This class will look at strategies and methods to get maximum efficiencies of space, yield and labor from home gardens. It will include plans to help you know what your annual results, costs and rewards will be before you event start.

AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

<p>This class will look at strategies and methods to get maximum efficiencies of space, yield and labor from home gardens. It will include plans to help you know what your annual results, costs and rewards will be before you event start.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive: Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens

Bob Gregory

Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens Part 3

Okay, I know it was a long time ago when we talked about this, but I want to mention Rogan, you dared.

If you're like me, you know, 10 minutes go by and whoops.

And the reason I just want to mention this again and put this slide back up here is that this is really valuable.

And most gardeners and even many commercial growers are very, very reluctant to do this.

And I'm just saying I don't want you to be callous but to everything there is a season and you know, I I get a little bit frustrated too sometimes when I see a crop that I've tended to and lovingly cared for and you know plucked the bounty from and then basically have to terminate it before its natural life is over.

That's that's that's I can see how that can be a little bit troubling but it's it's essential.

It's really important for a practical approach to protecting your garden.

And again, it's not just for your crop cycles, but it grossly diminishes disease and pest problems too.

So that's, you know, that's the satisfaction that you have when you take those crops out.

What might appear to be prematurely to you is that you're actually securing the environment for for the long term.

By block planting again, when those beans have peaked out in their production, I'm going to plow them into the ground and plant another crop right behind it.

And that will have far more value than whatever few residual beans I would have had coming from that.

And here too, those are my smaller high tunnels that you see behind them, and this is a good photograph too, to demonstrate the, well actually let's go to the next 1, demonstrate the ventilation that I use.

Instead of using rolled up sides, I just take the upper panels off the end and take the doors off and that stays ventilated very well through the summer growing season.

I do get some heat gain in there, 7 to 8 degrees.

I had some contention about that at 1 time.

In fact, I suggested in West Virginia for the past 8 or 9 years, there has been a strong investment by the Department of Agriculture and by the University Extension Service to encourage small-scale growers.

We're living in a part of the country that's considered a food desert.

We have very little production in West Virginia.

And, you know, a few years ago, it was recognized that since everything that comes in in the way of foodstuffs to West Virginia and other parts of the country too for that matter is brought in by trucks if something happens the oil supply guess what folks we all starve So it's not a matter of just whether food is available or not, it's the transportation system that's involved in getting it to us also that needs to be considered.

And they have made some big investments in small scale agriculture as a consequence of that.

That is where the funding for the USDA or the NRCS high tunnel program came from.

There has been a large farm to school movement that's been in place for the last few years to help encourage school systems to buy locally produced foods.

And as a consequence of some of this activity on the part of the government agencies.

There's a gentleman at West Virginia University Extension Service, Dr.

Louis Jett, who has worked specifically to help small growers discover better ways to use high tunnels, to use season extension.

And a lot of that work has been dedicated to finding varieties that work well in a high tunnel and what's well adapted to West Virginia and that type of thing.

And He and I have gotten to know each other pretty well.

And he was asking me about what I thought of the high tunnel program.

And I told him, well, I think it's a great program, but I think the specs on the high tunnel need some revision because they were advocating long high tunnels with roll up sides.

And I said, you know, I think it'd be a better idea to advocate a shorter tunnel with open end walls in terms of ventilating.

So in order to satisfy his curiosity, 1 year I took 1 of my high tunnels and I rolled up the side on it, closed the end walls, rolled up the side, and we hung a recording thermometer in there that recorded the temperature for a 30 day period of time.

And the high tunnel that was right beside it, which was this 1, I left just as it is and we hung a recording thermometer in there for a 30 day period of time.

And it was a good exercise because it proved to me what I had thought.

And that is that the open end walls on about a 50-foot structure is totally adequate and cools just as well as the roll-up sides do.

We had a half degree variation on about 3 days, over the course of time, not 3 days in a row, but there were 3 days during that 30 day period of time when the high tunnel without the roll up sides was actually a half degree cooler than the high tunnel that had the roll-up sides.

So anyway, that's part of the reason for the size of this high tunnel.

And really for home gardeners, you don't need anything bigger than that anyway because you're gonna grow an enormous amount of food in a high tunnel.

It's an enormous amount of food that comes out of there.

This particular tunnel has lettuce planted in the center row here.

That lettuce is planted on a 1 plant per square foot area.

Someone had mentioned square foot planting before and this is kind of an adaptation to it, but the spring lettuce works very well on a 1 per square foot basis, and this high tunnel is about 700 square feet.

You subtract the walkways, I can get 500 or 600 heads of lettuce in that high tunnel, and I can do that 5 times a year.

That's a lot of productivity, a lot of productivity.

So, you know, that's, in terms of generating income for me, that's, you know, that's between 4 and $6, 000 a year in 1 high tunnel that cost me 800 dollars initially to build.

So that's the way the economics works there.

The block planting is evidenced here too.

You can see at the end of that bed I have some red romaine lettuce.

I don't have a lot of demand for that, but I planted in a block rather than in rows so that when it comes time to harvest it, I can harvest that block and replant it.

And then when the romaine is harvested a little bit later I harvest that and then can replant that too.

The left bed is a different variety of kale and again by using the block planting method we can put a lot of plants in a small space and do pretty well with generating income.

Now I'm a market farm, and 1 of the things that is necessary for home gardeners is what to do with the produce that you've got that's a little overabundant.

We'll go back to our broccoli crop and you know if you've planted more than what you can use immediately, if you're not going to can it, A lot of these crops will store very well even in the refrigerator for a good period of time.

And this afternoon we're going to talk about some of the methods of preparing the crop as well as what to do with the crop for longer term storage.

The title of the program this afternoon is Bagging the Bounty and basically it's how to make most efficient use out of what you harvest.

Some of that starts before you even harvest the crop.

Even if you're thinking of canning or freezing products, we're going to discuss some of the aspects of what's necessary from a grower's perspective, not just the kitchen perspective about what to do with their crops.

But 1 thing you can do is use cold storage.

So if you're a home gardener, it doesn't take a lot of space in cold storage is what I should say.

This is all of the cold storage that I have on my farm right here, these 2 commercial refrigerators on the left-hand side of the picture here.

Those are 4 feet wide, 2 feet deep, and 6 feet tall.

That's the equivalent to maybe 5 large household refrigerators, maybe 6 at the most, and I, by cycling my crops through these, this is all the cold storage I need for all of the produce that comes off my farm.

And so you don't need a big walk-in cold room if you're a small home-scale grower.

You might disagree with me if you're growing cut flowers, you know, in large quantity, but you don't need a lot of extra space, but it is really helpful for a home gardener that is, you know, producing a good portion of the food for yourself to have an extra refrigerator, even if you don't use it all the time.

So if you can find a used large refrigerator and you put it in the garage or an outbuilding or someplace where you're not gonna use it all the time just to handle some of the overflow of your crop production, it can pay for itself real quickly too.

And it's very much a good idea to have that.

We can store cauliflower and broccoli and cabbage and things like that for anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks in just a refrigerator So you know when you consider that sounds kind of extraordinary But when you consider that the cabbage and the cauliflower that you're buying here today in the grocery store is Already 4 to 6 weeks old because it made the trip all the way here from California It's it's not that that extreme But if you're growing your props crops properly and you harvest them properly and handle them properly, all of which we're going to talk about this afternoon, then some additional cold storage space for you can be really valuable and make more efficient use of your crop too.

Okay, I want to talk a little bit about some of the tools and techniques that I use.

And this is really where the rubber meets the road here about having 2 hands taking care of 2 acres.

Believe me, I don't like wasting steps and I don't like wasting time.

I absolutely love farming, but at my core, I'm lazy.

I don't want to do any more than I have to.

I want to get the best return I can for every movement that I make on my farm.

And 2 acres isn't a huge area, but from 1 end of my production area to the other end of my production area, it's about a half a mile.

Maybe, No, I'm sorry, a little less than that.

Maybe about, it's more than a quarter of a mile, less than a half a mile.

If I get out to that far end and I realize, oops, I left my tool or I left something back at the other end, I'm walking a half a mile or more and wasting time just to go retrieve something.

So we want to think about ways that we can make a minimum of movement and save your steps.

If I'm walking from 1 end to the farm and I know that an hour later I'm gonna need something at that end of the farm, even though I may be coming back, I've gotta keep these things kind of in inventory in my mind so that I'm taking what I need, where I need it, before I need it.

And that basically involves just staging tools and equipment and hoses and things where they're readily available when I need them.

And even if I'm going out to cultivate and I'm taking my hoe with me, if I know that later that day, I'm gonna be planting some plants out in that area and I'm gonna need a hose to water the plants in, take the hose too, you know, be sensible and try to limit your steps.

Each of us is going to have a different capacity to do this and a different way of going about this but it's really important to be efficient in what you do and look at the big picture for what you're trying to accomplish that day, not just the immediate task that's in front of you.

Whenever I'm walking through the fields, if I do have a weed issue and I've got a large weed that's popping up in a bed, I don't just look at it, walk on and say, I'm going to get that later when I do weeding.

If I'm walking by it, it gets ripped out on my way to go do something else.

And constantly keep the big picture in mind of what you're doing out in the garden so that you don't put yourself in little boxes of specialized tasks.

Okay, that's just sensible, just common sense.

Remember too that when it comes to water hoses, only firemen coil their hoses.

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Intensive: Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens

Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens Part 3

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Greater Efficiencies for Home Gardens Part 3

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