

These miniature green peppers in 9" pots produced heavy crops for months.

Soil

But where will you get the soil? Use compost. Check the municipality and the agricultural extension office for sources of compost suitable for gardening, and , and the local gardening club. Better to make your own compost (see Composting indoors and Vermicomposting), but it might take some time to make enough.



Try to include some good topsoil, or any soil, mainly for the sake of the clay content. Add some lime (ground limestone, about half a litre), and/or wood ashes (2 litres). You can also use sphagnum peat moss, coconut coir, perlite, though they're inert and don't contain any nutrients. Sawdust can be difficult stuff in garden soil, best avoid it -- especially sawdust from pressure-treated timber, which has poisons in it.

No compost?

If you can't get compost, leaf-mould will do, but it might be short on nutrients -- add a litre of organic fertilizer such as bloodmeal, ground peanut cake, alfalfa meal, ground steamed bonemeal. Fish emulsion is useful -- check the label to see it's all fish and has no chemical fertilizers added.



Liquid seaweed emulsion is one of the best sources of micronutrients and a real soil and plant health booster. Use some in the watering can every two weeks.



Tip:

Spray transplants with seaweed emulsion before you replant them, especially bare-root transplants.



Probably the best fertilizer is diluted urine (1:4 water). It's the mainstay of a successful container farming project in Mexico City: "Regarding fertilizer, considering the expense of commercially prepared fertilizers, the amount needed for a full-size deck garden and the fact that many of them don't work well, I have found that urine is the best fertilizer for this system. The decaying leaf medium breaks it down almost instantly so that there is never any odour, and germ survival in material such as this has been shown to be practically nil. This is a key element in this technology, is abundant, with no cost, and easy to manufacture." -- Container Farming -- Organic food production in the slums of Mexico City



Raised Bed Agriculture -- Minifarms Network: "For home gardening raised bed agriculture means: less work, less irrigation, improved soil, higher yields and no poisons. For market gardeners, mini-farmers and mini-ranchers it means all the above plus profits. RBA creates a healthy soil to grow healthy plants to provide healthy food to feed healthy people." 2,200-word article from Ken Hargesheimer in Texas, who has taught organic growing in permanent raised beds worldwide.

http://www.minifarms.com/rba.html

City farms







Organic gardening

Composting

Small farms

Small farms library



