The Spotless Garden
Michale Tortorello, The New York Times
THERE’S a “Beyond Thunderdome” quality to Rob Torcellini’s greenhouse. The 10-by-12-foot structure is undistinguished on the outside: he built it from a $700 kit, alongside his family’s Victorian-style farmhouse in Eastford, Conn., a former farming town 35 miles east of Hartford. What is going on inside, however, is either a glimpse at the future of food growing or a very strange hobby — possibly both.
There are fish here, for one thing, shivering through the winter, and a jerry-built system of tanks, heaters, pumps, pipes and gravel beds. The greenhouse vents run on a $20 pair of recycled windshield wiper motors, and a thermostat system sends Mr. Torcellini e-mail alerts when the temperature drops below 36 degrees. Some 500 gallons of water fill a pair of food-grade polyethylene drums that he scavenged from a light-industry park.
Mr. Torcellini’s greenhouse wouldn’t look out of place on a wayward space station where pioneers have gone to escape the cannibal gangs back on Earth. But then, in a literal sense, Mr. Torcellini, a 41-year-old I.T. director for an industrial manufacturer, has left earth — that is, dirt — behind.
What feeds his winter crop of lettuce is recirculating water from the 150-gallon fish tank and the waste generated by his 20 jumbo goldfish. Wastewater is what fertilizes the 27 strawberry plants from last summer, too. They occupy little cubbies in a seven-foot-tall PVC pipe. When the temperature begins to climb in the spring, he will plant the rest of the gravel containers with beans, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers — all the things many other gardeners grow outside.
In here, though, the yields are otherworldly. “We actually kept a tally of how many cherry tomatoes we grew,” Mr. Torcellini said of last summer’s crop. “And from one plant, it was 347.” A trio of cucumber plants threw off 175 cukes.
If that kind of bounty sounds hard to believe, Mr. Torcellini has a YouTube channel to demonstrate it. “There’s alternate ways of growing food,” he said. “I don’t want to push it down people’s throats, but if someone’s interested, I’d like to show them you can do this with cheap parts and a little bit of Yankee ingenuity.”…
(17 February 2010)
See the related youtube videos: here and here.
Seed trends – food gardening, pickling
Sophia Markoulakis, San Francisco Chronicel
If 2010 gardening trends shape up to be anything like those of 2009, we’re in for more vegetable gardens replacing front lawns.
According to November’s Edible Gardening Trends Research Report sponsored by the Garden Writers Association, food gardening will continue to be big, with 37 percent of the households surveyed planning to expand their food garden this year. Many seed companies are paying attention to how this translates to sales of new offerings for 2010.
Food trends such as pickling and home canning, and interest in Spanish and Latin American flavors, global street food and antioxidant-rich produce play a role in what home gardeners are growing. But do food trends follow seed trends or do seed trends follow food trends? It’s a “which came first” question that seed pioneer Renee Shepherd of Felton (Santa Cruz County) is quite familiar with.
Shepard’s online seed company, Renee’s Garden, selects new vegetable seeds based on “customer feedback, what I like to eat, and what’s successful in the garden.”
“Seeds are not that important to food trends and aren’t driving them, yet gardeners are growing more vegetables than ever and are interested in color, flavor and increased nutritional content,” she says. Invariably, there’s bound to be overlap, as gardeners want to grow what they’ve eaten at restaurants, learned about through the media or sampled at the store or farmers’ market.
It takes a lot of trial and error for breeders to produce a successful seed, and they take into account what’s happening in the food world. “Breeders are looking at nutrition and color, and this is in direct response to consumer interest,” Shepherd says. She meets with seed suppliers once a year and looks for seeds that are used in an emerging ethnic cuisine. She’s running trials on a purple bok choy that has both nutritional and eye appeal.
Since last year, Josh Kirschenbaum, product development director for Oregon’s Territorial Seed Co., has seen a jump in sales of vegetables for home preserving, including pickling cucumbers and saucing tomatoes. Compact plants for small spaces such as balconies are also popular….
(17 February 2010)
thanks to kalpa for the stories above. A good resource for food preservation, pickling, etc., is Sharon Astyk’s Independence Days.
Impressed by a Possible Future
Olga Bonfiglio
In my continuing quest to learn everything I can about gardening and small farm organic agriculture, I recently attended a Sunday afternoon seed starter workshop at the rural homestead of Lori Evesque, a very committed local/organic food advocate in my town. However, what I would learn on this day was more than just growing seeds.
Our class of 10 was a collection of rookies like me, practiced gardeners, and everything in between. We were all women with a couple men, and our ages ranged from young adult to middle aged.
Lori first taught us how to construct a four-foot long indoor seed starter stand. The stand is constructed with thick-walled PVC tubes, elbows, “T” connectors, and end caps that all fit together without any adhesive. The only tool needed was a hacksaw to cut through the long tubes.
The stand has three horizontal tubes that are attached to three vertical tubes. On the top horizontal tube, you hang two shop lights, which are suspended by a chain. As the plants grow, you raise and hook the chain connected to the lights so they are close enough to the plants without touching and burning them. On the middle and bottom horizontal tubes, you place plywood boards that will support the trays of seeds. The set-up holds four flats of plants.
Lori told us about the germination rates of normal vegetable seedlings in different soil temperatures, what kinds of soil to use, when to water the seeds, how to give the seeds enough light, and when it was advisable to plant the seedlings in the ground. In southwestern Michigan, the earliest time to plant is after the last frost in mid-May, but most of the group agreed that planting after Memorial Day was best. Lori also suggested that as the seedlings grew, that we should get them used to the outdoors by touching the plants and whisking our hand over them to create “wind.” This will help the stems grow stronger.
As people swapped stories about their own gardens and seed starting ventures, Lori passed around her seed catalogues. Some of them were in a four-color format with beautiful photographs of luscious vegetables and some were in old-fashioned black and white with intricate, crosshatched illustrations that looked like something out of the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
We also asked a lot of questions but were all focused on a single task: learning how to grow healthy, organic seedlings that will turn into good-tasting vegetables. As we moved to a table to select and plant our seeds in 9×9-inch trays, Lori offered us a choice from about a dozen heirloom tomato seeds. She suggested that we put two seeds in each square. When the “real leaves” come out, the seedlings should be gently separated and planted. She also gave us the essential popsickle sticks for labeling each seed variety we chose.
Some people planted two seeds in each square and used any number of a variety of seeds. Because I don’t have garden space at my home and plant a kitchen garden using big pots, I decided to plant just nine seeds of three varieties. If only three seeds germinate, that will be more than enough for me.
As we moved to the table to plant our seeds I suddenly felt a rush of excitement from within. I liked the fact that we were in a hoop house with a workbench, seed catalogs, tools, and that we grow things and get our hands dirty.
I also liked the fact that I was among people who were excited about spring not just because the weather would be warmer. A year ago I never would have believed I’d be thinking about planting a garden, but something changed for me as a result of my work on a small organic farm since last April.
Gardening gives me great joy and a sense of accomplishment, something I didn’t understand about gardeners before. And being able to grow my own food has also given me a new-found confidence and freedom.
I’m still very much a rookie gardener but I know a lot more than I did last year when I learned about gardening BY gardening. Of course, the payoff for all this work are fresh, delicious, homegrown vegetables!
But there was something else very exciting about being at Lori’s place. Her hoop house contained a 4×12-foot aquaponics system. She had learned how to build and operate the system from urban garden guru, Will Allen of Growing Power (http://www.growingpower.org/). The top layer has pots of lettuce, spinach, radishes, and other cool weather plants. The second layer contains watercress growing on a bed of small stones. The plants are watered and fed with water pumped from the fish tank gushing from a pipe out over them. And the bottom layer (a 300 gallon container sunk into the ground) contains about 25 yellow lake perch fish with more to be added in the spring.
Scratching underneath the aquaponics system was a chicken. Lori said she plans to have more of them so then she can raise her own meat and keep the greenhouse warmer in the winter, thus supplementing her egg chickens and ducks she also raises. The outdoor garden was covered with snow but it is about 60×80 feet and grows most of the vegetables her family needs for the year.
Lori’s house has a 2.0 kW solar panels array. In her front yard a windturbine swishes in the air and generates 2.0 kW. She said that the windturbine, solar panels, and solar hot water system produce about 80-90 percent of her needs. In fact, with the power generators and garden, she can be nearly self-sufficient on her seven-acre homestead.
My overall impression of my visit to Lori’s place was not only to admire her for what she has done to live a sustainable life, but to take a cue from her about what’s possible in the future if individual families produced their own food and generated their own power. It takes some hard work but then the results are worth it.
(22 February 2010)
