Tuesday, October 18, 2016

My Dream Garden - Part 2

I've been dreaming of my ideal garden a lot lately.  A few Christmases ago, I was given a book called Mini-Farming- Self sufficiency on 1/4 acre by Brett Markham.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Mini_Farming.html?id=HvcsAgAAQBAJ&hl=en

By simply judging by its cover, I figured that all I needed was 1/4 acre and I would be all set; I could quit my job and just live off the land.  Haha.  Of course, it is not so simple.  What he meant was that if you use the square foot gardening method using intensive planting techniques, you could potentially become self sufficient with over 10,000 square feet of raised beds gardens.

I did the math and it works out to about 227 of my 4'x4' beds.  When you figure in the space between the beds and also adding in some space for pollinator attractions and some decorative features, you're talking about close to or even more than an acre of land.  Not that that's a bad thing.  I would do it in a heartbeat if I didn't have to work.

Then comes the idea that maybe I could plant enough to sell some vegetables and plants to make a little money to keep afloat.  Then the daydreams just keep rolling through my head and the only thing holding me back is that first step.  I do need more land, but I can probably work that out with some neighbors to get started.

When I did my first part of my dream garden post, I neglected to mention the importance of sorghum.  As Eugene on The Walking Dead says, "Now that is a criminally underrated crop that could change the game of our food situation from scary to honky-donky."  Haha.  My kind of dry humor.  If I had chickens and rabbits, I would grow some sorghum for them.  Apparently it's a very sustainable, drought tolerant crop that is very high in micro nutrients.

Speaking of micro nutrients, I recently was inspired to start cultivating mushrooms from listening to a podcast series on Permaculture Voices.  It is a subject that is very intriguing to me since mushrooms are not even in the plant classification of organisms.  Another thing was now fungial mycelium can be used to remediate contaminated soils to nearly 100% restoration.

Anyway, 227 raised beds!  That's a lot of space, but I can envision it though.  I would probably have to have a well drilled solely for the garden if I went that large.  Back a few weeks ago, when I had my great gardening day, getting ready for fall, I was beat by the end of the day, but I loved every minute of it.  I need to draw up some conceptual plans of this, and see what kind of property I can find to contain all of this.  Who knows?  Maybe I can even make it work with my neighbors, if I share the bounty.

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