The Ruiz Family's Organic Garden

The Ruiz family’s South Charlotte neighborhood nestles into the surrounding tree canopy like grandpa in recliner. Squirrels forage for acorns while school children hold court in quiet cul de sacs. The busy family of four had already begun taking steps toward healthy living, like buying organic produce from local farmers and joining a csa program. They had even tried a small garden and compost pile, but with limited success.

Recently they decided that it was time to step it up in the garden.  With some thoughtful panning and a little help from Microfarm Organic Gardens, they’d soon be bringing in abundant harvests of organically grown heirloom varieties of family favorites like kale, chard and spinach  - right from their own backyard.

Lots of trees also means lots of shade, but luckily there was a level site in the backyard - just  a few skips from the kitchen sink - with the perfect  combination of morning and late afternoon sunlight. Their plants would soak up plenty of direct sunlight, while getting a welcome reprieve from scorching afternoons. The Ruiz family’s cultivar wish list reads like ‘War and Peace’, so we designed a raised bed layout that offered enough area to grow a diverse selection of edibles all year long. Wildlife is abundant in the neighborhood, so the family opted for our 19” tall Kitchen Garden design, which is often high enough to keep out rabbits and pets, not to mention much easier on the back than other raised bed designs.

Their L shaped Kitchen Garden raised bed measures 4’ wide and 10’x12’, while the smaller Kitchen Garden raised bed measures 4’x6’ – plenty of room for a deep selection of off the beaten path heirloom varieties .  Our Kitchen Garden raised beds are made with locally milled eastern red cedar -  a combination of rough sawed 1x6 boards fastened to 4x4 posts, with 2x4 stakes placed on the inside help reinforce the design.  A border of steel edging and pathways finished with small glacier pebbles eliminate muddy walks to the garden, and gives it a tidy elegance that even the neighbors can enjoy.

Naturally, a garden is only as good as its soil, so ours are filled with a premium blend of pine fines, mushroom compost, and PermaTill. This soilless blend delivers excellent drainage while allowing plant roots to quickly grow throughout the medium and absorb water and nutrients.

The right combination of macro and micro soil nutrients ensures healthy plants and strong production, and our hand mixed organic amendment blend includes blood meal, bone meal, kelp meal, green sand, rock phosphate, and dolomite limestone.

It wasn’t that their old prefabricated plastic compost bin was terrible, but now it fit in with the new garden like an Andy Warhol painting at the Biltmore Estate. Plus it was a little on the small side, and asking it to process enough compost for their new garden would be like asking a Prius to tow a backhoe over to the jobsite. With almost 100 square feet of new garden area, there’ll be plenty of room to continuously work in fresh compost, and we found a perfect nook nearby for a Microfarm single bin cedar compost station.  It’s an open top design made with 1x6 red cedar boards and features a slatted front that makes it easy to turn and retrieve compost.

Selecting Mushroom Spawn

What is mushroom spawn?
Mushroom spawn is simply any substance that has been inoculated with the vegetative growth of a fungus, which is called mycelium.

Spawn transfers mycelium onto a substrate, or material in which mushrooms grow. Common substrates include straw, sawdust, hardwood chips, logs, and even paper and cardboard, and it's helpful to first determine the type of substrate you'll be using before selecting spawn type.

Plug Spawn
You’re determined to give this mushroom cultivation thing a try, but terms like inoculation, mycelium  and ‘spawn run’ remind you of that biology class you dropped. Your Uncle Dave loves shiitake mushrooms, and has an overgrown woodlot teeming with spindly white oak trees and a beefy Stihl chainsaw that looks ready to take on the entire State of Oregon. Plug spawn would be a great choice. They’re grown on hardwood dowel pins, and ideal for inoculating newly cut hardwood logs. Plug spawn are also easy to use – simply drill holes, tap in the plug, and seal with wax. They’re sold in small quantities – enough to inoculate just a few logs - and included in most mushroom cultivation starter kits. Plug spawn also easily colonizes other wood fiber substrates like wood chips, paper, and cardboard.

Grain Spawn
Look out old Old Bossy. Rye, millet, and wheat are now often used in making grain spawn, and one big advantage it has over other spawn types is that it contains readily available nutrients for growing mycelium. Grain spawn is used to create more grain spawn, or inoculate mushrooms on substrates like pasteurized straw and enriched sawdust. Some growers even use birdseed or popcorn kernels as grain spawn. They’re great for growing mushrooms, but also feeding hungry wildlife, and for this reason, grain spawn is better saved for indoor cultivation.

Peg Spawn
At first that shady nook behind the garage seemed so promising. But the blackberry patch fizzled like a faulty bottle rocket, and the herb garden just melted into mush. The space is too narrow to squeeze in a compost pile, but perfect for cultivating mushrooms in a bed of wood chips using peg spawn. They’re essentially larger versions of the hardwood dowels used for plug spawn, and ideal for planting in landscape borders, and other tight spaces.

Thimble Spawn
Peanut butter and jelly. Yin and Yang. Brad and Angelina.  Some things are perfect for each other, and thimble spawn combine the convenience of plug spawn with the rapid growth rate of sawdust spawn. They’re made by molding sawdust spawn together with wax into the shape of a plug with a self-sealing cap, which eliminates the need to seal them with wax.

Sawdust Spawn
Do you have the patience of a 6 year old, and the budget of a college student? Sawdust spawn might be the ticket. Sawdust spawn is made by inoculating sterilized sawdust with mycelium. It’s economical , and because of the small size of the particles, can quickly inoculate hardwood  logs, wood chip beds, enriched sawdust, cardboard, and outdoor beds of unpasteurized straw. But remember that sawdust alone does not contain enough nutrients for growing mycelium, and it must be enriched with bran or another nitrogen source for reliable yields.

Welcome to the Urban Forestry Revolution

It’s easy to miss the turn into Carolina Urban Lumber. A modest sign and a narrow break in the hedge are the only indication that a sawmill is there.  Parking is an afterthought and trucks and trailers tango at the entrance as visitors come and go. Inside an armada of color-coded logs – some that weigh several thousand pounds -  float in the mud  and wait for their turn at one of two beefy industrial saws.

Milled boards are neatly stacked and dried in an onsite kiln. It’s a little surprising to find a sawmill in the shadow of the light rail south line, but it’s cleverly carved out of a wooded lot just behind Heartwood Tree Company, and perfectly positioned  for a steady supply of poplar, oak, cedar and other urban logs.

Carolina Urban Lumber and other urban sawmills are at the forefront of a new urban forestry movement in this country, and  the premise is simple:  Plan the urban tree canopy so that when trees must be felled – from disease, damage, or development - the lumber can be harvested, and live on as premium new wood products like cabinets, flooring,  or furniture. Until recently, when urban logs were felled they were often unceremoniously hauled to local landfills – at a hefty expense to both tree companies and local government.  Urban sawmills like Carolina Urban Lumber are changing that by giving tree companies a place to deliver logs at no cost, and milling the logs into premium quality lumber that is sold in the local marketplace.

 

Carolina Urban Lumber owner Damon Barron is tall with clear blue eyes and a smile that could melt a glacier. He’s always happy to talk trees. “Every urban tree has a story to tell.” He explains, motioning to a colossal Deodar Cedar log revealing decades of growth rings. “This tree was once the second tallest tree in the city of Charlotte.It was felled to clear a site for new construction in Myers Park, and the property owner asked us to mill it into beams for the new structure."

"Lumber from this log will also be used to make a barn door, coffered ceiling, and a writing desk in the owner's new addition,” he adds.

Not every urban log has a story this unique, but they all have a story to tell. And because Carolina urban Lumber is a Treecycle America certified mill, every tree that enters the mill will receive a Tree ID number. This unique number tracks the journey of each log, from the time it’s felled until the lumber reaches consumers as new wood products. The Tree ID number branded on an oak table, for example, gives the table’s new owner a chance to know and share in the story of the tree from which it came.

With the confident ease of a 7^th grader playing Call of Duty, Damon controls the hydraulic equipment that positions an enormous red oak log on the mill. This tree was recently felled in Charlotte, but it’ll give an encore performance as beams for a crane mount in a warehouse Uptown. Scrap pieces around the outside of the log can be chopped up and sold as firewood, and in the end, every part of the tree is will be used in some way.

As the urban forestry movement grows, what was once a waste burden will become a valuable resource for local communities. A large white oak felled by an ice storm - whose mammoth branches were climbed by generations of small hands – will live on as heirloom furniture for future generations. 

A stand of yellow pine trees felled to make way for a new transit line will be recycled into comfortable benches for waiting passengers.

A grove of Red Cedar trees cut down for construction of a new elementary school, is milled into boards and framing lumber for their garden program’s raised garden beds and greenhouse. 

Don’t be fooled by the understated entrance and lack of parking. An urban forestry revolution is happening at Carolina Urban Lumber and other TCA certified mills around the country.

Activate Your Compost Pile

You’ve created the ideal compost heap. The mass of perfectly moist, organic material fills a 4’x4’x4’ cedar bin, and layers of finely chopped nitrogen and carbon based material are visible through the 1” ventilation spaces between boards. As a courtesy you tell the neighbors in advance that the cloud that will soon erupt from the pile is just steam  - no need to call the fire department.

But instead of scalding hot decomposition and a pile of crumbly, black compost, legions of tomato sprouts comfortably read about current events from 2012 on the newsprint in your compost heap. Not to worry, because, a compost activator could be just what you need to turn up the heat in your compost pile.

Mass Matters
One common pitfall of a sluggish compost pile is too little material and a poor ratio of carbon and nitrogen based material. The pile should be at least 4’ high and should contain at least 25% green, or nitrogen based material. The mass of the material alone in a heap this size helps speed up the decomposition process, and  shredding the material in the pile increases the surface area, making it even easier for microorganisms to quickly break it down.

Bacteria and Enzymes
Bacteria are the biological agents responsible for decomposition process in your compost pile, and some specialty compost activators claim to either add bacteria themselves or enzymes that bacteria use to break down waste. The truth is that bacteria are almost certainly already present in the material in your compost pile, and simply adding a shovelful of soil – which already contains millions of bacteria -  to each layer will further inoculate the material. Enzymes are biological catalysts that help bacteria process waste, and bacteria produce these naturally as they break down food. 

Meal Time
Adding a small sprinkling of nitrogen rich powdered amendments like bone, blood, and alfalfa meal to each layer in a pile will help feed bacteria and activate rapid decomposition. A sprinkling of bone or blood meal, or dried poultry manure feeds bacteria in exactly the same way as many commercially sold compost activators, and these are useful soil amendments for any organic gardener to have on hand. Coffee grounds are also an excellent nitrogen rich compost activator, and you can throw the filter in along with them!

Manure ;  your stinky friend
Fresh or dried manure from herbivore livestock like cows, sheep, goats, chickens and rabbits is an ideal, nitrogen rich compost activator. Spread a 2”-3” layer of fresh manure, or lightly sprinkle dried manure between layers.  Horse manure is not a good choice because a horse’s digestive system cannot process hay and grass seeds. Dog and cat feces can carry disease pathogens, and human waste has it’s own set of risks. Read up thoroughly before you decide to head out to the compost pile with a newspaper and roll of toilet paper.

Simple Crop Rotation for Healthier Plants

Have you noticed that insect pests seem to get worse every year in your garden? Tomato hornworms appear out of nowhere, and swarms of cabbage moths dive and swoop among kale and collard leaves.

Have yields diminished over time, or do your plants seem to have lost that vigor they once had? If you’ve grown the same plant variety in the same place for more than one season, crop rotation could be the answer. Different plant varieties have unique nutrient requirements and insect pests, and planting the same thing in the same place depletes the soil, and allows insect pest populations to become established.  Planting kale after another brassica family plant like collard greens, will encourage the cabbage worm to .

The nutrient requirements of edible varieties are generally based on the part of the plant that is eaten. Plants that produce edible roots, blossoms, leaves and fruits all have unique nutrient requirements at various stages of the plant’s life cycle, and grouping plants with similar traits together allows us to properly rotate them in the garden.

Heavy Feeders
Fruiting and leaf crops including tomatoes, kale, collard, greens, and spinach.

Light Feeders
Root vegetables and onion family crops including beets, carrots, and garlic

Nitrogen Fixing
legumes including beans and peas

While there are more complex ways to rotate crops, the Simple Crop Rotation method is the easiest to follow in the typical backyard garden.  While the most effective crop rotation is to avoid planting the same variety in a bed for at least three years, but this is hard to accomplish in the home garden, and following this simple formula will go a long way toward keeping insect pests guessing, and your garden’s soil fertile.

1. Follow a heavy feeder with a light feeder
2. Follow a light feeder with a nitrogen fixer
3. Follow a nitrogen fixer with a heavy feeder