Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Soil 2 Cuisine Business Card, Images, & More Graphics



My friends, Carver & Micheale, visited theTacoma, Washington 12th & Union Streets' Community Garden just one time. Can you tell they're happily enthused about the project?

Thank you, Carver & Micheale! It was awesome meeting you! Thank you, too, for the honor of sharing your beautiful enthusiasm! What a joy to us all you are!




This Awesome couple stopped one day and blessed the community garden with so much joy it's a miracle!




This gentleman from an African nation stopped by and literally begged to have someone come to his people and lead them in natural soil gardening!




In Seattle a prototype "Food Forest" community garden sits on a 7-acre section of Beacon Hill Metro Park. Placards detail some of the natural nutrition and other values of practicing community gardening. Here are random photos taken in Winter 2015.





















The year I volunteered at the Tacoma Salvation Army's 12th and Union Community Garden



12th & Union garden compost pile partial build, Fall 2014. Note the "staging" area where I had raw material placed for later building the pile with by alternating layers of the different materials.



Wood chip pile dumped by a line-clearing crew in July. Photo taken November 26 2014. This chip pile was placed around each food forest tree 6 inches deep in early Spring 2015. By Fall the weeds growing in the raw chips reduced all of this material to pure nutrient-dense soil, on top of the street building waste the entire food forest half is comprised of.


The wood chips around the trees with weeds growing in the chips - July 5 2015.



12th & Union garden Fall 2014.


12th & Union garden January 15 2015.



12th & Union garden March 6 2015. Note the garlic beds. A bed of green onions separates them.


12th & Union garden mid-Spring 2015. Most of these plants Wintered over from Summer 2014. The distant bed of garlic I planted in November. It looks like a lawn gone nutz.

A lady-friend's two raised beds on the Left, which I filled with natural soil the Fall of 2014 kept most of her brassicas(Cabbage family) and Swiss Chard, spinach and chives green and growing through the extreme cold snap in Late November then on into the mild 2015 Winter. April 8 2015



The whole raised bed half of the 12th and Union Community Garden. Behind the camera the other half is the food forest.  April 8 2015


View of the raised bed garden in the foreground with the food forest half in the far background with just finished soil sitting by holes in the solid street bed wastes left by by Tacoma street construction. February 12 2015





February 12 2015 The food forest fruit tree holes are three feet deep, and filled with rain! The back hoe operator discovered 12 inches of pure clay was around the 5 foot depth! We back-filled with the Winter's soil pile. Those trees were claimed by others of Tacoma's 52  community gardens to be the best first year saplings in the city!

Note the green duct taped cardboard cover on my horse stall fork. I take the local transit buses and this covering makes it less threatening! I get many people asking why I'm carrying a snow shovel on the bus!



Sweet corn bed August 8 2015 with Sugar Pumpkin growing on the fence. I planted a row of raspberry with corn and a few sunflowers. Several tomatoes, another huge sunflower people loved to take pictures stand by, and other plants came up volunteer. Messy, but beautiful green!

That sugar pumpkin is from seed I get each year from one some Halloween reveler smashed on a street where I live. Each year I planted and harvested several 8 inch delicious pumpkins. But this one plant in better sunlight produced 6 12 to 18 inch diameter pumpkins! Still very sweet.


The 3' Brown Turkey fig I planted in February is over 7 feet here on August 8!



Compost pile construction August 8 2015




12th & Union garden June 25 2015.







New college grad working with H.S. Sophomores earning Summer Camp working in the 12th & Union garden, August 13 2015.













































My lady-friend's raised beds



Garlic bed harvested. red and yellow Quinoa spikes growing by the "Tee Pee," 12th & Union the day I officially left.



12th St fence row. "Vertical" garden.  I fastened curving branches to the fence with strings down to scarlet runner beans in tubs, then planted yellow Summer squash; yellow sweet corn; cucumbers; several quinoa; a tomato; Siberian kale; yellow wax beans, and scarlet runner beans plus butternut squash along the fence.




Flower circle in the garden street corner. The "Tee Pee" and quinoa in he background.





Along the Union Street fence. Several harvests already from tomatoes, beets, chard, sweet basil, parsley, peas and kale. The tomatoes in the foreground doubled their size by the end of September. This photo taken August 22 2015.




A 12 foot partly-grown sunflower on the Left; Sweet corn bed in the background; red beets, red Swiss chard, tomatoes and carrots in the foreground; broccoli, parsley, green peppers, cabbage and asparagus on the Right background and foreground. A Turkey fig I planted in February less than three feet high is close to 8 feet here, August 22. It bore one ripe fig and a hundred immature ones that dropped off with Fall!

The large black tub to the Right holds saffron crocus rhizomes. They bloom in Fall. I pulled elephant garlic that was ready a few days before this photo.





Red lettuce and Brussels spouts. A flower bed with bird and bee-attracting flowers and carrots in the background.



Close up of the 10' tall sweet corn with patty pan, yellow Summer squash and hiding underneath, cucumber. August 22 2015



My back to the corn bed: Rhubarb, broccoli, carrots to the Left; a pink dahlia, arugula(going to seed); red lettuce(about to bolt); Swiss chard; creeping phlox; one harvested garlic bed; a parsnip going to seed; second year asparagus; my lady friend's two beds; a half-grown sunflower; water cress in the farther black tub - saffron crocus in the nearer tub;  the "Tee Pee" with scarlet runner beans climbing the curving maple branches. August 22 2015



I experimented with native natural pumice soil a neighbor brought to the garden in this 4 x 4' bed. The tomatoes were stated from seed in mid Spring, outside on he warm compost pile with frosty nights. The basil as well. Here both sweet basil and tomatoes in native Mt. Rainier pumice have a nice show for August 22!

In the Left background there is an artichoke growing in a Tacoma sewer solid wastes and sawdust "soil" the City of Tacoma donated to community gardens. It is NOT a good soil! The saw dust attracts all nitrogen and plants are dwarfed. The second year is half good, but the low nutrient content still dwarfs plants and produces minimal yields.



Close up of a quinoa growing in a tub along the Union Street fence. The sweet corn was awesome! I planted it in native pumice soil along the fence in a narrow row I pulled back the coarse wood chip covering to cover the soil I placed on top of the gravel covering this former gas station lot. No other soil was used. I did cover the narrow strip with the rough wood chips.




My trusty old Texas Horse Barn 10-tine stall fork. I found it on eBay and the Oklahoma lady told me she picked it up at a farm sale in Northern Texas! It's been a faithful friend for 13 years.

Note the rings of wood chips around the dwarf fruit trees in the food forest with weeds growing in the chips. The original 6 inches of wood chips reduced to 1-1/2 inches of excellent soil. I a later photo I spread two feet thick wood chips over the space between the trees. This will, if left alone, produce about 6 inches of good soil on top of the street building material covering this old lot.

The gray-colored pumice native soil is about two inches thick. A neighbor brought it over and had a man on a tractor spread it for us, gratis!

There's an apple on the Left; Asian pear on the Right, and a cherry, apple and plum in the background.



A neighbor across the street brought tree trimmings to the food forest. With chips coming in from Tacoma power line maintenance crews and some heavier tree trunks and bushes, we built Hugel-Kulture berms. The concept is that over years' time the wood rots making a great water retainer and natural nutrient soil base. In reality, this can take 30 years! We just needed decorative berms and had woody material far too large for composting and no chipper!



I photoed a planting and harvest chart



One of my final projects for the 12th & Union garden was this set of 3 plywood bins on pallets. I lined the bottoms with cardboard, leaving space for water run off around the sides. The Salvation Army facility has a kitchen and produces lots of kitchen wastes. I mixed the wastes with cardboard and garden wastes, cardboard and a little sand and added the few thousand red wiggler worms I raised in a smaller bin from a few hundred donated worms. By Fall the bin was filled with their castings but as I left the garden in August I did not work the other two bins. My leaving was mostly due to lack of assistance. Other factors played out, and it was time to quit.








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