Adventures in Urban Farming: garbage and garden gnomes

greenman's grotto

It's been a long and trying week. As often is the case when days like these go by, I find myself more and more grateful for a garden to get my hands dirty in and see literal growth and progress from work, patience and care. Today started with a trip to the city landfill here in San Diego. For those of you in the area, and even for those of you in other places across the nation, the landfill can be one of your best resources as a home gardener. Besides being a source of reusable raw materials like wood, glass, tires, concrete and brick, the local dump is a great place for amended compost and mulch. Here in San Diego, a square yard of natural chipped mulch to 2" granularity costs you an economical $12 and is chipped on site, guaranteed to contain no weeds or palm. We loaded up 25 empty 5 gallon buckets over a tarp in the back of the truck, paid our $12, and had them dump a whole truckload for us to haul out. Since it is already in buckets, unloading is a breeze. Compare that to Home Depot, where a square foot can cost you nearly twice that and be full of chemicals to boot. I highly recommend all home gardeners look into this often unknown resource for gardening.

the greenery at the miramar landfill

all the mulch that you can haul

happy mulched gardens lose less water to evaporation

Having the mulch will cut down on insects like slugs that aren't keen on crawling over splinters and fibers, is natural weed control for most invasive plants, and helps keep things moist during the hot summer sun by cutting down on evaporation from the soil. All good things for the home garden.

Last night was the first night that insect control yielded absolute zero pests, which is a big deal. It would seem that our vegetable weevil problem has passed. Rest assured there will still be regular patrols but our numbers have been decreasing steadily with the bug raids and DE/neem treatments. Our next big project should be getting that shambling mound of a hedgerow trimmed, yikes! Company arrives in only four weeks!

Meanwhile, the tomatoes and tomatillo seem very happy! Blossoms everywhere and even some new small fruit which will undoubtedly grow into enormous juicy heirloom tomatoes as the season grows warmer. Volunteer nasturtiums are popping up everywhere along the fence line too.

tomatillo flowers

tomatoes, yay

nasturtiums will grow anywhere

Finally, I wanted to do a little highlight on some of our garden critters that some of you have been noticing and commenting on. In our home, we put these guardians out to look over the growing plants and in their own way, protect and help the plants to grow. It is great fun to see one of the neighborhood kids find one of these guys buried among the raspberries and pumpkins too!