TIPS FOR YOUR GARDEN
Cut workload, boost bounty
How can you garden without worrying about water and hail and the constant threat of changing weather in Calgary? Thankfully, techniques abound and local gardener Sara Haney uses every available method to make sure her garden stays watered and healthy without any extra effort.
Haney, the self-described crazy hippie of the neighbourhood and owner of Puzzle Permaculture in Calgary (on Facebook) says last year was definitely the most productive tomato season ever.
She was away for a month during harvest and came home to bags of tomatoes and raspberry ice cream in her freezer, compliments of her helpful neighbour and self-watering tomato pots.
After buying an older Glamorgan bungalow in Calgary filled with pavement and a big patio, she cut out huge chunks of the concrete to create in-ground self-watered gardens and growing beds.
She allows orach, a giant edible related to quinoa, to reseed and shelter smaller plants from hail. And she uses Third World pot-in-pot techniques to grow tomatoes in record numbers.
Haney opens her garden to the public to show it off a couple of times a summer because “we have people walking by in the back alley all the time and they are asking why it looks so weird. So (during tours and open garden days) people can ask those questions instead of just complaining about our yard and how weird it looks.”
POT-IN-POT SELF-WATERING SYSTEM
Haney says her self-watering global buckets (Globalbuckets. org) are a great way to save labour and water.
Her 12 buckets are all linked together with tubes at the bottom so she can shove the garden hose into one of them and fill up all dozen buckets at once.
Global buckets need watering every three or four days instead of twice a day for regular pots.
GIANT SELF-WATERING BEDS
A wicking bed is very similar to a global bucket. Haney created a reservoir of water under the plants that wicks up through their roots by cutting into her concrete jungle.
“So we cut the concrete in blocks and moved it aside with the intention that we would get rid of it,” she says.
“And then I started taking permaculture classes and learned when you live in Calgary you have to preserve the heat that is offered during the day to save for night time, to help some of these fussier plants grow. So that’s what we did is we saved all of the concrete and just took the two middle blocks and set them on either side of it and then we dug down two feet.”
Because Haney and her husband were so industrious, they actually sifted out all of the gravel from below the concrete. They put in thick pond liner, weeping tile, landscape fabric and about eight inches of soil. The water wicks up against gravity so the plants are watered from below.
“Now we can water into one big pipe and it fills up the whole reservoir. The biggest bed is about 14 feet by three feet (four metres by one metre). That’s a huge reservoir. All we need to do is to water them every week or week and a half,” she says.
As an added benefit, the garden effect of growing in a concrete jungle is huge.
“Our tomatoes are usually ready two to three weeks ahead of other people in this area because the concrete is so hot.”
SWALES FOR IN- GROUND
Until you come to one of her open yard tours and she talks about it, you won’t realize Haney has a swale system in place.
“The swale is dug down about nine inches (22 centimetres). It’s kind of in a rainbow shape in our garden,” she explains. “Then we put down perforated weeping tile in the swale (and) we made sure it is perfectly level. Then we filled in with wood mulch on top of that. And the wood mulch acts as a sponge. So as it rains, the water from our garage roof goes directly down into the swale system through our garden and it distributes all the water around our whole garden space (about 30 feet by 10 feet or 10 metres by thee metres.) “So the wood mulch and pipe hold the water and the mulch releases (moisture) into the soil when it needs it and the plants go down to meet the water that is around them but not on top of them. We try to trap and save water wherever we are able to. We can hold a lot more water in the ground than we can above the ground.”
'WEEDS' THAT FEED AND SHELTER
Some plants just grow by themselves and Haney lets that happen. Purple tree spinach or orach is one example.
“We just let that grow wherever it wants to grow. It grows eight feet (three and a half metres) tall (and) it grows into the frost. We can make lettuce wraps out of it, we can dry the leaves to make a green powder. The birds like eating the seeds and in the spring we use the (dead) stems to make pollinator houses.
Orach seeds itself and grows so tall it is part of Haney’s hail resistance plan. The different layers of plants deflect the hail from shorter plants: (Orach) gets all battered by the hail. That’s OK. We’ll make a salad out of them and keep going. We’ve been pretty lucky with hail the past couple of years.
Other plants like dandelions and comfrey are chopped up and left on the soil surface to mulch the ground and feed the organisms in the soil as they break down organic matter. This is one more way Haney’s garden is selfsustainable.
LAZY GARDENING
“The best way to influence everybody is through their kids and through their grandkids,” says Haney. “When their adorable little faces are telling them: Please don’t spray chemicals on the dandelions because that hurts the bees and their pollinator friends, that’s where change happens.
“People think we are just lazy gardeners and it’s true. We are. But we are also efficient gardeners. Once people understand why we have the plants and what plants grow they respect the garden that much more.”
TOURS
Sara Haney and tour partner Ted Bahr run permaculture tours every summer. Each tour is a local, fully escorted, entertaining event that includes a vegan meal at the end of the nine-hour day. Details are at www.permaculturetours.ca. Space is limited and tours usually sell out by the end of May.