http://www.gardeningrevolution.com/files/Raised-bed.pdf
This was in our evening news tonight, just wondered if anyone had heard of something similar before.
He says he doesn't get any weeds growing in it, and it will grow large amounts of food in a very small area.
"survival garden'
I wonder what that is growing up the tower? Looks like some kind of vine.
I don't know, but in order to grow that many veggies in a small spot like that, it would all have to grow UP as much as possible.
I'm scared of ladders, so how would I pick it LOL
I spent the money for the class, and was mostly very disappointed. He has just recently added the "survival" part to his title and his web site. He used to promote his program as simply a method in raised bed gardening. He apparently has had some success with his scare tactics and has added "survival" to prey on folks fears. However, as I said, when I took the class, it was supposed to be about gardening. He spent more than half the morning talking about the coming political and economic collapse and how you have to learn to feed yourself and defend your property if you want to survive the next few months. I paid a lot of money to learn how to garden, not to hear his view of the political climate.
His bed mix is cotton burr compost, peat moss, rice hulls and his "Essential Elements" nutrient blend. I can get you exact proportions if you're interested. My opinion is that the mix is too structurally weak. It's "fluffy" to the point of having no tilth at all. I think a certain amount of actual soil is very important to plant support and growth. He also claimed that his cotton burr compost comes from certified organic cotton fields, but the bags were not labeled as such, and I know that he is buying them from Hummert International just off Glenstone on Florida. He bad-mouthed the Springfield Yard Waste Recycling Center's compost, which I have been using with great success for 4 years. He made claims against it that he could not support with fact, whereas the YRC staff has laboratory analysis to back their claims.
He had some very good ideas on plant support systems. With soil that structurally weak, you darn sure better have a good plan for support! While his stacked block beds are very functional, they are hard to make attractive. That's made even worse when you follow his advise not to bother leveling a footing, and just stacking the blocks following the contours of the ground.
The hair on the back of neck goes up anytime anyone tells me that their way of doing something is the only way to do something. Len is not what you would call an open-minded individual. It also becomes quite apparent by half-way through the class, that the main goal of the day is to separate you from a significant portion of the contents of your wallet.
I took away from the day a few very good ideas for plant support and seed spacing in raised beds. I bought a five gallon bucket of "Essential Elements" to give it a try this year, though I practically got into an argument with the man because I wasn't buying the rest of my components from him. I believe if I hadn't told a little white lie (that I already had built a bed using his formula) he wouldn't have sold me the EE.
As it is, I've expanded my garden by 1200 square feet, amended the soil deeply, put in automatic irrigation and planted it for way less than the cost of buying everything from Len for one 64 square foot (un-irrigated, un-planted) bed.
jeffinsgs - thanks for the heads-up.
Honeybee it says in the article that the picture shows him using a stepladder to pick Kentucky Wonder pole beans, so I guess that's right. Sure seems like a headached to me, as well as maybe dangerous.
Oh, and by the way, he does get some amazing results. He has had both tomatoes and beans all the way to the top of that 16 foot tower. His standard tomato cage is 4 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall.
I just wish that he would dial back the political rhetoric and not try to scare people into buying all their supplies from him.
well personally I probably agree with the political rhetoric, but I don't agree that his method is the only way to do it, or that one would have to buy supplies solely from him.
I think his idea of the cement blocks is just functional, it is a vegetable garden with his primary purpose of producing food, not spending alot of time or effort on leveling it just so, and making it look attractive.
I don't think using a ladder would be dangerous as long as your ground is fairly level and you have someone with you when you are on it. I am just chicken of ladders :)
For some people who have small spots of land to garden, going up and using a ladder may be the only way they can grow very much at all. When we lived in town we had a postage stamp sized yard, very tiny. And the back of it always flooded when it rained, so it was pretty much useless besides being too small.
It would seem to me that the 'fluffy' soil would literally drain water as fast as it was put in, and wouldn't that waste alot of water not to mention not be good for the plants?
Also wouldn't that drain away nutrients in the soil? Maybe he has a way of capturing the water that drains and reusing it ?
Len's theory is that it is impossible to over-water the beds or sustain drowning damage from torrential rains. The beds drain whatever they can't hold. In the case of your soggy backyard, it would work perfectly.
There's no doubt that raised beds and vertical gardening will improve yields. I'm doing a lot of it. I'm building trellis with cedars that I'm cutting out of the woods. I may need a one or two step stepladder to get to the top of what I'm doing, if the plants grow as they should.
Since the veggies are taking over the backyard, aesthetics are important to me. I don't want to look out of my sunroom and see a bunch of concrete blocks running cattywampus all over the place, but that's just me.
If you agree that the world is going to heck in a handbasket and that gangs of marauders will be storming your property to steal your garden by the end of the year, then by all means, go and enjoy Len's class. I guess I just have a more optimistic view of our ability to work our way out of this recession, just as we have in the past. I garden because I enjoy it, prefer the food to supermarket produce, and would like to trim the grocery bill a little bit. I also don't see how his system is all that self-reliant, if you need "him" to sell you your stuff.
jeffinsgf - cattywampus - the only person I've ever heard using this "word" is my brother. He and I are British - are you from across the pond, too?
No, I'm a south Missouri hillbilly. lol My folks are 5th or 6th generation "hybrids", so the Brit influence couldn't be from there either. Just something my folks used all the time. Sounds so much more descriptive than "crooked".
Growing up in north Mississippi it wasn't unusual to hear "cattywampus" used, but they pronounced it k t wumpus. However, I was taught to spell it the way you did. I might as well hit myself upside the head with a clay root.
Claud
Us east Texas rednecks speak cattywampus too, only we pronounced it "cantywampus." Another similar word was cantycornered. Surprise, Surprise!! My spell checker doesn't recognize either word. :-) Well shucks, them dickshunery folks are a little cornfused about the englush languish aint they.
Jeffinsgf........Thanks for debunking some of that scaremongering stuff. Just too much of that going on for monetary purposes. The word "sustainability" is getting overworked and misrepresented too. I grew up during the depression and thru the war years and most of my relatives came close to living the self sustaining lifestyle out of raw necessity. It was a simple lifestyle in the sense that if you didnt work hard, you simply didn't eat. But it wasn't the romantic life as some are now portraying it. They went from sun-up to sun-down caring for all the necessary animals, gardens and fields. And they had enough land to plant on and to hopefully survive the weather, bugs, viruses, and plant deseases. And they were all using "heirloom" type plants and saving their own seeds while quietly praying that some horticulturist somewhere, somehow would come up with plants that were more productive and more desease resistant.
I like tin foil hat talk so I would probably have liked the class! The gardening is cool too!
jeffinsgf - Small world, I guess. I'll have to start using "cattywumpus" more often - as you said - it's much more descriptive. My favorite word is "ethereal"
eth whut?
I use "caddy-wampus" all the time. Grew up saying it, too. I've lived in Texas all my life. I also say caddy-corner.
stephanietx, "caddy-wampus"was in my folks vocab. and they were German and Irish!! Your caddy-corner was kitty-corner when I grew up. Interesting isn't it!!
jamlover,
It's kitty-corner, but catty-wampus. Get it right. lol Isn't language a funny thing?