I’ve recently begun writing about gardening in the Detroit edition of examiner.com, an online magazine specializing in local coverage of multiple markets (currently ~40). But getting viewers of this site to read those posts, while nice, is not the reason for posting this.

Although I have been taking a breather from posting (anywhere) while I deal with a recurrent health problem, after several months experience with The Examiner I can attest that they pay their bills and that income continues to accrue even if you have to take a break from writing.

If this sounds appealing to you, I’d like you to follow TWO links. The first is a short video about how to fill in the application so that I will get the referral fee. If you do not fill in my “Examiner number” (5189) in the correct place, I don’t get paid for the referral. Links after the break.

The Examiner pays this fee, not you, so please don’t skip this step.

Here’s the link to the application video. (It opens in a new window so that you can refer to it, if needed, while filling out the application itself.)

The second link is the link to the actual application. As soon as you are accepted and have posted two articles, I am credited with your referral and you become eligible for the referral program yourself.

Here’s the  link to the actual application.

Is this a good thing? Yes. Right now they are running a contest which includes not only their standard $50 referral fee, but prizes for the top 20 referrers nationwide.

If you can generate 20 new writers you will earn $1,000 plus have a shot at a Kindle, Wii or other cool loot. All of this, of course, is on top of the penny per page view.

I am a Christian and, as such, subscribe to the Golden Rule of doing to others only as I would have them do to me. That’s a part of why I am recommending this employer.

However, I also know that many of my readers are either Wiccan or Pagan (the gardening crowd seems to include a lot of people who reverence the creation), so I would remind them of the Laws of Three-fold Return and the Law of Seven-fold Return. You can take this employment tip as just one more ‘internet freebie’ or you can acknowledge the worth of this tip by giving me credit for presenting it to you. In either case, it’s only reasonable for you to expect others to treat you the same … and then some.

With 40 markets, The Examiner still has vacancies for hundreds of topical writers (it needn’t be about gardening). I’ve referred four IRL friends. Three have read the deal, liked it and signed up. None of them chose to write about gardening. Whether you want to write about fine wine, cheap tools, elephant lingerie or off-grid survival, The Examiner can probably accommodate you.

I’ll get a referral fee. You’ll get a writing job. Sound fair?m

Each article you post will pay about a penny per view (cross-linking of serial / related posts really pays off here!). And, once you have been accepted and begun to publish, you’ll also be able to receive the referral bonus for encouraging others to apply.

They are not demanding a Michener / Buck / Steinbeck … just a reliable blogger who can write in ‘third person’, stay on topic, be worth reading, paste on a (legal) photo and do the same thing all over again in a day or two. One short article won’t pay you much … not this month, not next, not ever. But a regular series of short articles will add up this month plus next month plus next month … year after year. I’m looking to ‘officially’ retire in the near future, and this is one of the ways I intend to get past the Alpo aisle in the grocery store.

One nice feature Examiner offers is that you can use content there that you have also posted elsewhere and you can use (your original) content that you first posted there anywhere else you choose … book, blog, magazine … wherever. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s how I understand the agreement I signed. So a series of blog entries could, when re-edited, become that book you’ve always wanted to write. Think about that.

Tell’ ‘em Bill Canaday (#5189) sent you!

PS This is a straight referral program, not MLM.

Pink Rose Art Print Art Print” href=”http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?c=c&search=80052&AID=266779200&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1″ target=_blank>Art Print” href=”http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?c=c&search=80052&AID=266779200&PSTID=1&LTID=2&lang=1″ target=_blank>Anna Scott 19.75 in. x 19.75 in. Available at AllPosters.com

I’m guessing that a lot of people who are still ‘hanging on’ financially are also hanging on to their internet connection so as to look for work or at least file for unemployment benefits until they run out. Here in Michigan, lots of people “call Marvin” every two weeks … Marvin is the automated unemployment arrangement. If you can’t keep your internet connection up, the public libraries still offer internet access free. Although, if a recent trip to my local library points to a broader pattern, you may have to be prepared to either wait in line or bring a laptop.

I’ll try to make the wait worthwhile.

I’ll let you know where to find free seeds. I’ll show you what you can forage. I’ll tell you when to plant, when to pick and how to prepare what you’ve grown. And, most importantly, I’ll tell you how to preserve the extra (follow the advice and there WILL be extra) to help you get through the next winter.

If It’s Green, It’s Cash

If you live in Michigan, I’ll show you how to get the exclusive use of a plot of land to grow enough to feed your family – and still have produce left over to sell as a cash crop. Can you say “organic produce”? I thought you could. Go to the market and price the organic stuff. You’ll swear it was grown over a gold mine. Why not grow it, eat and preserve what you need, and sell the rest yourself? The land, leased from the state, will set you back $50 for the year. As the long-term unemployed will tell you, that’s exactly 500 soda bottles or cans for a years worth of food.

I’ll try to hunt similar sources down elsewhere, but would certainly welcome your input. In fact, I’ll need your help; no man is an island and no man is an expert in everything everywhere. As I write this, I am just one person.

A backyard garden can be your own declaration of (food) independence.

My hope is for this blog to become truly worldwide in scope, with articles for the absolute newcomer and articles for the seasoned hand alike. That is; I want it to be neutral as to color, race, creed, nationality, educational level, income level or political affiliation or any of the other dividers that have so long held humankind apart.

Food is neutral (or should be) and so am I.

I’ll need help. Most especially, I am looking for guest authors with niche expertise, such as mycology, UN food policy, organic insect control and others. If you fancy yourself an expert on anything related to growing or marketing food, its sciences, tactics or techniques, please use the contact page on the main menu bar to contact me with a proposed article. I’m all ears.

Can't argue with that logic.

Making your own rain barrel can help you cut costs in your garden while increasing both the quantity and the quality of your produce.

Greg, over at NashVeggie, has put together a pretty nice pictorial of how to make your own rain barrel on the cheap. I’ve seen other barrels similar to his, and I’ve given considerable thought to building something a little more ambitious in my own “space challenged” garden*, so allow me to add my thoughts to his.

A problem to solve:

I’ve found that I get a dramatic boost in output IF (and only if) I never, ever, let the soil dry out. “Mid-day wilt” might be a natural response, but it is NOT the optimal response. And standing around with a watering can in my hands simply isn’t on the agenda. Not today. Not ever.

A simple water barrel, unless it is mounted way high, offers too little water pressure to power anything more automatic than a bucket. It’s not likely that I am going to use that arrangement very often. Certainly not often enough to keep the soil continuously moist. The word ‘continuously’ is the important one here. Even a few hours of wilt is damaging.

Nay-sayers Anonymous:

I can hear the nay-sayers with their nay-saying now. They are saying that allowing the soil to dry out between waterings forces deep rooting and that deep rooting is, as Martha would say, “a good thing”.

Forced deep rooting is accomplished by killing the shallow roots that the plant already had. Killing roots that the plant has already invested energy into growing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’ve found that keeping the soil continuously moist allows the deeper roots to develop, too, without the loss of the shallower roots. If the plant needs deeper roots to cope with the heat (transpiration loss), it will develop them. But stressing a tomato plant, for instance, with drought will lead to low output and blackspot (a calcium deficiency that looks hideous) on the blossom end, rendering some of the fruit that does develop unusable. It will also render every plant in your garden more vulnerable to insects and disease. Any stress will accomplish that last part and drought is as good of a candidate stress as any.

It is fine with me if, as a result of keeping the top of the soil most, the roots don’t probe more than a few inches. This is because the bulk of the bacterial action that produces the needed nutrients is in the first few inches of soil anyways. This leads to a problem, though, in that the water I apply continues to travel downward and these first few inches of soil are also the first to dry out. A weep or emitter irrigation system can keep that top layer of soil as moist – and biologically active – as the floor of the Amazon forest. I recommend the weep style of system because it is dependably reliable, very reasonably priced and very simple to install and operate. Once installed, it is an entirely passive system.

I’ve grown 14′ tall tomatoes in Michigan using this method with well over a bushel of fruit from each plant by this method. It works. Four years later, I’ve still got plenty in my pantry.

Moreover, it does not require that I be rigid in my plant spacing and layout. This is a good thing for those of us who use interplanting or rotation planting as part of our gardening techniques because, at various times in the season, the same general area may be occupied by several different plants planted in slightly different locations. With the Tyvek weep lines, I simply turn the water off for a few minutes, pull the lines from their old locations, dig a shallow trench in the new location with the corner of a hoe or the point of a triangular planting / weeding hoe, drop the lines in the trench and re-cover them.

Done. But that’s okay: that wasn’t the fun part of gardening anyway.

For each answer, a fresh question:

As you work in your garden, you are using sharp tools around delicate lines. You WILL cut them. Although the emitter lines are harder to accidentally cut into, they are also more expensive to repair. To repair the weep lines, simply clamp the supply end off with a paper clip and let the line dry while you go to a fast food restaurant to get a plastic straw. Don’t steal … pay for a small drink. For the sake of your health, make it water. Save the straw. On your return, snip off an inch or so of the straw and use masking tape to attach the cut ends near the middle of the straw. Keep track of the rest of the straw because 1) it doesn’t need to be in a landfill just yet, 2) you don’t need to be in a fast food restaurant, either and 3) summer isn’t over.

After finding a source for a suitable used barrel, which is, in my experience, the toughest part of this project, Greg says that less than $25 in parts from any decent hardware store will finish the job. My own estimate is that the out-of-pocket cost is quite likely to be under $10, as almost anyone reading this page will have some or all of the pieces already laying around, unused. For instance, he bought a ‘no kink’ hose bib. That’s fine, and it obviously works, but either raising the barrel or turning the bib sideways when mounting it will also avoid kinking the hose and, even if you have to buy ‘new’, the regular hose bibs are only about $3-4.00 in Detroit. You’ll notice that Greg is going to have you raise the barrel after all … so why not buy the cheapest valve you can find with the right threads? You may even have a hose bib sitting around in your ‘junk box’ of plumbing parts. Over time, most of us develop a box or two like this … stuff that still works, pulled in the process of fixing something else that really was broke. Too good to toss – but with no immediate use – they collect in boxes patiently awaiting a moment of inspiration or even of desperation. I could probably get everything else he mentions for around $5 new. With the exception of the O rings, however, they don’t need to be new and there are ways other than using an O ring to seal the hole. In fact, the other methods, such as applying a liberal shot of silicone adhesive, might actually be preferable, since the washers he uses will not have a retention groove machined in them to capture the O rings. Just wet an old rag (or fingertip!) with water and wipe away any excess adhesive after the parts are tightened and you’ll end up with a very neat job.

This is, after all, ‘just a water barrel’ and probably not the centerpiece of your home or garden.

Your mileage may vary, but small deviations from his design are probably worth giving some thought to. He used, for instance, a PVC pipe fitting on the inside of the barrel. From a corrosion standpoint, this might make some sense, but, since the plastic barrel is going to degrade in the UV light found outdoors, I honestly don’t see the barrel lasting long enough for the corrosion resistance to matter. Use, if you wish, a pipe fitting made of iron pipe. Iron helps keep your plants green and iron from plants helps keep you healthy, so a little regular corrosion would actually be to your benefit.

You can ‘customize’ his idea by adding a drip or weep irrigation system powered by the tank. (That’s not an affiliate link … I just like the product.) If you do this, make certain to raise the tank several feet to insure that gravity will supply enough pressure to keep the lines pressurized. The top of the water needs to be at least 7′ above the surface of the garden in order to give at least 3 psi at the soil level. A 2×4 or 4×4 stand should prove more than adequate if you have at least rudimentary carpentry and design skills. Keep in mind that a gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds. Thus, 50 gallons is going to weigh about 400 pounds. For this reason, make the support sturdy with a firm foundation. If the soil beneath it is on the sandy side, you might want to spread the weight around by putting it on a stone bed or some sort of concrete / concrete block foundation.

Think about it:

With a little thought (and either a toilet or stock tank fill valve & float) you should be able to keep some water in the tank at all times but allow the rain water to improve matters. Tap a garden hose into the toilet float valve and place the float valve near the bottom of the tank in a manner similar to how Greg illustrates for sealing his hose bib. As discussed below, the actual height might be a bit fiddly.

The float valve will keep ‘some’ water in the tank at all times (enough to power the irrigation system) but the rain water will fill all the space above the float with chlorine-free / nutrient rich water. Keep in mind that the level of the “some” water will need to be 7ft. higher than the garden soil. Adjust the float so that the valve opens at this level and all will be fine. This is the ‘fiddly’ part, made somewhat more challenging by the fact that most of us live in single-story homes and our gutters are not much more than 7′ above the ground.

If you live where winters result in freezing temperatures, don’t forget to completely drain the whole system in the fall and to divert the water from the downspout away from the water tank until the weather is reliably warm next spring.

If you buried the weep tape (shielding it from UV rays while reducing evaporation loss) you can also store it, loosely coiled, indoors and get a second year from it. Don’t plan on re-using it if you left it outdoors all winter or if you didn’t shield it during its first summer.

The nicest thing about a watering arrangement such as this is that you can walk away from the garden for a vacation trip and know that the garden will not only survive, but flourish. If you are also a mulching ninja, even the weeds will still be under control when you return.

*I can’t actually implement those thoughts until I’ve had a chance to dig up the drain line from my house that runs under my garden — but is plugged by tree roots from the neighbors elm tree.

And now, a break from my writing …

Not too long ago, I wrote a longish article about plastic bags. That’s all, just those ubiquitous plastic bags you see snagged on trees, lining gutters or washing downstream. But even that thumbnail sketch took several long posts and a considerable commitment of time to read. (If you think they took a long time to read, just consider how long they took to write! For every word in the final article, at least three were cut from the drafts.)

What does this have to do with gardening?

The way I see things is that we can garden our little faces off but if we don’t also tackle our relationship to our possessions, curb our mindless consumerism, and reconsider our personal values, we undo all the good that our little plot in the backyard might have done. And then some.

The very next time you go to the store and get distracted by the “ooh, shiny” … whether it’s an electronic gadget you absolutely must have or the latest in fashions that shows that you are ‘”au courant”, take a closer look, and imagine that object magnified by a factor of 70. That’s the waste load we needlessly place on the planet when we mindlessly purchase things.

Just look at it and ask yourself if owning it is worth the true price.

If it is, go ahead and buy it.

Most of the requests I get for posts deal with pests and, while I hate to get caught up in a negative spin on gardening, sooner or later the topic has to be addressed.

I am going to handle this by breaking it out into three main subsections and two lesser ones:

A) Garden generalities … principles and procedures that you can follow to ensure a generally healthy garden. This will be further broken out into:

1) discouraging pests and

2) actively eradicating them … two entirely different topics.

If I never write on any other subject, those two, alone, would make for a full career.

B) Plant-by-plant growing instructions which will, necessarily, treat the pests that visit each plant along with other factors of cultivation such as lighting, germination temperatures and so on. I might even toss in a particularly interesting recipe or two.

C) Treating each pest as an individual, paying attention to life-cycle, means of control and factors to weigh before deciding to eradicate.

Organic gardening is a blend of encouraging the positives such as healthy growth, presence of beneficial organisms and reasonable tolerance levels with appropriate levels of control when these are threatened or insufficient.

Keep you chin up. First we’ll paint the big picture with the broad brush and then we’ll home in on the details that stitch everything together. Finally, we’ll try to keep a good attitude and have a bit of laughter at how things never seem to work out perfectly, but they always seem to work out well-enough.

–Bill

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Bilbo Blogger