The 24th Annual Permaculture Design Course at CRMPI (Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute) in Basalt, Colorado

Sunday, September 12th – Sunday, September 25th,  2010

With Peter Bane, Adam Brock, Sarah Montgomery, Kelly Simmons and Jerome Osentowski.

Space is still available. Visit www.crmpi.org to learn more or to sign up!

Advanced Permaculture Design Course by High Altitude Permaculture with Sandy Cruz, Marco Lam, and Alison Peck in Boulder, Colorado.

September 16th – November 18th, 2010.  Ten Thursday evenings 6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. plus two Saturdays 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

For more info, visit www.hialtpc.org

I’d like to thank Sandy Cruz of High Altitude Permaculture, and Jerome Osentowski of Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute for their support!

I started getting several ant hills around my yard here in the mountains, with some in or next to my garden. One fairly large hill was right next to my medicinal herb garden and I wouldn’t doubt if the ants made off the seeds I planted since almost nothing I seeded came up. While ants are good at aerating the soil, the thousands of ants were getting to be a bit too much for me.

I wanted a completely organic method of getting rid of the ants. Some articles mentioned Borax or diatomaceous earth, yet those could also kill beneficial insects. On one gardening forum, someone mentioned grits. Yes, corn grits, aka cornmeal, aka polenta.  I thought “If the gophers like garlic and Italian food, maybe the ants will like some polenta!”

The theory is that the ants will take the corn meal into their mounds, eat it, and when it expands in their stomachs, they will… umm, explode! So I gave it a try and tossed a handful of cornmeal on each mound, and sure enough they eagerly brought most of the cornmeal into their mounds. Within a day or two, the ant activity had reduced by probably 90%.  A week or so later I am seeing very few if any ants near the mounds that were once crawling with thousands of ants.

Want to control your ant problems naturally?  Make them a nice Italian meal of polenta!

This spring I had grand plans of thoroughly documenting my use of the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator to plan my small (100 s.f.) garden here in Eldora, Colorado where I am a bit below 9000 feet altitude. Mother Nature and some garden loving critters changed my plans.

In previous years I had been lucky enough to start seeding in late April or early May. While we had a fairly mild winter this year, the spring was a different story. Every time it seemed I could seed the hardier varieties, it would snow or freeze. That is mountain life for ya!  I didn’t start seeding until May 25th, and then we had a cold spell after that. Almost nothing seemed to be germinating well, so I reseeded many items in mid-June.  Towards late-June things were finally starting to grow, and then the deer remembered my garden.  

Ah, the deer!  Yes, they need to eat too, but given my current economic slump, I was hoping to save money by growing my own food. In the past I tried some expensive deer “repellents” and they didn’t work at all.  What works is a very tall fence, or a rabid dog tied out by your garden.  After the deer chowed on my baby spinach, kale, snow peas, and other goodies, I broke down and spent some money on a bird netting type of deer fence.  It was so thin I never thought it would work, but it has, and it was fairly cheap.

Everything was growing slowly, very slowly. I gave a boost here and there with some organic liquid fertilizers and that seemed to help a little.  I had in mixed about 30 gallons of llama manure before starting the garden, but that obviously wasn’t enough. Time for a real soil test next year.)

One day I noticed that 4-6 garlic plants were missing. Right next to the deer fence, and the fence looked like it had been pulled down. Deer? Deer don’t eat garlic. A person?  Now who would steal from a garden?  A couple days later, 4 more garlic plants were missing. Oh come on! I didn’t think any animals ate garlic, so I was back on the human thief theory, as impossible as it seemed for my mountain neighborhood. A couple weeks later I noticed yet more garlic had been taken and one Egyptian Walking Onion. Hmm… Only a small hole in the soil was left, about the size of the garlic stem. Not like the bulb was yanked out of the ground. Maybe it was being pulled underground? I grabbed a shovel, and dug in. Ah ha! Tunnels!  Obviously it was pocket gophers or a similar critter. But do gophers like garlic?!  A quick search on the web told me that gophers love garlic!  So I harvested the garlic a couple weeks early before it was all gone.  They had eaten one quarter of the 75 or 80 plants I had!  (And ate 7 out of 8 Red Russian Kale plants!)

Between some fairly serious germination and growth issues due to the weather, and the critters, my garden has been far less successful than it has been in previous years. In past years I never used and season extenders like cold frames or even floating row cover, yet I had a fairly productive garden. Perhaps it was a bit foolish of me to think I could make it through another year with out those things at this altitude. After starting a farm at a lower elevation and doing it right, I knew better.

I recently acquired enough 3/4″ double wall polycarbonate to build a modest greenhouse, perhaps 6′ x 8′ or even 8′ x 10′ so I can get started earlier next year (or extend this season). Or at the very least I will build some serious cold frames before fall.

Hearteye Village CSA in Lafayette, CO will be offering an affordable workshop on food preservation.

This workshop will cover a variety of food preservation methods. Food dehydration, freezing and canning will be reviewed in relation to their effects on and appropriateness for specific types of garden produce. The format will be lecture and demonstration, with samples for tasting.  Yum!

Saturday, July 31st 1:00 to 3:00 PM, $35.

Please contact Tracy for more details. hearteyelandtrust@gmail.com

Sorry for the short notice on this, but if any of our readers are in Washington state, or interested in traveling there this week, there is an Introduction to Small Acreage Farming workshop taking place from May 14th to May 18th. Details and contact info can be found here:  http://tilth.org/events/introduction-to-small-acreage-farming

While I was hoping to add a harvest totals option for Fantastic Farm & Garden Calculator members by May, funding for our project has not yet allowed for the development of that free upgrade.  I am however looking into adding “Community” options to the site which will allow FFGC members to have their own journals/blogs where they can write their gardening and farming experiences.  There will also be the option to join discussion groups & forums, make friends (similar to Facebook), and other fun options.

I’ll be working on these updates in between juggling all of the other tasks I have with this site and Colorado Local Sustainability… there is a lot on my plate, but I’m always working towards improving our projects!

-Jim

We have added information the the site about our upcoming “Grow Your Own CSA Co-op.  We at Colorado Local Sustainability and LandShare Colorado are in the process of forming a cooperatively-based incubator of urban and semi-urban Community Supported Agriculture initiatives that will become a nationwide clearinghouse for beginning and existing farmers, as well as market gardeners. To learn about the current benefits, click here.  We are also looking into additional benefits such as group buying and other discounts.  The co-op will be open to members nation-wide.

Farmers and gardeners across the U.S. and Canada are using the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator, and now we have a member from France!  Welcome all, and thank you for your support!

Lastly, down on the farm, we have a lot growing.  We have seeded a lot of our cold weather crops, planted onions, have a ton of tomato, pepper and basil plants in the little greenhouses, and the garlic and shallots we planted last fall are looking very happy!

Hello folks, we’ve added a cool and easy to use Feedback link that you will see in the left-hand border of the site.  It uses the popular “Get Satisfaction” community support software which lets you: Suggest an Idea; Ask a Question; Mention a Problem; or Give Praise!  We welcome all of those things and especially appreciate praise and ideas!

The cool thing with the Get Satisfaction Feedback option is that once you post your idea/question/problem/praise… other people in the community can also respond to you.

So.. do you have a question about the Fantastic Farm & Garden Calculator, or LandShare, or the site in general? Click the Feedback link to the left and say what you have to say.

Want to start a conversation? You can do that through the Feedback link as well.

On this note, I have discontinued the Forums for now.  No one was using them, and perhaps this new Feedback option is the way to go.

Hey… we’d love to hear your feedback!

thanks,

Jim

We’ve added a companion planting chart to the site to help you plan your companion planting, and intercropping.  You can find it under the “Growing Ideas” menu, or click here.

If you use the Square Foot Gardening method it is quite easy to use the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator to plan your vegetable garden. While the current version of the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator does not have an input for square feet, it is easy to quickly convert your square footage to work with this online vegetable garden planning program. Watch the video to see how!

You can find larger versions of this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUd-PkXIXxI

The main training video mentioned at the end of this video can be found here.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions about the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator.