I must apologize for not being more active with this blog. I have been ill -- just a very nasty summer cold -- and busy. My wife and I are nearing the end of a looong remodeling project. The Parking Space Garden is doing very well.

The plants inside the greenhouse are doing very well. The tomatoes are 2 feet tall now and very healthy. Tomatoes planted outside in Seattle are barely alive.

Outside plants are slow, due to the coolest June on record in Seattle. Also, I think some of our Grow Boxes may not have gotten any fertilizer. That is easy to fix.

We've had our first harvest -- lettuce which we gave away to members of our congregation.

Meanwhile, my home Grow Boxes are doing very well. We have been eating the Broccoli. It is so tender and sweet, it doesn't need to be cooked.

Cool, wet weather in the Northwest

This week has been very cool (50's) and wet (1 in. of rain today) in the Pacific Northwest. Good for lettuce and the kales. Not good for tomatoes and eggplants. I'm glad I decided to include a greenhouse in the design of The Parking Space Garden.

The garden is practically complete now. This week I planted eggplant and more basil in the greenhouse. Outside I planted carrots, onions, kale, two kinds of zucchini and cucumbers. Within the next month, when all of these plants spread out, the garden will be full.

I also bought two pieces of concrete reinforcing mesh at Home Depot. I bent these into a rectangle which I set up over the tomato plants. This should give them a good strong support system as they grow vertically.

Plant support

Gardening in such a small space (roughly 8 feet by 16 feet) requires that we go vertical as much as possible. For that reason, we are enclosing the garden with a light weight, easily portable fence made of 1 1/2 inch PVC pipe with 48 inch green plastic fencing wire-tied to it. This fence will also serve as plant support for pole beans on the east side and sugar snap peas on the west side. The beans will likely climb higher than 48 inches (most likely 96 inches or higher), so I will need to go up with another layer of fence by the beans. I cannot go outside the parking space footprint to support that fence, so I will go over the top at a height of 8 ft and join the west and east fences with two lengths of PVC. Pictures later. The entire of cost of the garden, including the greenhouse and 30 grow boxes will be about $700. That will not be economical the first year, but by the end of the second year, it will have paid for itself at today's vegetable costs.

So the world will know

Carol R. made a nice sign for our Parking Space Garden. It reads "Parking Space Intensive Garden -- One Less Car, Lots more local food." In the greenhouse we have 13 tomato plants, 2 hot pepper plants and 4 sweet peppers. Outside we have 5 containers of pole beans, 3 containers of broccoli, 4 containers of sugar snap peas, 2 of lettuce. This week I hope to plant zucchini, kale, onions and carrots.

What happened in Cuba

Cuba had it's "peak oil" experience in the 1990's. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in the sudden cutoff of all oil imports into Cuba. Almost overnight Cuba had to learn to cope with the shortage of energy and all the resulting shortages that caused. This video shows how Cubans did this and how they learned to take care of themselves. We have a lot to learn from Cuba.

Grow boxes on a boat

Grow boxes are ideally suited for liveaboards. We currently have four boxes on the quarterdeck of our boat. (My wife and I have lived on our 38 foot trawler, Desiderata, for more than two years. We are remodeling a 100-year-old house in Everett Washington and the work has taken a bit longer than we had expected. We expect to move in this summer.) We have lettuce and strawberries started. This week we will start harvesting the lettuce which was planted in March. This box has not been in a greenhouse. None-the-less, our harvest is very early for the Maritime Pacific Northwest.

Under Construction

At last the Parking Space Garden is under construction at Shoreline Unitarian Universalist Church in Shoreline, WA. I have been busy with travel and remodeling our house. But from now on, I should have a lot more time to put on this. Expect to see major progress this coming weekend.