess left.

The community center. A house built for relaxation and to serve as a community center when/if the island is developed.

Cool place to relax.

Banyan tree said to have been planted by Thomas Edison a good friend of Charles Burgess.

The island had its own water desalination plant.

Ok so my first day of work consisted of an Island retreat! In which we went to a private island first owned by Charles Burgess, inventor (dry cell batteries). Tough! I know.


Main house was a spanish style mansion.

Beautiful!

MY CLOSET! So to say the least my closet is a wee bit stuffed. I had to come up with creative methods of making the most of the space I had. To start with my clothes rack is just under 5 ft off the ground, so I had to come up with something to hang my long dresses on and even some of the shorter ones. As you can see I solved that problem with a hook over the door.
I was able to fit a small shoe shelf in the bottom of my closet for shoes and I have 3 multiple pant hanger to take care of hanging most of my pants in the least amount of space. There is probably 4-5 feet from the shelf to the ceiling in the closet, so I thought about how to make the best use of the space. 
What I came up with was to turn one of my tubs on it's side to stack my shirts in and misc. stuff on top of the tub. Then I put a couple of plastic drawers and stacked some folders and books on top of those. Next to that, which you can't really see very well, is two crates stacked and filled with clothes as well as misc. stuff on top of them.  At the end of my bed I have two crates stacked which will remain there through out the duration of my stay and serve also as storage space. YEAH! I finally got it all squeezed in!

Last night there was as  square dance with ECHO staff and another mission group in town we all had great fun! 

This morning I am googled reformed churches in the area once more and was delighted to find one that is a PCA, to make a long story short it may be the closest thing I will find minus psalm singing to our church. PTL!

Tomorrow I officially start! From what I hear we are having a rare day of intern retreat, so I have a nice day of getting to know everyone.

I will continue to post as often as I can, but after this I imagine it will not be every day.

This is my room after everything was unloaded from by overstuffed car. It was a mess all Friday night and Saturday too.

My bathroom!

Finally I got it all put away. I took a trip to the store for more organizational tools (ie storage drawers and over the door hooks).
As you can see I disconnected my headboard and put my bed on risers so I can use the space under the bed for storage. This helped a great deal to so that I actually have a place to put everything. It is stuffed full under that bed! Wait till you see my closet!