Vitaly recently contacted me and asked me to help publicize his site, Vitaly Geyman Photography.

In case like me you’re a little puzzled by his accent, he grew up in Ukraine, then lived for a time in Italy, moved to Australia where he got his MBA, and now lives in the US.

Anyway, readers of this blog will know I’m happy to promote the work of people doing related things, and in particular people selling their own work. Vitaly’s work isn’t directly related to the subject of this blog, but I do think his photography is very good and worth having a look at.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

I’ve tried a few times in the past to make posts explaining life as an American living in Holland, and it’s hard to do.  Anyway, the story of how this burn barrel came to be in the plot next to mine at my community garden is in many ways a good metaphor for so many things here, so I thought I would take another stab at it.

This plot was just assigned a new gardener. It’s a very isolated spot and positioned in a way that I’m pretty much his only neighbor.  The new gardener, as well as not having any gardening experience, clearly has some developmental issues.  He introduced me to his son, and told me he was ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), but clearly this runs in the family and the father has some of the same problems.  The management of the community garden didn’t discuss the situation with me first at all (which is okay, they didn’t need my permission), then just dumped him in his plot with almost no support or supervision.

He’s a nice guy, I like him, but communication is very difficult and compounded by the fact we don’t have the same native language.  Explaining anything takes a lot of time and patience.  He’s very keen to get both plants and experience from me, and I’m sure many readers of this blog will understand this is something I’m willing to invest a lot of effort and time into.

Compost

I told you this was from a gardening perspective, so first a little background.

Probably most people reading this will find it hard to believe, but 95% of Dutch gardeners don’t use compost.  For them, compost is waste and not desirable for the garden.  Most gardeners in my community garden dig a deep hole at the end of the year and bury any accumulated compost and garden waste as deeply as possible where it’s safe.  We all have compost piles and make it, and many gardeners somehow feel like they are doing something valuable for the environment in this way, but then they throw it away or bury it.

Probably the idea that compost is bad comes mostly from commercial farmers, whose crops are specially bred to be uniform and grow well in poor ground with chemical fertilizer added.

According to these gardeners compost makes weeds.  To their credit, there is some truth to this.  It’s true, if you have a piece of neglected ground in our climate, then put a layer of compost on top, you end up with a fiercely growing patch of stinging nettles and thistles.  For the Dutch, this is proof, and there is simply no further discussion.  If you think I’m being dismissive or sarcastic, I truly invite any of my readers to come here and try to convince them there is some value in compost. It’s just not possible.  I am very serious!

Our community garden association often has discussions concerning the possible contamination of the ground water from compost use, and many gardeners are very passionate about this.  Sometimes these discussions become very heated.  I consider it a small victory I’m allowed to use compost at all, as in some places the harassment would be so great I might have to stop.

Instead of compost, Dutch gardeners use chemical fertilizer, which does in fact give fewer weed problems in the short term.  As organic gardening has been a recent trend here like many other places, gardeners tend to interpret this to mean they need to buy boxes of fertilizer labelled organic together with organic seeds, but still not use compost.

You might think this would be a great opportunity.  I could go around and collect as much compost as I want from others who don’t want it.  Ah, the Dutch are too clever for this.  There is a complex set of things going on here, and with everyone it’s a little different, but here are a couple of the important ones.

First is they are aware some people put value on compost, so they feel they should be able to sell it.  They also know foreigners come to their country and sometimes make them look foolish by doing things better.  It’s very hard for many people to understand that I would be happy to take their compost if they don’t want it and save them the trouble of throwing it away, but I’m not going to pay or trade for it because I have compost of my own.  It must be worth money, or it must be trash, and if they give it away it could make them look foolish.

So since compost is trash it must be treated like trash.  It’s not possible to ask them not to throw pieces of plastic, metal, even glass into their compost.  For a time there were compost collection bins around the country, so people could compost their kitchen waste.  I haven’t seen any in years, and I think part of the reason was that there was a mad rush of people trying to help the environment by adding all of their household trash.

In terms of the very underlying problems here, the Netherlands is a small country, and like any small town or community it has a narrowness in thinking.  I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but it is the case.  There have also been long running problems with the education system here, which started with very deep budgets cuts in the 1980s that were never restored.  Primary education has always been good, and many skills like languages, business, civil and water engineering, architecture and others are widespread and extremely competitive.  With many exceptions, most Dutch people however lack basic reasoning skills or breadth in their higher education, and rather have blue collar vocational oriented training.

Fires in Gardens

Okay, back to the burn barrel.

Officially, the rule is we are allowed to burn garden waste within reason.  We are also allowed to have barbecues or burn firewood.  No fires are allowed on the ground, but rather have to be in a container.  We are not allowed to burn trash.

The problem of course is many, if not most Dutch people don’t understand the difference between garden waste and trash.  It’s the same problem with compost and trash.  Since it’s not possible to have a rule that non-Dutch people can have fires and Dutch people can’t, the operating principle is no fires are allowed.

Many non-Dutch people find the total prohibition too restrictive, and sometimes burn wood from their trees or have barbecues.  Dutch people often have barbecues.  This is justified by what the Dutch call ‘tolerance’.  In other words, even though these fires are permitted, the operating principle is that fires are not allowed, but the garden management tolerates them.  Got that?

My Garden Neighbor

Okay, back to my new neighbor.

The member of the garden management who is in charge of assigning gardens, and decided to assign the plot next to mine, is called the ‘Garden Commissioner’ (GC for short).  As well as assigning the plot, he helped the gardener get started by assisting with the instruction that all compost should be removed and the garden should be doused with chemical fertilizer.  The new gardener was then encouraged to get further assistance and plants from me.

Like all newly assigned plots in our garden, this one came with a big pile of trash.  Even though our gardens are across the street from the city dump, this gardener complained it would be too much work to bring it there.  This is a little understandable, as it was a pretty big pile and it would have been a lot of work.  The GC had the perfect solution, he gave the new gardener the burn barrel and instructed him to burn the waste.  He also told him ashes were good for plants, so he should spread them around his garden.  For the GC this was justified by the same tolerance that allows some people to use a barbecue in their garden.

I immediately started explaining to the gardener that burning trash was not allowed, and the only thing he could burn was clean, unpainted and untreated wood.  He was very adamant that he not only had permission but instructions from the GC, and he had no other good way to take care of the trash.  He did however agree, he would only burn clean wood.

A few days later Steph and I went to the garden, and a horrible smell was coming from the burn barrel next door and the other gardener was on his way out while we came in.  The smell lingered for days in the garden and our clothes.  I had a look in the barrel, and discovered a piece of burned PVC coated fence.  When PVC is burned, it’s very toxic and who knows what else he was burning!  His garden was full of plastic, painted wood and all sorts of other things that should not be burned.

I saw the gardener the following day, explained he was creating a very serious situation and he must really stop burning trash.  He agreed, and promised only to burn clean wood, but it was clear he could not tell the difference between clean wood and trash, and was not able to resolve the conflicting instructions of the GC and myself.  The next time I was at the garden I found the burn barrel as in the picture above ready for another round of burning full of painted wood and other things.

A Letter

In theory the next step was to take this up with the GC, but the situation was too urgent and something needed to be done very quickly.  I also felt I wouldn’t get anywhere discussing the difference between trash and clean wood with the GC, as I already had experience with that.

Instead I made a written complaint in a way I knew would attract a lot of attention.  It’s not only against the rules to burn trash, it’s illegal.  This letter might possibly have been the first step in taking legal action against the garden if it didn’t stop, in order to protect my own garden, and they had to do something.

The reaction was very clear.  An inspector of some sort visited the garden, interviewed the gardener and took samples for testing.  No one has said anything to me, but the garden now seems abandoned, I guess pending determination of contamination then possible decontamination.  The city takes this kind of thing very seriously in gardens where people grow food, as they should.

Who’s Fault?

Well mine of course.  The GC made a decision the trash would be taken care of by burning and, with one letter and in a brief instant, I undermined that decision and made him look foolish.  The new gardener is now without a garden.  I’m sure as far as the GC is concerned I’ve invoked some worthless bureaucracy in his government he doesn’t understand, and he’s of an age where I’m sure he grew up with burning trash in a barrel being a normal thing.  It was certainly a normal part of my childhood.

It’s clear the GC is very angry at me.  He often speaks of the problems foreigners cause in this country, and I’m sure this is just one more example.  I doubt he will ever get over this, and it’ll continue to be a reason to show hostility towards and distrust me.

The new gardener doesn’t seem mad at me, and does seem to understand something serious happened, but really doesn’t know what.  Now when he’s allowed to use his garden again, he will return to a garden without any compost, full of chemical fertilizer, and count on me to explain why things aren’t growing well and tell him what he should do next.

Elections

So I said before that this is a good metaphor for what’s going on in this country.

We just had national elections.

The Dutch government is made up of a number of political parties, and there is almost always a coalition formed after elections.  There are two main parties, Labor (similar to the US Democrats)  and Christian Democrats (similar to the US Republicans), and usually one of these gains the most votes enabling them to nominate a Prime Minister.

In these past elections, neither one of these two main parties got the most votes.  The votes were spread out among a lot of smaller parties, mostly with extreme views.  Roughly 50% went to right wing parties, that mostly campaigned on a anti-foreigner platform.  Roughly the other 50% went to left wing parties.  There are enough ideological differences between the parties anyway, that for many of them it’s very difficult to work together under the best of circumstances, but it’s hard to imagine what kind of government will come out of coalition talks this time.  Normally a coalition is formed from two and occasionally three parties.  This time a minimum of four parties will be necessary, and five or more would not be out of the question.

Foreigners are blamed for importing their own culture and ignoring Dutch culture, taking jobs from Dutch people and in general undermining the authority of Dutch people by ‘working around the system.’

What ever happens with this next government, it won’t be anti-immigrant.  There is huge need for knowledge workers here, and not only are these work permits available, they are actively being promoted by the government.  Knowledge workers who come here get tax breaks and many forms of special treatment.  While I think we can now request it, until now the Dutch government has ignored an EU directive requiring them to issue work and residence permits validated for the whole of the EU to those who currently have them for the Netherlands, because they’re afraid these people will leave the country.

The number of Dutch people leaving the country recently reached an all time high, and it’s primarily the educated who are leaving.  On the other hand increasing numbers of unskilled workers are coming in primarily from eastern Europe.  It’s really a rapidly escalating problem.

In short, this country needs people who understand what compost is, but is willing to be supervised by someone who thinks it’s toxic waste and hates foreigners.  They will be required to teach organic gardening on a plot of land with chemical fertilizer and without compost.  They need to live in a country where the government was elected promising to get rid of them, and many people resent they are there.  There are many tax benefits and other perks available.  Volunteers?

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

The only other garden blog in Japan I know of is Adekun’s Japan Blog, so it’ll be nice to hear more from that part of the world.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

With advent of special agricultural practices, researchers have shown great interests in discovering unique ways of watering farm in short duration of time with minimized wastage of water. One can also gather huge amount of output from the farm under programmed watering through specialized irrigation techniques. The irrigation technique like drip irrigation has enhanced productivity of crops in many ways. Certain species like egg plant have shown greater productivity as far as watering through customized drip irrigation channels. The basic model of any farm irrigated through drip irrigation technique involves proper planning of water channels prior to installation. This can avoid unwanted wastage of water in the farm. Modern farms comprise all types of plants and shrubs that can attribute the credibility of home both quantitatively and qualitatively. Depending upon the topography of gardens irrigation technique employed for regular watering of plants can differ.

Need for drip irrigation

Drip irrigation is associated with number of positive features. These can be grouped as distinguishing subjects when compared to other irrigation techniques. The water utilization in drip irrigation is quite remarkable thing to watch out for. The farmers develop customized drip channels to moisten up root tips and sub surface layers of top soil enabling necessary water supply without any wastage. Since watering is confined to root tips, one can also avoid onset of several diseases that attack shoot system of any plant. Lack of moisture can prevent bacterial and fungal attacks to surface of stem and leaves. Surface run offs can be avoided thus enhancing strength of soil. The fertilizers and manures can be fed to plants without any fuss. Drip irrigation provides ample opportunity for employing recycled water for irrigation purposes. This makes drip irrigation to be successful with highest efficiency of about ninety percent or more.

Drip irrigation system- basic components

The skeletal design of any drip irrigation system involves several parts namely drip irrigation soaker hoses, valves, drippers, pressure relief valves and end seals. The valves used for drip irrigation serve dual purpose to any farmer. The regular channeling of water can be achieved followed by unidirectional supply of water involving installation of back flow prevention valves. The valve dimension generally employed for any drip irrigation is about 20 millimeters. Unidirectional flow of water can promise uninterrupted timely supply of water at root tips. Emitters should be spaced in regular manner throughout drip channel to permit flamboyance in both appearance and function. Generally emitters are spaced for about eighteen inches apart. The maximum spacing measure can go up to twenty-four inches accounting roughly to six hundred millimeters. Installing more emitters in small irrigation channel can also back fire overall event of drip supply by wetting soil completely.

Pipelines necessary for drip irrigation can be chosen based on length of tubing required. Generally PVC pipes are administered for homemade drip irrigation. Farmers find also polyethylene irrigation pipes (PEX) useful in cultivating melon species in large farms. Main watering channel and lateral channels can be permitted to have a span of about 120 meters. The main channel should take most of span length leaving lateral channel to manifest small reach. The lateral channel can also be provided with pressure control valves. This can regulate fluid pressure inside the pipelines. Total pressure required for regulating proper watering through drip irrigation can go up to 3 bars. Check valves are provided at periodic intervals to mobilize measured supply of water to root zone. Installing air vents in drip irrigation circuits can also provide opportunity for effective maintenance of pressure inside main watering channels and lateral channels. Care must be administered while selecting fittings for drip tubes. The size should be matched precisely to prevent any water leakage in drip circuits.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Invitations

I have a few more spare invitations to give away, and might be able to ask for even more later.  Soon it will be open to the public anyway, and anyone can register.  If you’re interested in an invitation, please ask.  At the moment this is the only way you can register as it’s still in beta testing.

Please don’t ask for an invitation if you aren’t interested in signing up right now.

If you are interested, don’t be shy about asking for an invitation, because I think I can probably find enough for everyone who’s interested.

Before you sign up, you should give some thought as to what you want to do with it.  I’ll explain more in a moment.  There are also costs associated with signing up that I’ll also explain more about, and no guarantee of making any money from it.

Micro-Payments

First of all, for clarity, flattr works in euros.  This doesn’t really matter, because you pay with a credit card which will automatically convert a currency like US dollars into euros.  Taking money out in dollars is also not explicitly implemented yet, but they have promised to support this sort of thing in the future.  I assume you will be able to request either a check be sent to you or a direct deposit into your bank account.  Here in Europe they have promised to support BIC/IBAN payments, which is a type of low cost bank transfer.

What’s a little unique about flattr is the size of payments you make with it.  Typically a payment is only a few pennies in size.  So why is this interesting?

If you consider this blog for example, which has roughly 10000 unique visitors per month.  If, on average, each one of these people gave me 1 cent every month, that would mean €100.  This would be quite a nice amount of money.

If I got €100 per month, I would probably give away a portion of this to other plant breeders and garden bloggers, perhaps 50-100 payments of €1 each.  This means even if you don’t have a popular blog, and can’t expect thousands of tiny payments, you may still get enough larger payments from people like me to make it worthwhile.

The expression of the people running flattr is ‘streams make rivers’, and what’s important is the idea of combining lots of tiny payments into larger amounts of money.  For this reason the whole system works better if more people are participating.

Pyramid Scheme?

I was chatting with someone about flattr the other day, he said there must be some kind of pyramid scheme, and asked what it was.

That’s an important question!

There are three kinds of people who use flattr:

1. Those who want to earn money by doing something.
2. Those that want to give money away.
3. Those that want to do some combination of the above.

In fact there are a lot of people with significant amounts of money they want to give away.  All flattr users have to give away an amount that’s currently between €2-20, but I expect the upper limit in particular will be increased with time.  You can certainly have more than one flattr account if you want to give away more than it allows.  I have already talked with a few people who don’t plan on asking for any money, and plan to give away at least €50 per month.

It’s my plan also to give away something along the lines of €50 per month, but only if I can generate at least that much myself.  I think a number of people fall into this category too.

There are many people in the world motivated in this way, and want to do something to help the greater good.  There will be a lot of money floating around in flattr.

On the other hand, flattr’s goal is to reward people who do things.  In the words of the flattr people, to reward ‘content’.  If you don’t do anything interesting, no one will want to give you any money!  If no one wants to give you money, then the only thing you can do with a flattr account is give money away to others.  If there’s a pyramid scheme associated with flattr, this is where it lies.  There’s no free money in flattr!

What’s important to understand too, is for these people who want to give away larger amounts of money, they will probably want to give it away to a number of different kinds of people.  For example, some to musicians who’s music they download, some to bloggers who write good blogs and maybe some to people who write computer programs.

If we as a community, want to get a good share of this money, we need to have a lot of flattr buttons on our blogs and a lot of good reasons why someone should click on these buttons.  If someone wants to give money away to garden bloggers, and I’m the only one who uses flattr, as a community we will only get one payment.  The more of us using flattr the better!

Costs

Flattr has costs associated with using it, although depending on how you use flattr these may not be very high.

Everyone has to give away at least €2 per month to at least one other flattr user!  If you don’t do this, they will take the €2 out of your account anyway and it will be wasted.

It’s no problem to team up with another flattr user and give each other this €2, in order to keep it from being wasted.  Every time you make a payment to someone with flattr there is a 10% commission, so in this case both of you would end up paying 20 cents in fees per month, but that would be all.  If you decide to do this, remember you need to login every month!

Finally you have to pay the costs of depositing and withdrawing money from flattr, which at the moment are a little expensive because everything has to be done with PayPal.  The flattr people have promised to implement more low cost options for doing this, but they are not yet available.

Also, you need at least €10 in donations before you can take your money out, and some people won’t be able to make this much.

Beta

It’s important to understand flattr is currently in beta testing.  This means it may not work as you expect, and in fact no one is sure it will work at all in the end.

It may not work for technical reasons.  It may not work for legal reasons, for example they may decide it’s too easy to use to launder money.

Probably the most important concern is if people want to use it.  This is how many similar systems failed in the past, because people simply didn’t want to use them.  I personally find flattr absurdly easy to use, and I think the ideas behind it will be interesting to a lot of people, so here’s hoping!

If you sign up now, don’t put a lot of money into it, and be prepared to lose your money if it doesn’t work out.

I’m still hoping a lot of you will be adventurous and give it a try!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

These last couple of weeks have been a lot of sitting and waiting.  First of all the weather has been unseasonably cold, too cold to start much planting out into the garden.  I have a friend from Siberia, and we were comparing weather forecasts.  It’s clear Amsterdam is even colder now than Siberia.

The other way I’ve been sitting and waiting is the trash collectors and street cleaners have been on strike for much of the last few weeks.  The strike was settled over this past weekend.  I don’t know any details of the settlement, but apparently the main issues at stake were a raise and respect.  I’m not quite sure what they were expecting in terms of respect, but I guess they finally got that from the city.  I understand the wage difference was not all that serious.

The strike has really been annoying, and large piles of rotting trash have been collecting all over the city.  We were not supposed to put out trash out,  so most people’s houses were also filling up with trash.  Even now, they don’t seem in much of a hurry to collect it, and it’s only slowly getting cleaned up.

Here’s some local wildlife checking out this pile.  Anyone know what kind of bird that is?

Here’s a pile decorated by a graffiti artist.

One thing’s for sure.  I won’t be missing the smell of rotting garbage…

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

I’ve just signed up for a new micro-payment system called Flattr. I’m still working on the configuration, and the entire system is still in beta testing, so there may still be some quirks. Hopefully if you view the front page of this blog you will see a button like the one above on the right sidebar, and if you read via RSS you will see one as well. I haven’t actually seen the one with RSS (this post is a test), but I guess it will be somewhere on the page.

It’s not the intention this should appear in an annoying or excessively obvious way, so please let me know if it does in whatever newsreader you use so I can fix it.

In a nutshell, if you decide to sign-up for Flattr, you can donate money to me. If you’re not interested, it’s okay!

Since starting this blog I’ve been reluctant to carry advertising. I’ve felt it distracts from the material presented, in reality most of the profit goes elsewhere besides my pocket, and so wasn’t an efficient way to raise what I thought would likely be a small amount of money anyway.

Nearly all other options also had their problems, either soliciting donations of amounts of money I felt were too large, or using payment systems like Paypal that themselves had excessive fees, as well as general management and customer service problems.

Flattr users sign-up and agree to pay a certain amount per month, as little as €2 or about US$3. When they click on other people’s Flattr buttons, this money gets donated to them. The more clicks per month, the less each recipient gets. This means donations are as little as a few cents. The fees Flattr charges are not high, and they have promised to try to lower them over time.

As much as anything, I support the ideas behind Flattr, and I think this is potentially a good way for people like artists and musicians to raise some money over the Internet.   It’s potentially an enormous asset to everyone who works on materials that don’t have intellectual property rights associated with them. This includes people involved in seed saving and plant breeding!

My intention is to try to support the idea of micro-payments like these, as well as seeing if this is a way my readers would like to make small donations to my efforts.

At the moment not everyone can sign up for Flattr, it’s invitation only. I have exactly one invitation to give away! First priority is someone with another garden or similar blog, next is someone who has left at least one comment here before, otherwise it’s first come first served. If you would like an invitation code, please either leave a comment here with your email address filled in or send me an email.

If you have a Flattr button on your blog, please leave a comment here and let everyone know!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

While I’m told Bloom 2010 will include 25 large, medium and small show gardens, local fresh grown produce will also feature strongly.  The event will take place in Dublin’s Phoenix Park.

Also new for 2010, is Bord Bia’s ‘Sustainable Garden’, which aims to highlight the positive impact consumers can have on the environment by thinking about their purchasing choices.

In 2009 a replica of the US President and First Lady’s garden was featured at the show, and visits included those of US embassy staff.

Tickets are available for purchase by following the link at the top of this post.  If you go, I hope you’ll report back and let us know how it was.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Steph had a few days off from work this week, so we decided to go to Artis, the Amsterdam zoo.  I’ve lived here 20 years and never been.  It has a reputation of being small, and of keeping wild animals in inhumanely small and unnatural enclosures, which is part of the reason I’ve avoided it until now.

I think part of the problem was over the years the land around the zoo became attractive for housing developments.  Greedy politicians and developers laid claim on so much, it didn’t really leave the zoo with enough for it’s own purposes.

To be a little fair to Artis, I think all zoos probably have this problem a little bit, but don’t visit Artis if you aren’t prepared to see a few distressed animals.

I was also a little surprised at how expensive it was.  It was more than €18 (about US$25) for an adult.  I haven’t been to a zoo since I was a kid, so I don’t really know how that compares with others, but it was more than I expected.

Now that I’m finished complaining, I have to admit we did have a nice time and there are many nice parts to the zoo.  We saw pretty much everything in about 3 hours.  The reptile house is certainly worth a visit.  They have a nice collection of snakes and lizards.

The butterflies were also nice, but difficult to take pictures of!  This was one of the few I caught standing still in a nice pose.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Mulching

Christopher and Rosemary made a post recently about this, with lots of great information.  I’m just going to add a few things to what they already said.

In terms of controlling weeds, there are two main mulching techniques, sheet mulching and using material high in carbon.  In case of the former the idea is to smother the weeds, and the latter is to create a chemical reaction between carbon (C) and nitrogen (N).

C and N are everywhere in the garden, and all composting and rotting is a reaction between these two elements.  Dry brown plant materials are high in C, and green plant materials and manures are high in N.  In addition there’s N present everywhere in the air, and it’s an essential nutrient in the ground.  All plant and animal life depends on N.

When you put high C mulch on the ground and it starts to rot, it needs N from somewhere, and it tends to take it out of the top 2 or so centimeters (roughly 1″) of the ground.  Because it makes the surface layer of the garden soil N poor, it makes it hard for plants to grow in it.  Any plants with roots deeper than this can get N elsewhere in the ground, which is why you can place mulch around established plants.

After mulch rots, it releases the N into the ground again, so there is no net loss of N in your garden.  You do not need to add extra N to make up for any loss of N, because none is lost.

If you want to use mulch to kill established plants with roots deeper than a few centimeters, normally you use some sort of sheet mulch.  In my garden I use plastic, what in Europe is usually called ground cloth and in the US I think is usually called landscape fabric.  Probably most people reading this know what I’m talking about.  It’s a reusable woven plastic material, often with green or orange lines, that lets water and air pass through it but blocks light.  In this way it destroys weeds, but not other life in the ground.

Many people use biodegradable sheet mulches like cardboard or newspaper, which can be left in place to rot as well as covered with dirt and planted into right away.  Lasagna gardening can make use of this principle.  I use too much sheet mulch to use something that’s not reusable, otherwise I would have to bring too many mulching materials into my garden.

As an alternative to using sheet mulching to kill established weeds, you can also use a very reactive high C material.  Wood chips are an example of this.  Fresh wood chips are very aggressive in removing N from whatever they come in contact with, and will generally kill established weeds.  For this reason, they are normally used on paths around the garden rather than in the garden itself.  It’s also important not to turn wood chips under, because they will make the ground very N-poor and difficult to grow anything.

The other thing that happens when you use mulch, which is unrelated to everything else I’ve said here, is even when weeds to manage to grow through the mulch their roots tend to come up near the surface.  This generally means they can be removed with a rake or are very easy to pull out by hand.

Lasagna Gardening and Raised Beds

For no-dig/permaculture style gardening, it’s important to control the weeds with mulching techniques.  There’s no such thing as a garden free of weeds!  You will always have to do some weeding by hand, but you want to make your job as easy as possible.

It’s also important to keep the ground as loose as possible, so when there are weeds, they are as easy as possible to remove.  This is normally best achieved by maintaining distinct layers in your garden soil, which help promote good drainage and a good home for beneficial organisms.  These layers are where the idea of lasagna gardening come from.

You need not do very much special to get these layers, by simply not disturbing the soil and adding home made compost from time to time on the top of your garden beds, they will develop layers on their own.

It’s also important not to walk in your beds, in order to minimize compacting of the soil.

It’s very possible to combine the idea of sheet mulching and lasagna gardening, and Ewa recently made a post about this including a how-to video.  For my purposes however, this is kind of a lot of work and it’s not always necessary.  Constructing a bed like this is only necessary if you have a spot where you want to build a garden bed, that has established weeds, and you want to plant in it right away.

Raised beds, while convenient because of their height, meaning you don’t have to bend down so far, are also not always necessary.  It’s also possible to make use of what Kenny calls borderless raised beds.  These aren’t really raised beds at all, but rather a place in your garden you simply designate and treat as a raised bed but isn’t raised.  These generally work as well or nearly as well as a true raised bed, and what I mostly use.

Unless you have recycled materials available, constructing the type of bed in Ewa’s post or a true raised bed can involve a lot of unnecessary, expensive and sometimes environmentally unfriendly materials like peat products or timber.  For example raised beds are generally built with wood that if treated will leach chemicals into your garden, and otherwise will only last a few years before needing to be replaced.  They can also be built with bricks or stones, but this is more work and the materials have to be brought from somewhere.  In any case, raised beds are generally only worth building if you know you will use the same garden for a number of years.

My Methodology

Sheet mulching takes about 6 months to kill the plants under it, and since my garden is in continuous use, I can usually plan in advance when needing to kill an area of established weeds.  I use the woven plastic material I mentioned above, and on an ongoing basis mulch parts of my garden.  Any time a part of my garden becomes unused for a time, like at the beginning of winter, I make an effort to keep it covered with plastic if possible.  It’s of course always better to keep something growing in the ground, like a cover crop, but this isn’t always possible.

I built a number of raised beds I posted about here.  Otherwise, I make ‘borderless’ raised beds by building temporary paths with small paving stones, about 30cm or a foot square.  In the picture on the top of the same post above, you can see I then use a lot of straw to control annual weeds.

Before I plant in each bed I rake any straw that may remain from the previous year to the side, loosen the ground a little bit with a digging fork, then plant directly into it.  Some of the beds also get some added compost.

The whole process in the spring of first removing the plastic mulch from the ground, building paths with paving stones, loosening the ground with a digging fork and raking the ground clear all takes a very short time and is very little work compared with digging weeds out every year like the other gardeners in my community garden do.  I’ll try to post some pictures of this sometime, so you can see better what I’m talking about.

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They really have a lot of good information — and a lot of unanswered questions!  If you’re new to permaculture style gardening, it’s a great blog to see how someone else is figuring everything out for themselves. Chris has really spent a lot of time explaining things he’s figured out.

If you’re experienced, please visit and help answer some of the questions!

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In particular, I’ve just installed a program called Piwik, which inserts a Java applet into the blog pages for statistics gathering.  Since for the most part Java applets are only executed by real web browsers, I now have a better idea of who my real readers are and what they’re looking at.

Piwik doesn’t detect all my readers, for example it doesn’t necessary know about people that use a blog reader (RSS), block Java script, use certain kinds of ad blocking software or use nonstandard browsers.  There is however the suggestion that most of the readers it does detect are actually taking the time to load pages into their browser and look at them.  My faithful readers, if you like.

One of the real revelations was where my readers are located.  Have a look at this list of readers, just from yesterday, but also pretty representative of the last several days.  The numbers indicate distinct readers in each country.

United States:  199
Great Britain: 22
Unknown: 8
Canada: 7
United Kingdom: 6
Australia: 5
New Zealand: 3
Argentina: 2
Belgium: 2
Indonesia: 2
Denmark: 2
Bulgaria: 2
Islamic Republic of Iran: 2
India: 2
Netherlands: 2
France: 1
Greece: 1
Croatia: 1
Germany: 1
Czech Republic: 1
Mexico: 1
Guatemala: 1
Spain: 1
Brazil: 1
Tuvalu: 1
Hungary: 1
Ireland: 1
Thailand: 1
Taiwan: 1
Venezuela: 1
Portugal: 1
Japan: 1

Wow!  What a diversity of countries and cultures.  It’s a little strange the UK is separated from Great Britain, not an important distinction in my opinion.  Perhaps if you live in Northern Ireland you won’t agree?

On other days for example, I’ve seen a lot more readers in Brazil, France and Belgium.  I’ve also seen a few Afghani, Estonian, Egyptian, Israeli, Swiss, South African, Peruvian, Romanian, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Slovakian, Austrian, Italian, Saudi, UAE, Singaporean, Finish, Belize, Malay, Hong Kong, Serbian, Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian readers.

Since most of these people are readers of garden blogs in general, it’s probably a lot more representative of our community as a whole.  What an interesting group of people we are!

I’d love to hear from all of you, and find out who you are and what you think of this blog!  I hope you all leave comments sometime.  You’re welcome to do this in your native languages if your English isn’t good.

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She made a similar list of food blogs.

Thanks Jeanne, for spending the time putting these lists together.

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Paquebot recently asked me to update the list of tomatoes he’s offering from what I posted here for him last year.

Paquebot lives in Wisconsin, USA.  He’s offering more than 200 tomatoes, organized into the year grown, giving an indication of the age of the seeds. Tomato seed are normally good for about 5-10+ years, so age isn’t an issue if you plant them within the next couple of years.

He’s offering them as part of the Seed Network, and in particular he said they are available to anyone, anywhere in the world. You have to discuss payment or trading terms with him yourself.

If you’re interested in anything here, send me an email and I’ll forward it to him.

2009 seeds
Aker’s West Virginia Black
Albany Georgia Heirloom
Amish Paste
Anna Hermann
Apelsin
Apricot Brandywine
Aunt Ruby’s German Green
Banjan Roomii
Belgian Heart
Big White Pink Stripes
Black Sea Man
Bosu
Buckeye Yellow
Carbon
Caro Rich
Chico III
Chocolate Cherry
Cour de Bou
Cow’s Tit
Eagle’s Beak
Endless Summer
Ernesto
Fantome de Laos
Giraffe
Guido
Guernsey Island
Hawaiian Orange Cherry
Hawaiian Pineapple
Hazelfield Farm Red
Heinz 1439
Japanese Black Triffle
Kardinal
Lagidny
Limmony
Marizol Purple
Mirabell, Red
Mirabell, Yellow
Monkey Ass
Moya
Northern Crown
Northern Lights
Pantano Romanesco
Paquebot Roma
Persimmon
Pink Ruffled
Portugal Monster
Principe Borghese
Riesentraube
Rozovii Giant
Sainte Lucie
Siberian
Silvery Fir Tree
Snowberry
Super Snow White
Ten Fingers of Naples
Tennessee Britches
The Orange
Tiny Tim
Togo Trefele
Turks Muts
Volgogradskij 5/95
Vorlon
West Virginia Pink Slicer
Willamette
Wisconsin 55
Wisconsin 55 Gold
Yellow 1884 Pinkheart

2008 seeds
Amish Red
Belarusan Heart
Besser
Black From Tula
Black Plum
Black Prince
Bloody Butcher
Boondocks
Borgio Cellano
Brianna
Cherokee Purple (PL)
Chianti Rose
Chocolate Stripes
Dinner Plate
Dr. Lyle
Dorothy’s Mennonite Beefsteak
Dorothy’s Mennonite Bicolor
Dorothy’s Mennonite Big Heart
Douce de Picardie (PL)
German Head
Giant Belgium
Giant Oxheart
Giant Roma
Giant Tree
Gigante Liscio
Golden Dwarf Champion
Hungarian Italian Paste
Japanese Oxheart
King Pineapple
Lancaster Pink
Large Pink Bulgarian
Legend
Long Keeper
Marglobe
Market Miracle
Mexico
Noire Russie
Old German
Preacher
Red Heart Yellow
Red Penna
Red Zebra
Russian Annie
Sandul Moldovan
Spoon
Super Beefsteak
Super Choice
Tater Kin
Taxi
Teton de Venus
Thessaloniki Oxheart
Valencia Pink
Watermelon Beefsteak
White Tomesol
Woodle Orange
Wuhib
Yamal

2007 seeds
Ace 55
Amana Orange
Ananas Noir
Aunt Madge’s
Aussie
Bear Claw
Beauty King
Berkeley Tie Dyed
Black Oxheart
Blue Beech
Boyarsky
Boy Boy
Brown Berry
Bull’s Heart
Burracker’s Favorite
Carmelo
Chateau Rose
Clover Trefle
Costoluto Fiorentino
Crimson Cushion
Crnkovic Jugoslavian
Danish Export
Des Andes Jaune
German Queen
Gogosha
Greater Baltimore
Gregori Altai
Grosse Cotelee
Hartman’s Yellow Gooseberry
Hog Heart
Howard German
Japanese Golden Pear
Julia Child
Kalman’s Hungarian
Korney’s Jelly Bean
Kosovo
Lemon Giant
Lumpy Red
Mandarine
Matt’s Wild Cherry
Mennonite Orange
Merveilles des Marches
Minibel
Nelson’s Golden Giant
Novikov Giant
Oaxacan Jewel
Olive Doree
Orange Giant
Paul Robeson
Peacevine Cherry
Pigmeo
Pipo
Pomodoro Palla di Fuoco
Pomodoro Red Pear
Raspberry Giant
Sausage
Scatalone
Selandia
Super Marmande
Tiger Tom
Tumbling Tom
UC82B
Ukrainian Pear
Wanda’s PT
Wes
Zebra
Zorica’s Croatian Bull Eye

2006 Seeds
Abraham Lincoln
Amish Salad
Amish Yellow
Aunt Gertie’s Gold
Aztec
Balkon Star
Black Cherry
Bradley
Cherry Roma
Cherokee Green
Cosmonaut Volkov
Croatian Heart
Douce de Picardie (RL)
Emeraude
Gardeners Delight
Garden Peach, Red
Garden Peach, Yellow
German Pink
Giant Syrian
Goose Creek
Greenbush Italian
Green Cherry
Green Giant
Green Zebra
Harvard Square
John Baer
Kristina Vatcheva
Leatha’s
Lemon Drop
Lithuanian
Long Tom
Marianna’s Conflict
Marianna’s Peace
Medford
Moby Grape
Mr. Fumo
Novogogoshary
Nyagous, Red
Oregon Spring
Perito Italian
Roman Candle
Segler
Sheyenne
Striped Cavern
Surender’s Indian Curry
Tigerella
Tommy Toes, Red
Tommy Toes, Yellow
Ugly Ripe
Voyage
West Virginia 63
Yellow Pear
Yoder’s German Yellow

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