Raised beds

I love the concept of raised beds, but have always cringed at the sight of wood touching dirt.  I am a carpenter in the great Pacific Northwest, and I know too much about where this relationship ends up, rotten planks.  Sure you can use cedar instead of fir and extend the lifespan of your raised bed a few years.  And you could use pressure treated lumber, which is saturated in a substance so toxic that microorganisms won't even grow in it.  But these are the options for the most part when thinking raised bed construction.

I have developed a raised bed system here that only uses chicken wire, some half inch rebar stakes, and a few bales of straw.  You can see the wooden stakes in the photo, but the bottoms of those rotted and broke off this year, and those were cedar stakes stuck in the ground for one year.  Well half inch rebar in 4' lengths works much better!

1.)  First you want to loosen all the soil under where the raised bed will sit, breaking up any layers that may have formed by sheet mulching, or grass smothering etc...  Be careful not to step on the soil and re-compress it after you loosen it.  I say loosen because you don't really want to DIG it up and flip it over, trust me on this, I have reasons.  Just stab a 12 inch + hay fork in the soil and reef on the handle a little bit and pull the fork back out and repeat.

2.)  Pound in the rebar 2-3 feet apart around the perimeter of your raised bed shape.  Then run 24" tall chicken wire around the rebar.  Fasten the chicken wire to the rebar with little lengths of tie wire, or hemp string.  Stretch the chicken wire as tight as you can get it so it holds itself up from sagging outward.

3.)  Next you you line the inside of the raised bed walls with wafers of straw bale, back fill the bed with yummy soil/compost mix and plant until you feel a slight buzzing sensation in your heart, then you will know you have done it well.

How to make compost

If you can tolerate the intro this is a great video on the basics of composting

It's easy to take radical action ...

The simple act of growing ones own food is the most important revolutionary action most people can readily engage in, right now.  You can finish reading this blog and go outside smother some grass and plant some squash seeds.  And you will be better off than you were when you woke up this morning, in a myriad of ways.  Gardening is a re-enfranchising activity.  Growing your own food lessens your dependence on the food corp system.  If most people could grow just 10 or 20% of their own food, the world would look a lot different.  In southern climates it's possible to sustain 90% for yourself year round, with a normal sub-urban backyard.  And in the northern climate you can still produce 50 - 70% of your own food year round, if you plan ahead.
I feel like I am taking my power back, by empowering me to sustain my family, and dis-empowering some food corporation to profit from me.

How to choke your lawn

SO you've decided to grow some food where your grass is?  There are several ways to go about this.  Being a fundamentally lazy person, I prefer the easy way to do things.  Sure you could dig out a chunk of grass, flip it over and cover it with fresh dirt and viola, you have a garden where you once had grass.  But I have found that by smothering the grass and then simply covering the area with fresh soil is much easier.  You can smother grass by using something biodegradable like newspaper or cardboard.  Cover this with fresh soil and the grass underneath will certainly die.  The first year you should grow something with shallow roots there, but next year it will be ready to plant something with a deeper root system.  My favorite method is to have the City of Eugene dump the leaves they pick up from the fall leaf pick-up program in my driveway.  From there I can wheelbarrow them to another part of the yard and dump them right on the grass, no newspaper needed!

Urban farming

Humans are master gardeners.  Even the die hard Sunday football fan is likely to spend 40-80 hours a year mowing his lawn.  Humans love gardening, growing flowers, lawns etc ...  This behavior is simply our agrarian roots manifesting in a very modern world.  If the same guy would spend 40 - 80 hours a year cultivating his own food, then he would get exercise, eat healthy organic, non-GMO food.  Seems like a no-brainer to me, that's why I am currently trying to grow food at my house in the Pacific Northwest.  I grew up in Indiana and was fed every corn product imaginable until I fled there in 1998.  Since then I have always wanted to try to live more sustainably.  Every house i lived in I, talked the landlord into letting me plant fruit trees and a garden.  And now that I own my own lot and a half with a ranch house on it, I intend to maximize what is possible in terms of sustainability on our little plot.  We are actually able to produce quite a bit of food ourselves.  Most of the summer we can graze the yard and eat fruits, veggies, chicken eggs, even nuts and herbs and spices. 
Now we aren't able, yet, to produce all the food we need, but that is our goal.  More importantly, however, we have found that we have a lot of like-minded folks in our neighborhood that feels the same way, and we are learning how to collaborate with each other toward our sustainability goals.  We have even gone as far as to set up a farmers market in our front yard to distribute food grown on a local organic farm.  The neighbors come streaming in to buy produce just blocks away from their house!  Great way to meet the neighbors!  And we end up with lots of produce from the farm that we can or freeze for later use. 

Welcome to Suburban Farming

Our culture in America has allowed corporations to take over the supply of food that we eat.  The average vegetable at a Denny's restaurant travels over 1500 before we eat it.  This is ridiculous.  Plus, the food isn't fresh, and it's generally conventionally grown ... so by the time it gets to us it has lost most of the menial nutritional value that it started with.  Plus this makes us beholden to big corporations, who choose which foods to offer us.  So we end up eating the foods that are most profitable for them to sell.  We used to choose from hundreds of different varieties of apples just 100 years ago, now the apple consumer is really only offered ten or twelve varieties.
The good news is, that there is a simple solution, grow it yourself.  Grow extra and trade with your neighbors.  If you live in a community where others are doing the same thing, then whole communities can, in large part, support themselves by simply getting connected with their neighbors.  This is why suburban farming and sustainable community are such radically effective concepts.  And we are really just relearning what our grandparents already knew, that we should cultivate much of what we need from the land.