• LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Backyard Vegetable Gardening & Livestock Raising & Sustainable Living

chickenscratch, I wish I had some acres. I have a small in town lot. My uncle has lots of room though, that's why he lets me have a garden there too.

I'll try harder to get some pics up.
 
Ive started to have to mow my lawn. I don't know what a compost pile is.
What are the benefits of starting a compost pile.
I was thinking of just getting a round trash barrel, filling it with clippings and tumbling it from time to time. Would this work?
 
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Ive started to have to mow my lawn. I don't know what a compost pile is.
What are the benefits of starting a compost pile.
I was thinking of just getting a round trash barrel, filling it with clippings and tumbling it from time to time. Would this work?

No, you need a good mix of green and brown waste for it to compost plus you need a good flow of air. Otherwise it will turn into a smelly, moldy pile of lawn clippings. A good mix of kitchen scraps, newspaper, and dead leaves should be added to moderate amounts of lawn clippings. Too much of any one thing will cause it to smell and not actually produce compost.
 
Pyramid Vegetable Gardens for utilizing space in suburban areas.

I love this thread! Yay permaculture!


Check these out:

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Also reading a LOT about forest gardens:

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Picture yourself in a forest where almost everything around you is food. Mature and maturing fruit and nut trees form an open canopy. If you look carefully, you can see fruits swelling on many branches—pears, apples, persimmons, pecans, and chestnuts. Shrubs fill the gaps in the canopy. They bear raspberries, blueberries, currants, hazelnuts, and other lesser-known fruits, flowers, and nuts at different times of the year. Assorted native wildflowers, wild edibles, herbs, and perennial vegetables thickly cover the ground. You use many of these plants for food or medicine. Some attract beneficial insects, birds, and butterflies. Others act as soil builders, or simply help keep out weeds. Here and there vines climb on trees, shrubs, or arbors with fruit hanging through the foliage—hardy kiwis, grapes, and passionflower fruits. In sunnier glades large stands of Jerusalem artichokes grow together with groundnut vines. These plants support one another as they store energy in their roots for later harvest and winter storage. Their bright yellow and deep violet flowers enjoy the radiant warmth from the sky. This is an edible forest garden.

What is Edible Forest Gardening?
Edible forest gardening is the art and science of putting plants together in woodlandlike patterns that forge mutually beneficial relationships, creating a garden ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts. You can grow fruits, nuts, vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, other useful plants, and animals in a way that mimics natural ecosystems. You can create a beautiful, diverse, high-yield garden. If designed with care and deep understanding of ecosystem function, you can also design a garden that is largely self-maintaining. In many of the world's temperate-climate regions, your garden would soon start reverting to forest if you were to stop managing it. We humans work hard to hold back succession—mowing, weeding, plowing, and spraying. If the successional process were the wind, we would be constantly motoring against it. Why not put up a sail and glide along with the land's natural tendency to grow trees? By mimicking the structure and function of forest ecosystems we can gain a number of benefits.

Why Grow an Edible Forest Garden?
While each forest gardener will have unique design goals, forest gardening in general has three primary practical intentions:

High yields of diverse products such as food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, 'farmaceuticals' and fun;
A largely self-maintaining garden and;
A healthy ecosystem.
Read More.

Like so:

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Also for our resident mycological production artists I give you a wonderful way to utilize tree logs in a holistically harmonious and fun as fuck way:

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Source: http://fingerlakespermaculture.org/?p=1380

Or use straw bale:

How to Grow Your Own Oyster Mushrooms on Straw
Fungi — by Samuel Alexander January 30, 2013

by Dr Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute and a lecturer with the Office for Environmental Programs, University of Melbourne.

I’ve been experimenting recently with growing my own oyster mushrooms, and as you can see from the photos, I’ve met with some success. I was motivated to explore mushroom cultivation partly because I’m a vegetarian and want to produce my own high-protein alternatives to meat; but I was also interested in using so-called ‘dead space’ to grow food (either inside or down the shady side of the house). Oyster mushrooms tick both these boxes, and they are also ridiculously tasty. Seriously.

Not only that, oyster mushrooms are extremely expensive when purchased from a supermarket, so it makes sense to grow them yourself. Currently in Melbourne they are going for $34 per kilo.

I’m no mushroom-growing expert, so do your own research, but below I’ve outlined how I’ve successfully grown my own oyster mushrooms on straw. It’s surprisingly easy, although you do need to take appropriate precautions to make sure you are growing the right mushrooms and in a hygienically safe way. Apparently white oyster mushrooms are the easiest variety to grow, which is why I started with them.

What you need:

Straw (I used pea-straw successfully but I’m told wheat straw is better)
Robust plastic bags, medium or large size (which can be reused)
Oyster mushroom spawn (which I got from CERES in Melbourne and are also available here). You may need to find your local supplier.
Spray bottle and water

My 10-Step Method:

Before you begin, wash your hands and clean all your surfaces well. It’s very important to be hygienic when cultivating mushrooms, as you do not want to grow the wrong types of fungi! Good mushrooms are really good; bad mushrooms are really bad. Fortunately, oysters mushrooms are very distinctive.
Once you’ve got all the materials, the first thing you need to do is pasteurise the straw. From my research online, I discovered that this essentially means heating the straw in water to around 70-75 degrees (Celsius) and holding it at that temperature for around 45-60 minutes. I used a large Fowlers cooking pot. Pasteurisation kills the bad bacteria but leaves the good bacteria. Before you put the straw in the pot, most websites recommend that the straw is cut up into small pieces, around 1 to 3 inches in length. (To be honest, I didn’t cut up my straw, and I still grew mushrooms, but perhaps if I had cut it up my production might have been greater — further experimenting required.)
Once you’ve pasteurised the straw, take it out of the heating pot with tongs and let it sit in a clean tub while it cools down. Be careful as you’re dealing with a lot of hot water and the pot will be heavy. It’s important you don’t put the mushroom spawn into the straw until the straw is at room temperature otherwise you will kill the spawn.
When the straw has cooled down, pack your robust plastic bags with straw quite tightly, and then distribute some of the mushroom spawn throughout the straw. I put about three or four pieces of spawn-covered dowel in each bag, but perhaps one would have been fine (further experimenting required). The straw should not be dripping wet, but it should still be damp from the pasteurisation.
At this stage, sterilise a skewer or a nail (by pouring boiling water over it) and jab holes in the bags every 3 inches or so. This lets some air in, but not too much.
You now have to find a home for you mushrooms. Keep them out of direct sunlight. They like some indirect light and I am told they like it best at around 15-20 degrees Celsius. (It’s been considerably warmer than that in Melbourne over the last two months, and mine have grown very well, but again perhaps the yields would have been greater had the temperature been cooler). More experimenting required. I kept my bags inside to minimise the risk of contamination.
Now you wait while the mushroom spawn develops into mycelium and begins taking over the entire bag. Mycelium looks a bit like white furry cobwebs, and you should start seeing it develop in the first couple of weeks. It’s important that your bags of straw stay moist, but not dripping wet. I found that the water from the pasteurisation was sufficient to keep the straw suitably moist without needing to spray with water.
After a number of weeks (depending on the size of your bags) the mycelium should have spread across the entire bag of straw. It is at this stage (which for me was about 5 weeks later) your mushrooms should start forming. I cut some slightly larger holes in the bag, although I’m not sure this was necessary. The mushrooms will decide that they want to grow out of one or more of the holes you’ve created, and they’ll usually grow in one or two clusters.
Now comes the fun part. The mushrooms essentially double in size every day, so within a week or so you should have good-sized oyster mushrooms. Mist them with water two or three times a day over this period – again, not so they are dripping, just so they are moist. The mushrooms should be harvested while their rims are still curled over a little and pointing downwards. If their rims seem to be turning upward, it’s probably time to harvest.
Harvest and eat. To harvest the mushrooms give them a twist at the base. This ensures that you leave the very bottom of the mushroom still in the bag. You want to leave that part behind as it is needed for the subsequent flushes of mushrooms. If you keep the mushrooms moist and in suitable conditions, you should get three or four flushes of mushrooms, although I’m told the first and second flushes are the most productive. I’m currently harvesting my second flush. When your bags stop producing, the straw can be used as mulch for the garden. (Alternatively, my understanding is that you can distribute some of your straw into new bags of fresh straw and the growing process begins again).

If there are any mushroom experts out there, do let me know if you have any advice, and if any of you decide to begin cultivating your own mushrooms, do let me know how you get on. I’m going to keep experimenting in the hope of developing the easiest and most productive methods.

That’s all for now. I’ve got to go cook me some shrooms.


http://permaculturenews.org/2013/01/30/how-to-grow-your-own-oyster-mushrooms-on-straw/

Great thread.
 
^^awesome post.

i have a buddy that grows mushrooms. last year i lined my beds with some of his spent mushroom logs and we got a few pounds of oysters out of the deal. pretty cool.

he lives in my house now, lol.

we emptied our compost drum over the beds at the start of this season, and tragedy! we didn't let it cook down enough to kill all the seeds. so i came outside one day and my entire yard is covered in squash. what kind? couldn't even tell you. some are huge butternut looking ones, some summer squash, all of the squash. pretty incredible. and eggs are coming in like mad and kevins mushrooms. rolling in the butternut deep over here.
 
My jalepeno plant today. Ive been taking them off for eating for about a month now.


My tomato plants that I removed from the rest of my plants. Bl'er diagnose them with blight. The one on the left looks like death, but is still fruiting a little. They both are.

 
Nice healthy looking plants beagleboy, and exceptionally crisp photos as well! :)

I need to get outside and work in the garden a bit. Perhaps I will tomorrow, and it may help lift me out of the rut I've been in.
 
Nice healthy looking plants beagleboy, and exceptionally crisp photos as well! :)

I need to get outside and work in the garden a bit. Perhaps I will tomorrow, and it may help lift me out of the rut I've been in.

it always does. i sit in the middle of my tiny ass garden like a crazy person all the time, and just sit there. i don't know, it makes me feel alive??? i'm a fucking loser.
 
it always does. i sit in the middle of my tiny ass garden like a crazy person all the time, and just sit there. i don't know, it makes me feel alive??? i'm a fucking loser.

I have a container garden on a small 3x10 slab of concrete and I often find myself just sitting in the middle of it also. It’s actually very relaxing to have my own personal “garden” top sit in as I live in the middle of a big city and have to share parks with everyone else.
 
I know that feel. I have even spent 5 hours weeding my lawn with a fork just because. Plus I was high

the only time i like pulling weeds is when i'm high. since i've been interviewing for jobs i haven't puffed in like 3 months. i have a lot of weeds in my garden.
 
Potting up some basil for sure soon. I've been using bought pesto heaps and want to try and perfect homemade stuff.

I used to make it lots but was never happy with it compared to store bought jars. I guess I'll just experiment with a few recipes.
 
My basil is starting to yellow with the winter. Either it doesn't love the cold or its life cycle is finishing, its even happening to the thai stuff though and that's meant to be perennial. The younger plants look a bit happier, might be time to get some seeds out soon.
 
Anyone have tips for lemon balm? (Melissa)? the bees love it, and so do I. It grows like septic minges in a syphilitic whore-farm, but thats still not fast enough for my liking, I could drink balm tea by the gallon and still be wanting more.
 
I have some acreage up in the mountains. This season has been pretty good to us. We had a great early start this spring only to have deer and bear problems. Then a late temp drop for one or two nights (from 55+ at night- to mid upper 30's) Once the fence was up for good, we got everything replanted in about a dozen raised beds all two feet tall. The sizes are 6x6, 6x12, 6 x 24. We have some great roma tomatoes as well as earlys, cherry, etc. Lot's and lot's of cucumbers, zucchini, onion, garlic, lots and lot's of hot peppers, bell peppers, corn, assorted melons and strawberry. The zucchini has been a big grower. Too many of them for my liking honestly. They have ranged between 14-28 inches. I believe my biggest was 4.5-5 lbs. <SNIP>
 
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