Just You, a Shovel and a Clearing in the Woods
You have bugout to an undeveloped camp in the woods. After you set up your camp and set up your security, located a water source, filled your containers and gathered you fire and finally struck a flame, it’s time to think over your food options. You begin to collected wild fruits and eatable plants, set snares, fish traps and trout lines. If you decide that this location would good long term, what else can you do to stretch your dwindling food supplies? If it is still early enough in the season, you could prepare to plant a garden. You have your garden seeds (mostly low demand vegetables), two shovels, a rake and a bucket. Not much to work with but the American Indians did surprisingly well with just basics tools as did many of the early settlers. You know how to make at low quality compost from the materials available which is good enough for your low demand vegetables. You know too how to space them to grow without irrigation but what should you next?
Solomon’s Plan for You’re Clearing In the Woods.
1. Find a clearing in the wood open enough to allow sunlight to your garden most of the day. You can enlarge it by girdling the trees around it to expand it for next year if needed and planting around them.
2. At 4 foot on corners, begin digging an 18 inch diameter circle as deeply as possible turning under the sod.
3. Gather nitrogen rich fertilizers: fish heads, animal skins & offal, road kill, manure of all kinds, and humanure (remember if you don’t have parasites already you can give them to yourself). Incorporate it in as you re-dig your circles to remove the surviving grass roots & weeds.
4. In 10 days, the fertilizer will have rotted down to where it is safe to plant your seeds or transplant the seedlings of your survival vegetables (toughest & low demanding ones): winter squash, corn (of Indian ancestry like Painted Mountain), sunflower, zucchini, kale, cabbage (large, late), tomatoes (intermediate, smaller fruited), and Swiss chard.
5. While your seeds sprout, spade up the turf in widening spirals, killing weeds, incorporating more fertilizer as you continue to dig up sod between the hills.
6. Start more hills for fall harvested crops and proceeding as above.
7. At the end of the season, you will have gone a long way toward preparing and fertilizing your garden for next year.
Exception for Potatoes:
1. Dig 12 inch wide rows with centers 3 or 4 feet apart.
2. Fertilize the rows as above and then plant the seed potatoes.
3. Before the vines emerge, turn over a 12 inch strip of sod on each side of the row and incorporate fertilizer. Continue this out to 24 inches while just chopping the remaining grass and weeds to kill them.
4. As the vines grow, hill up the enriched, loosened ground towards the center of the row.
Making Low Quality Compost:
1. As you have time, rake leaves, weeds, forest duff, animal scraps, humanure and wood ashes to make compost over winter to utilize.
2. It should be possible to make a low quality +, possibly a medium quality compost, for a better yield from your low demand vegetables next year.
Lawn to Garden Strategies:
1. Most of us will be facing the challenge of turning an established sod, whether lawn or hayfield, into a garden or productive field.
2. One strategy includes the proper use of a rototiller in destroying the grass and the use of the shovel to destroy the tiller pan for deeper root penetration.
3. A second strategy is using only a shovel and working less than 2 hrs a day for less than a month. Solomon, at 63, can turn 2000 square foot of heavy sod into garden at his Tasmania homestead. With it’s summer and winter season crops, good ground enriched with compost, manure and irrigation available, a 2700ft2 garden (2000 ft2 of actual growing beds without borders or paths counted) will feed 1 adult for 1 year.
4. In War time England, a families’ allotted 2700 ft2 garden area served to supply only about 1/3 of the total yearly calories for 2 adults.
5. Solomon then goes on in his book “Gardening When It Counts” with strategies for best using the new garden with what vegetable, appropriate raised beds, raised row and hills. You should read this.
The Shovel is Your Primary Tool
There are many tools for gardening by hand, but the one basic tool is the shovel. It comes in several venations (the shovel, spade and combination) and there are advantages to each. It is necessity to sharpening the cutting edge (at least 4 inches on each side) as shovels are a cutting tool and (as I can personally attest to) makes a huge difference when you are cutting heavy sod and tree roots. Starting at the center, grind or file the edge at a 15 ‘ angle to a chisel edge and at a 5’ angle on the opposite aide to remove the wire edge. Check the edge after each extensive use, unless it is exceptional steel, it will need to be re-sharpening. The pointed tip of even a sharpened shovel is not efferent at cutting tree roots. If you grind off the tip to flat knife edge of about 3 inches, fairly cut through most tree roots up to an inch in diameter(I have and it dose!), as well as dig, stubborn sod. If you ever do find yourself in that clearing in the woods, rest assured that there will be many, many tree roots in need of cutting.
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