Raised Gardens and Composting For Sustainability. Amy Grisak

Welcome back to part two with AmyGrisak.

Last week.

Hi Amy,

last

week, Amy talked about nature and how to go about getting into nature

with confidence and the understanding that mother nature is bigger than we are.

And how can you enjoy it?

Well, part two today is on the earth which bore us and sustains us.

Today let's talk about those raised gardens and how you start it.

Well, my family on my dad's side had a farm, just a very

small farm back in Ohio and always had gardens going that type of thing,

but I really got into it when I was 10 and that was my first job.

I started weeding gardens for a woman who owned a little shop.

She had an antique shop and herb gardens that was about a mile down the road.

So I would ride my bike up and she was very patient teaching me what to

pull and what not to pull that type of thing and talked about the uses

of the plants, that type of thing.

They utilize the plants.

They were fabulous at everything they did crafts wise, including gardening.

So that's where I got my start.

Why raised gardens?

Why not just plant it right smack in the earth?

Raised gardens are great because you can control the soil better.

Where we are in central Montana while it's a great place to raise

wheat in a lot of these areas, we're part of the golden triangle.

It can be rather challenging for the home garden because we have

so many different soil types, a lot of times, predominantly clay.

So it's a very heavy soil.

So when you are utilizing raised beds, You can decide and you can have better

control over the amendments that you put in the garden and how you improve them

. I didn't have raised beds growing up in Ohio because we didn't need them so much.

I mean, they're great because you can also control weeds

better, you know, looking back.

But as a child, I just took a shovel and turned everything under.

But when shortly after I moved to Montana, had purchased property by West Glacier.

And it was so excited.

I started building gardens before the house was even built.

And I remember getting my shovel and putting it in the ground and jumping

on it and just teetering back and forth because it was nothing but rock.

It was all big.

Cobbles that glacial till, and I'm like, okay, what am I going to do?

And so I just started popping up the rocks and I ended up building

220 raised beds out of stone.

And then I would haul in soil top soil.

I think I went through 14 dump truck loads of top soil to fill

doll, fill all those gardens.

So you did it with stone.

You can use anything, almost for raised beds, which is great.

Outside of things that are potentially toxic, like railroad

ties for the longest time, those have been very, very popular because

they're great.

They're square, they're solid, but with the chemicals that they use to

treat them, and that's the same with also treated lumber, you have to be

careful there, but you can use wood.

You can use bricks, stone.

Stone was always my favorite medium.

These were rounded.

So they didn't stack very nice at times, but it became very much a

Zen thing because you're building those short walls, 10 to 12 inches

tall, and you're looking for those rocks that fit and you're putting

everything together so it fits.

And so, yeah, it was, it was almost therapeutic as well as practical.

What's on the bottom?.

When I first did those I didn't put anything, but in subsequent

times when I'll build a raised bed, depending on where I'm going to put it,

if I'm going to put it in a yard, you know, right on top of the grass, I'll

put cardboard down first or sometimes oh, eight layers or so of newspaper, and

that's just helping smother out the grass that's below it, because if you put enough

between the lawn, the grass and the top, then you can pretty much smother out the

grass so it's not going to come through.

Oh,

okay.

So the, the rock beds that you started, the raised rock beds that

you started and you didn't put anything underneath it, did you have

a problem with the grasscoming up?

There wasn't any grass there.

It was all glacial.

So, and I did have some weeds eventually, but weeds are going to

come in, regardless., with raised beds, you can control them better,

but even with the soil that you bring in, even with airborne weed seeds.

Raised beds, definitely minimized the weed impact, but it doesn't eliminate it.

Just because you have so much more soil that a weed has to come through.

If it's going to come from the bottom.

And sometimes they do.

Cause I even have some raised beds and we have bind weed,

which is, it's a tenacious.

They need to find a good use for bind weed.

Cause it'll grow.

The roots will grow 20 feet deep and it will stretch out more

than 20 feet wide per plant and it will grow through anything.

It will.

Yeah, it will go through any fabric you put down.

Anything, but it's still, even with raised beds, you can keep on top of it easier,

you know, pull it easier and weaken it.

How high.

Would would listeners want to do their rock bed?

Uh, how minimum you want a minimum, depending it kind

of depends on what you want to plant, but a minimum of six inches.

And then, but you can go from there because a lot of people,

the beauty of raised beds too, you can bring them up to waist height.

And so if you did something like that, you may not put soil the entire

say two and a half, three feet, whatever you want it, you might put

bricks or rock or, you know, something to kind of take up space in the

bottom, but yeah, you can bring it up, so you never even have to bend over.

So it's great for people who have wonky knees or yeah, you just don't don't

need to bend over, which is great.

It brings gardening to everybody.

So instead of you going down to your garden, the garden comes up

to you and it makes it accessible for more and more people.

Now that is awesome.

with raised gardens, can people use heaters?

There's heating coils that you could put in the soil

if you want to warm up the soil.

And the thing that I found with the raised beds, particularly the ones

that I had out of stone is they would warm up earlier in the spring and

then they retain that heat in the fall.

And so it kind of buys you a little bit extra time on either side of the growing

season, which was lovely, especially where I lived outside of West Glacier.

You can put a nice hoop over it and create a mini greenhouse effect.

And so when you have say a plastic hoop over it.

And then you can use floating row covers on the inside.

You can really keep your garden going into the fall for a long, long time.

If you're going to create a simple hoop system, you can just use, I

think it's half inch PVC and you get holders and you push those down in

the soil and just arch it over.

And then use like a six millimeter, greenhouse plastic.

So that's going to be nice and heavy.

So it's not going to tear in the wind

. And it'll last several seasons, but it

Cause that that's what you're balancing.

You're balancing that durability with allowing enough light

for the plants to grow

and where you are in Montana.

What is the, growing season period?

We are zone three, which means we'll go down to about negative 30 in the.

And our spring can get a little iffy.

A lot of times we will freeze.

We had a huge snow storm the third week of may this last year.

, but we'll typically go till the third week of September for a frost.

So we have a pretty solid three months, you know, sometimes you might

get nipped in between, but as long as you have floating row covers or

some way to protect your vegetables, you can usuallyget through it.

This is very educational.

Talk about the zones and what you mean by zone three.

every country has a different scale pretty much, but ours are from the

USDA and they basically look at the winter time temperatures and how cold something

gets, because that's going to determine what trees you can grow, what perennials

you can grow, that type of thing.

And so zone three, like I said, we get to be about negative 30.

Really nice temperate zones are 5, 6, 7.

So those are ones that have a fairly mild winter.

So you can grow a lot, lot more.

It's much, much more forgiving.

My sister-in-law lives in Hungary and I don't think they have

the same type of scale in Hungary as what we do.

Let's go to

Soil.

Soil is tough because it's very regional and you can mix

your own with soil that you could find at a nursery using a combination of

compost, peat Moss or cocoa Corp is actually more sustainable to use than P.

And some people use perlite in it or vermiculite to help lighten the soil.

And sometimes you could get bags of topsoil.

Other times you can go buy a truckload and be able to fill.

So it really kind of depends.

, no matter what kind of soil you start with, you're always

going to have to amend it.

So you always want to add that compost every year, manuers,,

depending, after testing the soil to understand what your soil.

And just keep improving, improving that soil.

There are kits that you can buy at gardening centers that you just take

a small soil sample and with distilled water, I think typically and shake it.

And it'll tell you how your levels are for your macro nutrients.

So the nitrogen potassium and.

Once you know where you were there, then you can add amendments accordingly

So can you just put a whole bunch of earthworms in and

then you never have to amend anything and just leave the earthworms to

do what they do.

No, because different nutrients come from different sources.

So earthworms are definitely beneficial, but without a balance, like with the

phosphorus and things like that, those have to come in from other sources.

And a lot of times those are mineral sources, too, like bone meal type thing.

Because even though we have the big three macro nutrients, You also have

all these micronutrients that they all balance and they work with each other.

So if you're lacking one, the plant can't use another.

So it sits a gradual process and it's a lot of learning by trial and error.

And, but I always tell first time gardeners in particular,

just, just add some compost.

, it'll be fine.

And compost is another

topic for sure,

I burying my scraps.

That that's all I do to compost.

Compost piles are great with your brown materials and greens.

But I never had the patience for them because you have to water and

watch the temperature and turn them.

So there's a lot of different ways to compost.

And my personal favorite is I just bury all my kitchen scraps.

So every day I have my bowl on my counter and I throw my coffee

grounds in there, complete with the paper because that'll decompose.

Eggshells, everything else from the kitchen.

And then in the evening just go out in the garden and I dig a hole and I think.

And it breaks down extremely quickly and the earthworms are happy.

That's what I love because when I dig into the soil, I had all

these earthworms per shovel.

And so when the earthworms are happy, that's always a good sign

that you're doing something right.

And then I bury it.

And the only things you don't really want to compost are like avocado pits.

They'd take or citrus peels.

Those take a really long.

But pretty much anything else you would throw in a compost pile just bury

it just a few inches under the soil.

So how, when

can you use

it?

It's just there all the time.

It's just, so right now I've been planting in the area where I'm going

to put my garlic in about a month.

And so it'll, it'll be fine.

Oh, so

you don't unbury it to use it anywhere.

You just plant

that it's easy.

No turning.

Yeah.

Okay.

The way you're composting, it can go right in

the raised flower or raised.

Absolutely.

It's, it's super easy way to go.

Tomato

plants tend to, at least in New Mexico, they tend to

grow very tall and very quickly.

Does it matter that the soil is going to be so deep when you plant your tomato?

Well, with the tomato, they're really good to plant deep

and, you know, with if at all possible when I have a tomato plant, I'll take

off at least the first row, sometimes several rows of leaves, just so there's

maybe three or four on the three or four kind of rows of leaves on the top

and planet deep because with tomatoes, as deep as you plant

it, roots are going to form.

And anytime you have a good root system, you have a good, healthy plant.

And so you can plant tomatoes pretty deep.

And then when they're growing so tall.

So number one, that's probably an indeterminant tomato, which is a tomato

that's going to keep going until you cut it back or frost or freeze kills it.

If you want a shorter tomato, you want a determinant plant.

And it's just, there's different varieties, different, really cool

cultivars that are these different ones.

So a determinant plant is going to grow to a certain size and all its fruit

is going to ripen about the same time.

So if you're somebody who likes to can tomatoes or freeze them in large batches,

you want determinant plants because then all your tomatoes are going to be ready

so you can process them.

If you're somebody who likes to enjoy them throughout the season, and you love those

big plants grow the indeterminant, and they grow really tall and they just keep

producing until something shuts them down.

And I like both.

I like both the different varieties.

In my greenhouse I have an indeterminant, but like for us here,

you know, we're into September.

And so any of the little tomatoes that are on the top of the plant, I know

there's no way they're going to ripen.

And even in August, I did this actually.

There, there was not enough time for them to mature.

So I cut the plant back, severely pruned it because then all the energy

goes into ripening the tomatoes that are big enough to mature.

So got it.

Got to kind of be rough with the tomatoes and the cold.

Okay.

And we get late freezes every year so we don't plant and

we're at 6,000 feet, our house.

My husband, doesn't like to put the tomatoes in until after April

30th or even, the first week in may because we get those late freezes.

And then you end up losing your plant and then you have to start all over again.

I can give you a trick for that if you want to.

Okay.

My absolute favorite gardening tool, and we've used this ever since.

I've been little, they've been around for decades.

They're called wall-o-watersand it is a water-filled TeePee basically.

And so you plant your tomato plant and you put a five gallon

bucket over it, upside down.

And you slipped this Wall-o-water around the five gallon bucket just

to hold it just holds it upright.

And then take your hose.

And you fill each of these little cylinders around the Wall-o-water

with water, pull the five gallon bucket off and it collapses.

So it's like a little teepee.

During the day, the sun warms that water.

I've had them blizzard buried in snow.

And I've never lost a plant in probably 40 years of using Wall-o-waters.

Okay.

I'm

going

to have to get a better visual here.

Okay.

And if soil isn't warm enough in the spring, you can put up the Wall-o-water

ahead of time and just reach down and plant the tomato inside of it.

It's a little bit more awkward, but if your soil is a little cold,

you put the Wall-o-water up first, it warms up the soil for a week.

Get your plant in you're good.

Don't lose one.

So the

bucket, a five gallon bucket with a bottom to it.

Yep.

upside down over the plant.

Yep.

And then how do you do that Wall-o-water?

Then you just set the Wall-o-water it's empty and you put that around

the bucket and then you just fill it.

And then once it's you just reach down and grab that bucket and pull it off.

And then the Wall-o-water is self-standing.

How can that be?

They're great.

Other great.

Do you buy it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, I thought

we were trying to create it ourselves.

Oh no.

They've been around.

They were actually developed in Kalispell, Montana.

And have we used them when I was growing up, back in Ohio, they were great.

I think $4 a piece maybe, but they last for years.

If I was you in New Mexico, I would take them off as the tomatoes are getting big.

I would remove it, but some years, some years I forget to take them

off and the tomatoes grow and the tomatoes tend to ripen first within

the Wall-o-water, because it's this nice, perfect little environment.

I put squash in 'em and peppers in the spring.

Cause a lot of times I get ancy and I want to plant things outside, but I know

it's too early, you know, you, you know, you're going to get a frost, but if I

can put them in Wall-o-waters, they'll be fine and protects it from the wind.

The wind for us is such a big force to deal with that when they're in the

wall-o-waters they're protected there too.

Another thing that's really good with raised gardens or really

any other garden is mulch.

Nature

doesn't like bare soil.

so many times we'll have gardens that are very neat and tidy looking, but

it's just not how nature would have it.

And that's why weeds are always growing.

But I've always liked straw because it's nice on your knees in between.

So many of my gardens when they're in the ground, you know, raised beds are

great because you don't have to kneel down a lot of times or, or as much, but

straw in the pathways was really nice.

And even in raised beds, even straw around the plants or other mulching

materials, there's so much available, but it helps keep moisture in.

And then it also breaks down and becomes part of the soil.

And another thing that I'm getting into more, which last

year was a bit of experiment.

I'm going to try it again, are living mulches.

So planting, clovers and Betches and things like that that grow

right alongside your plants.

And the hard part is, is the appearance, because we're used

to that nice and neat look.

But when you have these plants, they look like weeds growing

next to your tomatoes.

What you do is you grow them and then you cut them down or mow them down

depending on where you're growing them.

And you just put what you trim right next to the plant.

So that's a mulch within the living mulch and it really

builds up the soil structure.

The worms love it.

The insects love it.

It's really good.

It just is getting past that mental barrier of the appearance of it.

So that's something I've been playing with more because even though I

constantly add to the soil, you can never do enough to improve it.

It's a living thing and you always have to feed it and keep it happy.

Cool.

This is so awesome.

It's fun.

As long as I've been doing this, there's so much to learn and that's, what's cool.

You know, there's always a new variety to try.

There's always a new technique to try and, and that's the other thing too, is what

a technique that may work for somebody may not work for other somebody else.

And that's okay.

It's, it's perfectly fine.

It's like every gardener finds their own groove.

Oh, and

you have such a groove.

You've got

it.

So then we're going to go into the last minute inspiring

words then you want to share

I think when it comes to gardening I just encourage

people to get out and grow.

Even if you're growing a single pepper plant in a pot, or you're putting in

a quarter of an acre of corn, it's just no matter what you're growing

the sheer fact that you're putting something in the ground and having that

faith in the future, I think says a lot about each individual and about society.

And there's a reason that gardening is one of the most popular hobbies in the world.

You know, a lot of people garden for their livelihood or for sustainability,

but there's that absolute joy with watching something from seed to

whatever you harvest at the end, whether it's a flower that you adore

or something that you have for dinner.

There's just something about gardening that is super, super special.

This has been absolutely phenomenal in learning about gardening.

Amy Grisak, thank you so much for sharing your garden groove and your joy

of gardening.

Thank you very, very much.

It's absolutely my pleasure.

One of my favorite things to do.

I can tell.

You have such joy in doing it and, and I appreciate that

you've shared how to do it.

So thank you for being on the show, sharing your positive imprints.

Thank you, Catherine.

Grow your garden and become sustainable while enjoying the benefits documentary

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