AdAgrA 2023: Digging Deeper

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Home Gardening

Cherie Duffield

Angela Ford

Intro to the Home Garden & Planning

Well, we're very honored that you came to this class.

It's beginning gardening and I see some of you who clearly have gardened before.

But we want to give you the very basics of gardening so that it's Not overwhelming and so that you feel comfortable starting a garden and knowing how to Keep it going So that when halfway through the season you don't become discouraged and give it up and let the weeds take over So let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, thank you so much for being with us.

We're thankful for gardens and for the gift you've given us through the garden.

So much beauty, so much wonder, and the good food also is such a blessing.

But we want you to come with us and be with us here, and speak through us, and help us to enjoy our time together.

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease.

I'm a home gardener, and I live with my husband Ron and our 3 daughters in Washington That's where we raised them.

I love growing beautiful produce and blessing others with a surplus gardening has been a huge blessing to our family among the many other blessings of country living.

We live on a beautiful grassy hilltop where the fertile farmland of the rolling Palouse and the blue mountains of eastern Washington meet.

Our family has enjoyed many profitable hours in our half-acre garden, which includes a large vegetable patch, berries, grapes, and a fruit orchard.

In addition, we have about 6 acres of grass, hay, and a few trees.

My exposure to gardening began as a child in the short summers of the Rocky Mountains at 7, 200 feet.

We grew potatoes, cabbage, carrots, peas, lettuce, and green beans.

But the summers were too short and cool for tomatoes and other heat-loving crops.

My grandparents, retired farmers and ranchers, also gardened, but both my grandmothers were health-conscious, and 1 in particular extolled the blessings of gardening organically upon me.

I wished more of the skills and experience had been passed down to me.

I'm grateful for their love of country living and the example they set for me of growing good food.

During my academy years I had a little gardening exposure 1 summer thinning peaches at Oklahoma Academy.

So my first real attempt to garden was at Weimar when my husband and I were working there at the time.

We ran into many obstacles such as difficulties of working the heavy clay of the Sierra foothills.

But the soil gardening bug hit me, and during the last 28 years, we used several gardening methods, including conventional row style, grow boxes, in-ground modified raised beds, and growing under landscape fabric, all with various levels of success.

In the next few days I look forward to sharing with you more details of our gardening journey and encouraging you to move forward in God's opening providence for you and your family.

May God bless each of you on your journey to the heavenly Canaan.

I'm Angela Ford, also live in Washington.

We live in Leavenworth, which is a little Christmas town.

It's a beautiful place, full of tourists.

So I don't go to town if I could help it.

We live 2 miles from town, so we have quite a lot of traffic that goes by our place.

We have the flower farm right on the road so it's an attraction people come in and we're finding it to be a real ministry we know when people are when there's funerals when there's weddings when there's a big birthday they come to us and it's it's it's a real wonderful thing we do we do have strawberries this is very new to us but we do have a strawberry field the raspberries and we Do grow corn and tomatoes and a few things for sale But I am trying to learn to manage my time a little more carefully because this last summer was the busiest summer of my existence.

So you see my son-in-law, Sean, and Vanessa have 2 children in this picture.

Christina is the taller 1, Brianna, James.

We used to do foster care so every picture has different kids.

These 2 little boys in this picture are still very much part of our family.

This is my mom and dad, Frank and Janet Pornier.

So they are the greats in our house with the great-grandchildren.

And my nieces have also been living with us.

They live there raised in Africa so Granddaughters are heaven Eden and Canaan So Now I am a full-fledged flower farmer because my daughter, who you've heard for years talking at Agra about growing flowers, is no longer the sole owner of the business I own.

So, I'm very glad to be here Gardening is wonderful.

It is it has been my Solace when you have a house full of people and you adopt children who have a lot of problems or you you're raising other people's kids the garden is where I went for solace for peace for tranquility and The more I garden the better I got at it and the more joy I found in it, but I really have always loved sharing the food with friends neighbors So anyway We can all take pleasure in beholding the many beautiful varieties of opening buds and blossoming flowers of every description and hue which our Heavenly Father has created for the happiness and benefit of His children.

It is God's design that we should love the beautiful in nature.

This was for the pleasure and happiness of man If parents would more closely follow the example of their creator in this respect I believe they would have less trouble in bringing up their children to Usefulness and happiness if parents would encourage their children to love the beauties of nature They would throw about them a safeguard Preserve them from the nippity prevailing among you and we need that today So if you're here with your children, that is a wonderful thing.

If you feel like you've come to this class and you already know your why, that's great, but let's go over a few of the why's that perhaps you may not have thought of yet.

And you know in this busy world where everything is just rush, rush, rush.

It's so nice to have a place where it's quiet and where we can observe God at work in the details of nature.

There's a direct working together with God in the garden.

You pray when those bugs come into the garden.

Children learn so much about life in the garden.

There's so much potential for physical and character development, and the garden is always ripe for presenting spiritual lessons to these little people.

In Christ's Object Lessons, we read about overcoming obstacles.

It teaches us to pay attention, to give more earnest heed to the things which we have heard.

If we will obey and listen to God's voice and keep or treasure his covenant then we will be a peculiar treasure above all people.

And even Balaam when he went to curse the camp of Israel was actually astonished to see the order of the camp of Israel and he knew that it would not be easily overthrown.

So that's a principle to us in gardening is that we have order.

You can trust what you're eating when you grow it yourself.

You know what you sprayed or didn't spray.

And that's becoming more and more important.

My little granddaughters are having trouble with detoxing.

The world is full of environmental things.

Everything is, and we're still, you know, they can't sleep or there's problems.

And it's just so important that we know where our food is coming from.

And people are inspired to eat healthier when you grow it.

You know you're like I put the time and effort into this.

I cooperated with God in this and so it's inspiring.

In fact, I grew up not really liking squash and we tried growing some squash, some banana squash, when the girls were little and nobody really ate it until we started growing it and then how how are we going to use this and so it's a good way to introduce new foods.

Soil Preparation & Weed Management

I'm glad you're all here this morning, and I hope you come back for this.

This is our second session All right, let's bow our heads Loving Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this beautiful day and for the time to gather together and to talk about the garden and you were the first gardener Lord and I just ask that you'll teach us today according to what we need in our each of our individual lives and experience and how we can cooperate with you thank you in Jesus name amen this is preparing the soil part 1 preparing the soil.

For thus saith the Lord, break up the fallow ground and sow not among thorns, Jeremiah 4.3.

In this class we're going to cover soil preparation for the garden.

Some of it is intuitive such as clearing the plot of rocks and debris and digging up the sod.

But if you don't want to dig up the sod or you are limited in some physical way, you can use a silage tarp.

I haven't actually done this but you can see where they have agriculture big black tarps on the ground.

They lay it down, the sun warms it underneath, the weeds die, it actually is it breaks up things a little bit, the worms like it, the moisture is there and it'll prepare the ground for you in a sense.

It doesn't take the rocks out or anything like that but it does, the microbes do flourish under that if it's a certain amount of time.

Thick weeds and grass disintegrate underneath it another method is No till this is my little granddaughter.

She doesn't do a lot of farming, but she pretends.

No-till method, you can use brown cardboard to lay it down on top of the grass and the weeds.

If you use colored, it has chemicals in it and plastics and if it's shiny and colorful don't use it we get we go to the hospital where my husband works we load up the suburban full of cardboard from the pharmacy We lay it down in the rows between the strawberries or whatever it is.

We're working on and I wouldn't do this between my vegetables necessarily unless you're just doing a path that will always be there because Yeah, if you're going to be changing things around you don't want a heavy mulch, but I put the cardboard down We put our wood chips on top and my paths are free of weeds always Which is really nice?

So I have watched Charles doubting on YouTube he does no-till gardening and he is a market gardener and so he's in Britain but it's still similar and it's very interesting to watch him He does a lot of experiments where he does a little plot here this way, a little plot here this way, and it's just it's very interesting.

So his name is Charles Doubting on YouTube.

He does no-dig gardening and he has books on Amazon.

1 other method we tried for no dig was the lasagna garden method.

Ok, I bought the book and I had a really rotten piece of land to work with the weeds were really awful the soil was terrible and so I thought no harm done I built beautiful lasagna beds and we had mixed results.

I don't know how I missed this, but anyway.

In some places, we had nothing because ear wigs actually bedded in those piles, and it became a nightmare of Egyptian proportions.

Believe me, you would come out in the evening and you could hear them chewing from the house.

You couldn't take a step without crushing them and it was my fault.

There's earwigs in the orchards and they were just prolific.

So I never did lasagna gardening again, but that doesn't mean it's not useful in some places.

I would make sure I did those lasagna layers months ahead.

A year ahead, 6 months ahead, let it sit all winter, let it compost properly.

You don't want to give the predators a place to grow and live.

We learned a lot about earwigs that year we didn't know that earwigs take care of their young they they cart them around and everything.

So anyway I would not do that again for myself.

But we had to take care of the earwigs by putting water in bottles with a little dish soap and we go out, it's the only way we knew how to do it, go out when it was just getting dark and actually spray them.

The second the water gets on them with the little soap in there, they curl up and die.

But if they don't get it fresh sprayed on them, it doesn't do them any harm.

The only other thing you can do is make traps.

I think it was soy sauce, molasses, and oil.

And little traps all over and they would gather in big mounds.

You can roll up newspaper and they'll be crawling inside but if you had as many as we that does not enough so it took us years to actually diminish the problem that we created by not composting our lasagna layers enough.

Okay I'm gonna let you talk about raised beds.

We've mentioned raised beds already a little bit and it's a question about what kind of wood and all.

This is Angela's garden with her how many did you say 30 boxes or something like that.

We live in orchard country that's what farmers do where we live and then the second picture is apple bins but they're really deep so it's just a lot of soil you're wasting.

I think we made our did our beds 4 by 8 or 4 by 12 with 2 by 10s or 2 by 12 for beds.

Some of you may have seen this but you can use corrugated materials, It's galvanized, I believe.

So if you're wanting to not be bending and you want to do a raised bed that might be a really good option.

I don't know if a person needs to put any holes in the bottom for drainage that might be something to consider or gravel in the bottom so you don't your roots when they go down and they will go deep if they get too wet their feet get too wet that's a problem for for plants yeah So there's a book called all new square foot gardening I have that book and I loved it.

It's not practical for me on the level that we grow But it is it is great for new new gardeners, and I love the way they do the grid and I use their their plans for how many plants you can plant in a square foot I use that all the time I when I'm out in the garden, oh, I need to plant this.

Oh there I need to plant so many onions in a square foot.

It's it just is really helpful So you can glean a little thing from each method and make your own And I'll just back to the raised bed idea again 1 thing you can do with that is yes like a square foot gardening but you can also it helps you plant more intensely and I I wish I had a picture of this but I once drew out little triangles.

You don't have to plant your plants always in a row.

You can stagger them or offset them to each other and that gives the plants an opportunity.

They actually like each other's company, not too crowded but they like each other's company and I'm thinking back at how I came across this you know traditionally you you make a row right and then you have a path and then you have you know each single row is the way I think a lot of people garden when I was a kid.

But if you think in terms of these beds, you have your paths, you have all this growing space where your feet are not tramping on the roots, compressing the soil, and so that's where your gardening is for us to have elbow room too, right?

So the plants need that space around each other.

But if you plant, like maybe you would do 3 or 5 across a bed of something, then the next row you would do 4 or 2 and then you can go back and forth that way and it's kind of you can get more plants in that space you use your space more productively the roots have have their adequate space So I found that that method helpful It's what we do in the flower field It's always upset like that it it just works so Okay Isn't her garden beautiful?

30 inch wide beds is what you'll hear the farmers, the market gardeners talking about.

It is a standard because the tools fit, your irrigation fits, everything fits really well with that size.

Tractor plowing, if you have a tractor it's very easy and it's very convenient but there is the downside of plowing too much.

You can destroy the delicate microbiome of the soil.

It's compromised by tearing up the ground over and over again.

You want those earthworms and you want them the microbes that grow there.

1 other downside that you might not think about is every time you plow you're stirring up seeds that were down in the soil.

You're bringing them up to the top and then boom they grow and you have more weeds than you did last year and you wonder why and so you plow again and you bring up more seeds and it just continues You know and and so that's just something to really think about If you if you're rotating your crops in zones for the benefit of your health soil You could potentially destroy your own efforts by dragging the plow through those zones Also, So we will talk about it a little more later but you plant your tomatoes here this year, here next year, there the third year and you're planting beans there and then you're planting broccoli you know and and you're you're rotating for your soils benefit because each plant takes a different thing and each plant has pathogens that they leave behind you know the diseases or the the insects that like them the most.

If you're dragging that soil through each biome what's the what you know you've just destroyed what you tried to do by having a crop rotation.

Rototillers are powerful tools to break up the ground and prepare the soil for planting and these can have an advantage if you don't have a tractor, if you don't have access to your plot with you know larger equipment.

They're often necessary, they can be convenient and quick and make your soil perfectly crumbly, however as with a tractor plowing overuse of a tiller can actually cause compaction and we we had a little bit of that this spring.

We still till with a tractor, but then we tilled early.

Our window is either we have a lot of times May and June rains so if we don't till in April we have to wait until we get a window it dries out.

But this year we had a lot of really really wet June, unusually wet for our region And the soil compacted after the tilling.

And so then it's like, OK, I'll show you later, but we have actually landscape fabric down, so we're not going to till it again.

But so there's some of those things to think about, what's your context and what's going to work for you.

And like Angela said, the rototiller can also bring up those weed seeds to the surface.

Mulching between the rows is often a better choice for keeping the weeds down than repeated tilling.

If you're dependent on a tiller, planting will often be delayed in the spring while waiting for the soil to be dry enough after the winter snow and rain.

And this is something I'm actually in the process of rethinking a little bit, because where we have those beds, so we usually till like the tractor and then when all the girls were home, we would dig the aisles.

And so we had 7 or so aisles and that takes, that's a lot of work to move all that soil into the raised beds.

So I'm actually rethinking a little bit because it might be that we'll have more success if we go to another method.

So gardening doesn't need to be expensive.

And sometimes we've borrowed the neighbor's.

Just had them come and plow something when we didn't own a tractor.

Seeds

Loving Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this day for being with us for giving us these topics or to stretch our minds and Grow us in so many ways and Lord as we talk about the seed we think of you as the Word of God who came to give us life and we just ask that you would guide our talk today and our understanding and that we can cooperate with you in your plan for gardening in Jesus name Amen God said I give you Every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth, and every tree that has fruit with seed in it, they will be yours for food.

While the earth remaineth, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.

In my binder, if you want to look at it later, there's these plans for how to decide how many seeds you need to buy.

There's charts for where to plant in your garden.

And she has these for free on the website.

And I tried to get an easier link, and this is all I could come up with.

So if you can write that down, I think it somehow didn't make it on the handout.

So while you're writing that down, I just want to remind you, we're going to mention quite a bit of different pieces of equipment.

Some of it's expensive, Some of it's cheap.

But gardening is not meant to be more expensive than buying food from the grocery store.

Right now, buying food from the grocery store costs you an arm and a leg.

It is so expensive and gets more expensive every time I go.

So I just want to remind you that you doesn't have to be expensive.

You don't have to own every single awesome piece of equipment, okay?

We're gonna mention what I use, she's gonna mention what she uses.

We don't both have the same things necessarily and you don't have to have it all but maybe they would work something would work for you okay so we want you to start small and having a garden should save you money in the end.

And during the long winter days, which right now in Texas in January, it doesn't feel like winter, but at our house it was cold, lots of snow.

So when you have some time to look through those catalogs or look online and kind of get an idea.

So if you kind of think of the categories of what you want to grow, then you can zone in on what variety you would like to grow of those things.

Also take note of your family's preferences.

You know, if you don't like to eat Swiss chard, don't plant 20 feet of Swiss chard.

But if you like green beans or you like carrots, tomatoes, start with those things.

Like maybe you want to try 1 new thing or something every year.

And then take note of how much you're able to plant, care for, and harvest successfully.

Because this is not just starting and getting it in the garden, it's when the harvest comes on, how much, and believe me, when harvest comes on and you have berries and trees and Sometimes it gets overwhelming because everything needs attention.

You know, do you want, are you wanting to just eat fresh out of the garden while it's garden season?

Is that, you know, if that's what you want, then plant accordingly.

If you're wanting to preserve food for the garden, from the garden for the winter, then you may want to plant a little more.

Do you know how many canned green beans or frozen green beans you might want to use per week along with how much you might think you would use for summer eating.

But calculate 1 quart of green beans a week for 52 weeks.

We have a lot in our house, so I actually have to do more than that.

Because 1 quart of green beans for 15 people doesn't go anywhere.

So plan per week, but then minus the amount that you would eat in the summer months because you'll just be eating the fresh ones instead of the canned ones.

So that is about 40 quarts of beans and peas and dill pickles, she says, and double or triple for tomatoes.

And I do spaghetti sauce and ketchup and salsa.

How many pounds of tomatoes do you think that takes?

Then be specific with your vegetable list.

If you know you want to grow cucumbers, you know, grow cucumbers.

So we planned to get together back in Washington, but we actually lived 3 or 4 hours apart.

We have both been exceedingly busy with our families.

They put a new roof on and new windows in their house, and we have been building my mom and dad's house.

And when you have to dig up tons of dahlias in the fall and can the tomatoes and go glean the peaches.

And it's just, we never actually got together.

So we've been working pretty well together, don't you think?

I grow about 5 different kinds, but maybe your family is used to the kind you get at Costco, the little long English cucumbers.

You like that kind, that's what you know your family will eat.

Series

Home Gardening

Tips for Staple Crops

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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