Tareq Amin's Organic Garden

Tareq Amin has a thoughtful expression and gentle smile that could charm a saltwater crocodile, and the elegance and warmth of the family’s new home feels like an extension of this positive energy

And we were happy to find that the gently sloping area that Tareq had already scouted, was well suited for an organic garden.

With well over six hours of direct sunlight each day, and a gentle slope for good drainage, this garden site could grow any edible variety - even heat-loving summer vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant - and would never become soggy during the rainier months of the year.

Plus, it was close to the kitchen. In fact, it’s just a short walk from the back door, past the swimming pool, and over to the next harvest of fresh organic produce. After all, a good organic garden site should be as convenient to the kitchen as possible. Who wants to hike a mile across the entire backyard just for some salad greens?

Tareq Amin's Organic Garden from Microfarm Organic Gardens on Vimeo.

 

Now, Tareq’s home may be new, but he’s been growing edible produce since he was a child, and he already had an expansive list of edible varieties that just had to find a place in his new garden. So we designed a raised bed layout with lots of garden area, and that could easily be expanded in the future. 

Tareq loved the Kitchen Garden raised bed design for the same reasons that seem to delight every owner ; the 18” height that makes gardening much more comfortable than lower raised bed designs, and the sturdy, all-cedar construction. Each one of the L-shaped raised beds in Tareq’s garden measure 3’ wide and 6’ long on the outer sides, and the square-shaped raised bed in the center measures 3’x 3’.

 

With a harmony of elegant proportion and pleasing lines, Tareq’s builder and landscape architect set the bar for visual appeal on his property very high. And since this raised bed design sits in a prominent area of the backyard - right behind the house, and beside the property line - we dressed it up with an elegant border of steel edging, and filled the area with white pea gravel that perfectly matches an existing pathway.

As always, our Kitchen Garden raised beds are filled with a premium organic soil and amendment blend that will never become compacted over time or have to be replaced. In the course of a year, the soil will settle a few inches, and a few bags of organic soil and a scoop or two of fertilizer between seasonal plantings are all that’s needed to keep the garden beds topped off with fertile soil, and the garden thriving.

And because this garden site has so much direct sunlight exposure, drip irrigation was essential. So we fitted the raised beds with 1/2” drip irrigation tubing that has clog-free emitters spaced 12” apart, that each deliver about a gallon of water per hour. The irrigation system is joined neatly underground between all of the garden beds, and connected to the property’s existing irrigation system. 

Five raised beds is a generous amount of garden, but Tareq is a vegetarian, and we know that the Amin family uses a LOT of fresh produce. So it was no surprise when we got the call to extend the back of the garden to add two more 3’x6’ raised beds.

We were more than happy to add those two new garden beds and extend the edging and gravel a little further - after all, that’s what we’re here for. And even though the new, larger garden has enough room to grow just about anything, we know how much Tareq loves gardening. And when the time comes to extend the garden just a little bit further, we’ll be ready.

Simple Steps for Storing and Saving Seeds

Saving and storing seeds from edible plants are perhaps the most satisfying skills a grower can master. Once you master this process, the beautiful organic produce from your garden is sure to be more rewarding, on top of better tasting and more nutritious. Seed saving is a skill worth learning, and if you’re ready to give it a try, or just need a refresher, you’ll find this short tutorial useful. 

Before you begin, consider that every plant must first be pollinated before it can produce seeds. Some plants are equipped to pollinate themselves, and others are pollinated by wind or insects, like bees, that carry pollen between plants. 

Self-pollinating annuals are usually the most consistent when it comes to producing seed with the same traits as the parent plant - things like taste, color, size, etc. Biennial varieties like cabbage, collards, and kale, flower or set seed during their second year, and sometimes need a little protection to survive harsh winters. Seeds from many perennial varieties can also be saved and stored.

Consider that only healthy plants yield high quality seeds, thus the seed saving process really begins with the soil and growing conditions in your garden. Collect seed only from the most vigorous plants - the best specimen from each variety. And remember that many plant diseases are seed-borne, so never collect seed from a diseased plant. Select parent plants based on desirable traits like early yield, insect and disease resistance, vigor, flavor, size, etc.

With almost all plant varieties, it’s necessary to wait until the seeds are completely ripe before collecting them, and usually, this means that the fruit itself will be long past ripe in terms of harvesting for food. But seeds harvested too soon have a low germination rate and tend to be less vigorous, so it’s important to wait even at the expense of a small amount of edible produce. Tomatoes, lettuce, and spinach are a few exceptions to this rule, and their seed germination rates don’t seem to suffer when the fruit is harvested a little under-ripe.

COLLECTING SEEDS

The method of collecting seeds will depend on the plant variety... 

TINY SEEDS from varieties like lettuce and onions are released as soon as the plant matures, and many growers tie a small paper bag over the seed heads to collect the tiny seeds as they’re released from the plant.

SEED PODS contain the seeds of varieties like beans and peas. Remove these pods from the plant, gently split them open, and spread the seeds out over paper to dry. 

FRUITS like melons and squash should be a little past ripe before their seeds are collected. Gently separate the seeds from the flesh, soaking them in water if needed to remove any remaining fruit residue, which can hold moisture and reduce the storage life of the seed. Thoroughly air-dry the cleaned seeds before storing. 

DRYING & STORING SEEDS

Harvesting seeds from healthy plants at the right time is only half of the process of seed saving. Remember that the viability and storage life of your seeds will also largely depend on the drying process and storage conditions. 

Spread your seeds out on clean paper in a dry area, sheltered from wind, for about one week. Many growers hang an incandescent light bulb or similar small heat source above the seeds to gently increase the temperature and reduce the humidity of the seed-drying area. Just remember that drying seeds too quickly can damage them, so adjust the conditions of your drying area as needed. 

Gently bend a seed to determine if it’s completely dry. Seeds that flex and snap back need to dry a little longer. Seeds that break, are fully dried and ready for storage. 

The main factors that affect the storage life of seeds are their moisture content, variety and quality, the drying process, and storage conditions. It’s essential that seeds be kept cool and dry during storage, or they’ll sprout or rot. Ideal storage conditions are a temperature between 32 and 41 degrees, with 20-40% humidity. This environment will prevent premature sprouting, and maintain a healthy seed moisture content of around 5-8%. To absorb excess moisture and help maintain this humidity range, some growers place silica gel in the storage container with the seeds. 

To be sure, saving and storing seeds isn’t the easiest task in the garden. It does require a little more foresight, planning, and patience than simply buying seeds every year, and the robust commercial seed market must be some testament to that. But nothing about organic gardening is really easy, is it? So go for it, and give seed saving a try. Start small with your seed collecting adventure - maybe just one favorite variety to begin with - and see where it takes you!

How to Brew Compost Tea in Just Three Easy Steps

Mixing organic compost into your garden’s soil is one of the best ways to deliver balanced nutrition to your plants - and arguably the best way to maintain soil fertility. But it does take a little time for roots to absorb all those beneficial nutrients, and for healthy improvement to show in the plants. There may be times when your plants need need a faster boost of nutrients, and when they do, it’s time to brew up a batch of healthy tea…compost tea. 

Brewing compost tea is a lot like brewing a cup of chamomile tea at bedtime. Compost tea recipes vary from ultra simple to elaborate, but in all of them the idea is the same ; leaching nutrients from the solid material in your compost pile into water that can then be sprayed directly onto plant foliage. 

The basic compost tea recipe below will set you on the path to success, but with a batch or two under your belt, you may want to experiment. We say, go for it!

STEP 1

Shovel a few pounds of finished compost into a porous cloth sack. An old pillowcase, flour sack, or similar cloth item with tightly woven material will work just fine. Serious compost tea brewers may opt for a specially-designed compost tea brewing bag with 400 micron sized pores that allows more of the nutrients, and beneficial organisms to pass through the material and into the compost tea. But an old pair of pantyhose works good, too.

STEP 2

Once you’ve filled and securely tied off the bag, set it in a 5 gallon bucket, or similar sized container. If you have a large garden with lots of needy plants, consider a larger container with a correspondingly larger compost “tea bag”. 

STEP 3

Fill the bucket with untreated rainwater. If this isn’t available, first fill the bucket with tap water and allow it to sit uncovered for a few days, then put in the bag of compost; this step allows much of the chlorine and other chemicals that are often present in tap water to evaporate away. The beneficial biodiversity in compost is sensitive to the chemicals in treated water, and the goal is to preserve as much of this as possible in your compost tea.

Many compost tea recipes suggest using a submersible aerator like the ones used in fish aquariums, while the tea brews . This isn’t absolutely necessary to brew compost tea, but it does provide additional oxygen to the hardworking aerobic bacteria in the tea. Without enough oxygen, anaerobic bacteria can sometimes steal the show and produce a bad-smelling tea that could do more harm than good to your garden. If you plan on making compost tea on a regular basis, invest in a submersible aerator - there are plenty to choose from, they aren’t that expensive, and will help ensure a successful batch of tea every time.

But if you do happen brew a smelly batch of compost tea, don’t use it on your garden plants - just discard it somewhere outdoors.

The ideal compost tea brewing temperature is around 70 degrees, but keep it somewhere between 55 and 95, and you should be fine.

And some compost tea recipes also call for adding a few tablespoons of horticultural molasses to the solution as food for aerobic bacteria. This step isn’t necessary, but if can nurture beneficial aerobic microorganisms while the tea brews. If you do add sugar or molasses, just remember to mix it in towards the end of the brewing process. Adding sugars like horticultural molasses to the tea too soon in the brewing phase, can cause those hardworking aerobic microorganisms to burn through the available nutrients too fast.

After two or three days, your compost tea should be ready to go. Simply pour the liquid into a pump sprayer, apply the solution to the tops and undersides of leaves, and stems of your plants, and smile as your garden springs back to life. 

West Coast Family's New East Coast Garden Coop

When the Woolworth family moved from Oregon to Charlotte, they may have said goodbye to the Pacific Northwest, but their love of organic gardening came east, right along with them. Homegrown organic produce and backyard eggs were an everyday part of the couple’s life out west. Now the Woolworth’s are a busy family of four and their two small children were just as eager as mom and dad to find the right nook in the backyard for their new chicken coop. 

Tall shade trees line both sides of the family’s backyard, and we quickly identified several sites that had the right combination of sun and shade. While winter sometimes serves up cold weather here in Charlotte, keeping a backyard flock cool in the summer is usually more challenging than keeping hens warm in winter. With this in mind, we selected a site beneath several trees, that gets morning sun and shade in the afternoon. This site is right across the backyard from the kids play set, and within easy view of the windows along the back of the house. Backyard chickens are surprisingly entertaining, and it’s way more fun when you can see them!

With the coop’s location picked, the next step was to choose the right design. Although they weren’t new to backyard chickens, the Woolworth’s are a lot busier now, with two careers and two small children. They wanted to start with a manageable flock of three hens, and a coop that was large enough to keep them safe and comfortable, even if the birds don’t come out to forage every day. In Oregon, the couple experienced firsthand just how determined predators can be, and they were understandably concerned about the security of their new chicken coop. 

But the Garden Coop had all the strength and security they wanted, plus an attractive design that fit right into their upscale Charlotte neighborhood. 

The Garden Coop’s burly, red cedar frame sits on eight concrete piers that put the it on a level foundation and prevent contact between the wood and the ground. This substantially extends the life of the coop’s frame, and any outdoor wood project, for that matter. Rough-sawn red cedar lumber, milled to a true 2”x4”, gives our version of the Garden Coop a tremendous amount of strength, that frustrates even larger predators like dogs and coyotes. Smaller, but perhaps more wily bandits like raccoons don’t fare any better with the Garden Coop’s 1/2” steel mesh siding, that’s buried around the entire perimeter of the coop. Since wild animals don’t have the body mass to shove a coop door open, they’ll use their claws to try and pull outward to open doors.The Garden Coops’s ultra-secure entry door opens inward, and has a tight fitting threshold design that makes it impossible for dogs, raccoons, coyotes, possums, and other common chicken predators to pull the door outwards.

One of the outstanding features of the Garden Coop is the fully covered run that’s built into the design. Tinted polycarbonate roof panels, with a generous overhang, keep a backyard flock dry, and provide extra shade on hot days, and needed sunlight during the winter months. 

The roost box features a simple egg door - well out of reach of raccoons - that allows access from outside the coop to the double nesting box. Inside the coop, the large hinged door on the side of the roost box makes cleaning the Garden Coop a task that can be checked off quickly and easily. 

We think chickens would rather climb and roost on live branches than milled lumber, and we’re always looking around for good roost branches the same way some people score vintage furniture on the side of the road. But we didn’t have to go far to find the roost branch and ladder rungs for the Woolworth’s coop  ; a small sapling that was growing right in the middle of the coop floor, and a large branch that we pruned from a nearby tree, lived on as chicken ladder rungs and a sturdy perch.

The Woolworth family may be a long way from Oregon, but with their new Garden Coop completed, they’re a lot closer to that new backyard flock. The kids think their new backyard coop is pretty cool, and neighborhood wildlife are already sizing up the stout new structure, puzzling over how to get inside.  And the new flock? They’re sure to love their new home as much as we loved making it - especially those re-purposed ladder rungs and roost branch.

Free Building Plans for Fun Outdoor Projects

Have you ever made a cool outdoor project with redcedar? We have. Many, many times. It’s awesome! We love making things with red cedar and we think you will too.

“But I’m not a builder”, you say. “I’ve never made anything with wood before.”

So what? Remember that LEGO Millennium Falcon you built? Sure, it took 7 hours, but you faithfully followed the directions, and the end result perfectly matched the photo on the box. And there wasn’t a single leftover piece, either. Or how about those glazed pork chops you made in 2005 that everyone still talks about? All you did, then, was humbly follow the recipe to the letter. And that was just a single meal that didn’t last two hours. What if you made your own red cedar adirondack chairs, cedar dart board cabinet, or tiki bar? Do a good job on those, and they’ll probably still be out there years from now. All you need is a little determination and a good set of building plans.

Working from a set of building plans really isn’t that different from following a recipe in a cook book, or the instructions that come with a LEGO set or a piece of IKEA furniture.  

Most wood project plans include a list of all the materials and tools that you’ll need, pro tips for helping the project go smoothly, technical illustrations, and and step by step instructions that guide you from the first cut to the final nail. Some project plans  - like these free DIY plans at realcedar.com - even have 3D Google Sketch Up renderings, and videos that show the completed project.

 

Most of the projects at realcedar.com are beginner-friendly with lots of, simple, straight cuts - Perfect for a weekend project the whole family can help with. Just choose your project, download the plans, pick up the tools and lumber you’ll need, and follow the directions. You’ll surely succeed and want to build another cedar project. Before you know it, you’ll have heaps of cedar sawdust in the garage, and an assortment of beautiful red cedar garden benches, pergolas, picnic tables, and adirondack chairs - all of which you made yourself.

 

And just because the free DIY plans are there to help sell Western Red Cedar, doesn't make these outdoor projects any less awesome. 

After all, Western Red Cedar is certainly well suited to these outdoor projects. But you can easily substitute other long-lasting wood varieties, and if you live in the Eastern half of the US, you may find that Eastern Red Cedar is just as durable outdoors - perhaps even more durable -  but is easier to find and costs less. 

But the plans call for REAL CEDAR. So which redcedar variety is the REAL CEDAR -  Eastern or Western Redcedar? 

 Both of these redcedars are actually members of the Cypress family, and both are famously resistant to insects and decay. But they are two distinctly different tree species. Western Redcedar,Thuja plicata, grows in the Pacific Northwest, from Southeast Alaska to northern California. Eastern Redcedar, Juniperus Virginiana L. is the most widely distributed eastern conifer tree species - native in 37 Eastern US states.

We’ve built many outdoor projects with both Eastern and Western redcedar, and have found them both to live up to their storied reputation for outdoor durability.

If polish and presentation are any measure, then it would seem that the humble Eastern redcedar falls short of its well-branded western cousin. After all, they have professionally produced videos with actors wearing branded apparel. We don’t even have a logo. Heck, we’re still out at the sawmill in overalls and bare feet. And the last thing we need is another East Coast/West Coast rivalry, but our aromatic Eastern redcedar sure does smell good and that iconic grain pattern makes any outdoor project more special.

 

 “But enough!”, you say, “which one is the REAL cedar?”

 Maybe it just depends on where you live and who you ask. 

 According to one veteran sawmill owner, “The only true cedar in the world is the Cedar of Lebanon, Cedrus Libani”.