[geeks] Greenery and brambles...

[Chris Hedemark]

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On Sunday, October 27, 2002, at 09:54 PM, Mike Hebel wrote:

> I'm actually thinking hydroponics when we finally get an apartment.  
> not as simple as a garden but far more flexible.  I actually like 
> tending plants.

Have you ever heard of aquaponics?  It takes the hydroponics idea to 
the next level, using a second crop (fish, usually) to create waste 
products to feed your hydroponic crop.  It's a bit more self sufficient 
than hydroponics or aquaculture alone, and increases your diversity in 
the process.  I haven't done it myself yet, but it seems merit further 
investigation.  Having until recently been a major aquarium wonk, I 
know all too well the benefits of fish poop on the veggie garden.

> Count me green-eyed. ;-)  You realize that if the property is that 
> diverse you could probably make some side money by selling freshly 
> dried herbs on the 'net.

Never really thought of that.  Hmm.   Are you familiar with square foot 
gardening?  It's basically high-density raised bed gardening, usually 
using 4'x4' plots that are a foot deep.  Plant very densely, where the 
individual plants are actually in competition with one another for 
space.  With tomatoes you will get smaller fruits (but more of them) 
per square foot of garden space.  I suspect herbs will not suffer 
nearly as much in such confinement, especially the mints.

I've got enough space here, certainly, to make a go of it.  Whatever 
the case, I'm sure it would pay me better right now than IT work has 
for the last 16 months (which is how long ago I was laid off from a 
sinking dot-bomb, and still today looking for gainful employment).

> Actually we have mulberries in the back yard.  The raspberry bush in 
> the back had to be removed due to it's overgrowth of the telco pole 
> that happens to be in the corner of our yard.

Which brings us full circle, to the original suggestion of using it as 
a sort of natural fence at the edge of your property.

> I just remembered a time when I lived in Chicago as a kid.  Myself an 
> a few friends were eating the mulberries off of a large and old tree 
> when some lady came by and yelled at us trying to convince us that 
> they were poisonous.  She went so far as to call the police on us who 
> stopped by, looked at what we were eating, and told the lady to leave 
> us alone. lol!

Too funny.  I'm convinced the average American would have starved to 
death if the predictions of Y2K had really come to pass.  While I'm 
sure I would have lost a lot of weight (which is a good thing), I'd get 
by okay.  That is, unless I had to eat octopus.  Yeck.  Tried it for 
the first time just the other night, and while the flavor wasn't 
disturbing to me, the texture of it going down my throat triggered a 
gag reflex and the bugger wouldn't go down.  How the Japanese do it, 
I'll never know.

> Suburbia west of Chicago.  It's starting to get too built up for my 
> tastes.  If I can get us out of this house I'll set something up.  
> Right now I don't have enough space.  I'm still hoping to find a 
> remote industrial building (with some property) that I can renovate 
> but that's a long time down the road.

How much space is "not enough space"?  I think my house is pretty 
modest (only 1500 s.f.) and I manage to keep the whole Yonder Way 
Museum of Obsolete Technology, a couple of dozen chameleons (and from 
time to time their offspring), as well as a number of potted plants 
(all edible) inside the house.  I also have a deck off the back of the 
house, not too large but it is a good ten feet above the ground since 
I'm on a slightly sloped lot, and any of the herbs that will benefit 
from having lots of vertical space to hang their long branches and 
runners will go in boxes on the edge of the deck.

A parcel of yard space the size of a child's sandbox, four foot by four 
foot square, will yield you 32 ears of corn.  Using intensive planting 
methods, imagine what a small amount of space could provide you with in 
terms of, say, zuchini or tomato (especially if provided with cages for 
climbing & support).  The typical gardening method of planting crops in 
widely separated rows doesn't make sense.  Why can the plants within a 
row tolerate close proximity, but the plants in two different rows have 
to be so far apart?  For a small gardener, it is *not* necessary to 
apply large scale agribusiness logic to 16 square feet of land.

> Either that of build Dr. Quest's cabin complex somewhere. ;-)

Oh yeah.

I already got a sort-a "Bandit".  See 
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/bulldogphotos8.htm first dog, top of the 
page.

> Frankly I can learn to live anywhere but I prefer lots of space 
> between myself and my neighbors.

That's precisely why I picked up that 36 acre woodlot.  When I bought 
it five years ago, it was on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere.  
Today, the roads are all paved, the neighbors have big brick homes with 
paved driveways (very unusual to have paved driveways in the rural 
southeast), shopping megaplexes are going up nearby, and yet I still 
have my 36 nearly undeveloped acres as a buffer.  The stuff I'm doing 
here on an acre and a half is an experiment. I'll make my mistakes here 
so that when I get to the big lot, I'll have a better idea of what 
works and what doesn't work.

If you enjoy talking about this stuff, I've been writing about it for 
years on my web site but I bailed out when the Y2K nuts came out.  I 
just recently started back up again and need to repopulate from all of 
my old articles and lots of new ones as well (I backed up the old 
articles before I took it down).  I dunno how long this sort of topic 
can be tolerated on a computer geeks list.  ;-)

Chris Hedemark
Hillsborough, NC
http://yonderway.com


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