Introduction

Back in December of 97, Lee, a friend of ours introduces us to Adanajah. For many years my wife Valeria and I had been trying to start a garden. I tried to start one before, but I became very discouraged. I used to be very good at growing houseplants. When I was young, single and without kids, I had an apartment filled with plants (My babies-then). At the time I felt that I could grow anything. From that flat we moved to Zimbabwe in southern Africa. There I tried to grow some watermelons, which I thought would be easy to grow. I thought if I just put the seed in the ground presto I could grow perfect American watermelons. It was not very successful the seeds never sprouted. I tried again when we were back in the states, and again no success. Soon I tried to plant again and still no success. Valeria tried to plant a little later and she got a little further, growing carrots and greens. However, the insects, the cabbage worms, overwhelmed the greens. I was totally discouraged by this outcome. Valeria, on the other hand, was not; she was convinced that she just needed more sunlight.

So when Adanajah, Lee and Valeria talked about starting a garden I thought "oh how nice, what else is new…" But the next day I came home, there sitting on our nice lawn was three big piles of "yard waste". Lee and Adanajah had started clearing away the junk in the back yard and cutting back the oleander bush. Three days later, Adanajah and Lee had created a garden and a plan. The plan was to rebuild the soil and the soil biology.

The idea was simple if we built up the biology then the plants that we put into that system would take care of them selves. The cycle is simple; plants take water, minerals and light to grow. Earthworms and microbes break down the dead plant material into the nutrients that the plant needs (Eighth Grade Biology). The more we can do to develop and promote that cycle and encourage diversity, the better. A more balanced cycle will give us stronger and healthier plants. In the past, I thought that growing plants was not a part of that biological cycle. I believed it was only a chemical process. But millions of years have gone into developing that biological system and the addition of a few chemicals into that process do not make it better, it just poisons the microbes and the earthworms.

Where am I

I am in Southern California, about a mile away from the Rose Bowl, Zone 9. Typically, our winters are not cold but it will frost once or twice a year. We very rarely get snow.  The weather depends on what type of year it is, the winter 97-98 was an El Nino year. We got lots of water this year, close to 40 inches of rain. Typically it stops raining in late April or May. Then it’ll start raining again in late October, usually a couple of days before Halloween. Then we may have some rains in November, a dry December, a rainy January, February, and March. Usually it will rain once a week during those times. But on the whole, we have a pretty nice climate in the winter time. Our average temperature from November to March is 72f. In the summertime it is easy for the temperatures to get up to the high 90’s. Sometimes it may reach the 100’s for one or two days. On rare days, it can reach up to 110 degrees. There is also a lot of smog here during the summer. The smog from the LA basin blows here into the San Gabriel Valley before it moves up over the mountains. The typical summer weather pattern is sunny for a few days until it warms up. Then we’ll get a marine inversion layer, essentially a fog layer that will burn off by afternoon and we will then have hazy sunshine. The cycle of marine layer burn off to Hazy sunshine will continue for a few days then we will get two or three days of sunshine. Temperatures will range from a high 90’s during the day, to the mid 60’s in the evening. That is basically our whole weather pattern for the summer.

What was there before?

25-30 years ago my father had a garden. Since then, it’s been a play area for my boys and for my brother’s children. It had been overgrown by weeds and a mature oleander bush. It was also occupied with a play set/jungle gym. For years it was neglected. Basically it was a weed patch and we would cut them down each year when they got too tall. We tried to take a section of it, approximately a 4’ X 10’ section, to grow vegetables, we were unsuccessful. Other than that, there wasn’t really much there. It was basically covered with weeds and junk. Our soil is on the clay side and compacted.

The Beds

There is nothing special or fancy about the beds. They are raised beds. Because they are raised, we don’t walk on them anymore. Not even between the rows When you walk on the beds, you compress the soil, that makes it harder for the plants to send out roots to grow. The plants don’t grow in the soil they grow between the soil particles.

Basically, the soil needs to have structure and strength so that it can hold the plant’s roots. So as you compress it, it just makes it harder for the plants to grow their roots. It also cuts down the air supply, which starves the plant from picking up nitrogen from the air, and it also starves the microbes so they can’t get air either.

I really didn’t know about double digging, so I basically used a pitchfork and churned in # cubic yards of compost. This was compost that I got by the trash can barrel load from Lee. I dug in about 3-4 barrels of compost per bed. I forked the compost into the bed to the depth of 16 inches. I picked out the rocks as I dug. The rocks I placed in a pile in an unused section of the garden or the edge of the bed that is against a wall. The rocks give off minerals. So I don’t discard then totally from the garden.

The beds are nothing fancy; they just have a lot of organic material in them. They were a lot of work. However I believe in the long run they are going to be great If I keep mulching and giving back to the soil at some point I am going to have good soil When I dug the beds up after the pulling up the first crop and churning in the mulch into the soil, I was amazed at the number of earthworms that were in the soil compared to when I was first digging the beds, which is what I wanted. So I think it is going to be great. Also with the beds, we bought some microbes from Tim. I mulched everything, the beds, and the paths and then I soaked the beds and then spread the microbes on top of the beds.

One quick side bar about Tim. Tim is a master composter. His pile is as big as his house, which is a two story Victorian. His pile is 100 feet long, about 30 feet high and slopes an angle of about 35 degrees. He turns parts of it with a small bulldozer. His yard is like a tropical rain forest with lots of palm trees and many other types of trees. The ground is very soft. He has Ducks, Geese, Chickens, Dogs, and Cats. When you are in his yard, you would never think that you were in Southern California. The city tried to force him to remove the pile but then backed down. The rumor mill said that the folks at Caltech tested the finished compost and the soil in his yard was so biologically diverse that it should be a national treasure.. I will ask Tim directly to find out what happened. All I can say is that his pile is of great benefit to our community and we lucky to have him here.. Many people get compost from him. Hopefully, we will be able to do a page or more about him soon. He is really fascinating and has a lot of information that we can all benefit from.

Tim’s microbes will help diversify the bacteria in the soil and it will help the micro-ecosystem that is developing there. The Microorganisms and earthworms break down the higher level organics into nutrients that the plants can absorb and they help with the bio-diversity with the total garden.

The Paths

The paths are probably one of the most unique things about this garden design. When I read a lot of the gardening books and magazines it seemed that they treated the paths as if they were not that important. But in Adanajah’s method, the paths are an integral part of the garden.

The paths are layered. I dug down about 18"- 20" and put branches that were 1" to 2" around, along with twigs that were the garden residue, and that became my first layer. The residue was from the oleander bush, Japanese elm, and the apricot tree. The next layer was 2" of straw. Followed by a 1" layer of news print paper, and the last layer was about 2-3" of soil. The result of this design would be that the bacteria and the worms in the soil are going to consume the straw and the paper and together they will breakdown the branches. This will cause the paths to sink , further raising the beds. But also, as you work the garden, you dump some of your garden residue on the paths. And when you mulch the beds you also mulch the paths. All of this breaks down and becomes compost. So what I should get in four or five years are paths that are compressed compost piles that are full of worms.

The Compost Piles

We have three different compost piles and they are each unique. Adanajah created the first compost pile. He started off with the branches from the oleander bush and the apricot tree. Then he used twigs and leaves. We added about 2 more layers of twigs, cardboard, leaves, newspaper, kitchen scraps, and dirt. Each layer of the compost pile was about four inches thick. This type of composting is called the Indore method.

The second compost pile is smaller than the first and was started because the first pile was getting to high. We were adding kitchen scraps and layers of dirt, but our soil is very clay-like and we did not have much to put into the main pile. This new pile is about 5’ X 5’. I thought I would use the same method as the first pile, but then I got a little impatient especially after reading about composting in books. So impatiently, I turned it. With the type of soil texture I have, it was somewhat of a mistake. I had layered it with branches, twigs, leaves, paper, and soil on the bottom. But as the season went on, I had fewer leaves to add to the pile. The turning created these little round balls of soil. So now when I see a ball I mash them and eventually I will not have any more balls. In this pile I put my kitchen scraps and yard residue. I turn this pile about once a week. This pile does not heat up like the third pile, which I will discuss shortly. But it consumes the kitchen scrapes, the grass clippings and other organic waste like crazy. I will put a pail of kitchen scrapes into the compost pile and by next week when I turn it, there will be no recognizable pieces. The reason I think that this pile does not heat up is because of all the soil that I put into it when I created it. And also I think that it consumes what I put into it so efficiently is because I put the leftover microbes that I got from Tim in it. Further, now that the pile is over a year old the earthworms have discovered it an are doing their thing.

The third pile I got from Tim. This was a very big pile 8’x20’x3’. That was an adventure. He could not drive his truck to our back yard, so he had to drop this ton of compost on our front driveway. It took all day to move it to the backyard. The pile was wet because it had rained the night before and it smelled like ammonia. It was made up of wood chips, horse manure, straw, yard residue, alfalfa, horsehair, vegetables and things unrecognizable….? Then it rained for four days starting that evening. The first day it rained, it leached out a lot of the ammonia, which was a brownish runoff. This runoff killed hundreds if not thousands of worms.

Moving this pile from the front of the house to the back was the best thing for the pile. This action turned it and got air in the pile to feed the bacteria and microbes. The rain helped the bacteria and microbes by giving it good non chlorinated water. I let it sit there for about week. Then it started to heat up. I would turn or dig at this pile every 3 or 4 days and with every turn of the fork steam would come off of it. It was transforming. I had never seen anything like it. After about 2.5 months it started to cool down and it was very easy to turn it, every thing had broken down. The only thing that was recognizable was the wood chips. The horse manure, the straw, everything was this fluffy dark brown substance. I used about two thirds of it to put down 4" mulch on the garden, beds, and paths. I have kept adding kitchen scraps to the pile and when I do, it heats up and turns the scraps into compost.

That is a description of my three piles, and as you can see each one is different. The one that seems to be the most efficient, is the second pile. It seems to take less time to turn recognizable kitchen and garden scraps into unrecognizable black substances. However, it does not heat up. I turn both piles once a week. The first pile I may leave alone for another year. Over all, I think of the compost piles as living objects. I feed them my kitchen and garden waste and they consume it. One heats up, one doesn’t and the other is changing and shrinking. And I will put all of this back into my garden.

The Library

The library was a big help because I could check books out about any subject in reference to gardening. I can’t stress how big of a help that was. I did end up buying two books. I could check out a book, read it see if it had something for me. Take it back and get another. Typically I would get three or four books at a time. I learned a lot. But I can’t stress more how helpful the library has been.

The Insects

Ideally you have a balance in the garden. You have diversity of biology. Our yard was in such a state that there really was not a balance in terms of the plant & insect life. In the biological diversity of our garden, there was a dominant insect, the earwigs. The earwigs were consuming a lot of the plants that we put in there. The idea is that if the plant is strong enough it will resist the insects and survive. But the earwigs were such that they just consumed a lot of the seedlings I put into the ground. I bought some basil at the local gardening shop and they just totally consumed it. What I basically do with the earwigs is when I go out in the night I would destroy them. Going out at night is a very good idea because I couldn’t see what’s eating my plants during the day. The only way to do it is with a flashlight at night. But I think I have the earwigs under control now. The Earwig is actually a beneficial insect. They eat other insects. So there is this little balance between these insects that are beneficial and that are necessary but they are also hurting the plants that I am trying to grow. The slugs are also present in the garden. But when I attack the earwigs I usually get the slugs as well. I went out their nightly for about a month. The other "problem" insects are the aphids. Ladybugs and their larva eat aphids. Right now it is winter and the lady bugs are gone. I am going to try three different approaches to check the aphids. The first approach will be to use water to "wash away the aphids. The next step will be to use an organic soap. I am not so sure that the soap will not harm the microbes in the soil. . The other major insect are the ants. I am still kind of wondering what is going to happen because the ants are the dominant insect. They were everywhere when I was a child and they are still everywhere. When I killed an insect, like an earwig or a slug, sometimes within 20-30 minutes the ants start consuming the carcasses of those insects. It is really quite amazing. I know I have disrupted their nest with my beds and paths, especially one of my paths, which is where one of their nests used to be. I can see when they were coming back after the winter, they were kind of eating up through the side walls of the beds. But once I mulched, I really could not tell what they were doing. My watering however, does not disturb their nest. The ants are also the farmers for the aphids. I will just have to keep an eye out on them. Another insect that caused us great problems when we had done the garden before, were the cabbage worms. A white butterfly lays its eggs on the plants. It would basically eat holes in our greens, lettuce and broccoli. So basically when I see an egg we pick it off and or if I see a caterpillar drop it on to the path and crush it. We actually also try to inspect our leaves of the plants to watch out for the eggs of the butterfly, so that we can get the egg before it turns into a caterpillar.

The Microbes

The microbes were interesting. When they first started talking about microbes, I kind of thought it was mumbo jumbo sort of stuff. It made sense, but I don’t think I realized how important the microbes really were to plant and soil health. They really are the cornerstone of what the plant needs to break down or to get the minerals that it needs from the organics that we put into the soil. We bought the microbes from Tim. I laid down essentially a four-inch layer of mulch and then soaked the mulch pretty well. Then I spread a layer of microbes on to the garden. You can’t really see the microbes, basically the microbes are in the soil that Tim provided. I got two bags of the microbes. I think it helped augment the microbes that were already in my soil. Anytime you give microbes; you also need to give organics. One quick note - last year the weather down here had been pretty damp and I think that had something to do with finding four different species of mushrooms growing up through the mulch. That has been interesting.

Biology

What I am trying to do through this whole process is promote and develop the biology of the garden. If I can increase the biology of the soil, the microbes, and get it to balance the microbes and the earth worms, it will basically break down the soil into the nutrients that the plants need and can consume. It will help the plants growing. God and evolution have taken billions of years to develop this life and they know better than I do, they know better than the chemical companies who produce the fertilizers. All I have to do is strengthen that biological and ecological system and they will survive. So that is why we are planting the organic material, that’s why it is going into the soil, that’s why we are mulching and doing the compost and staying away from the insecticides and chemical fertilizers. The insecticides kill off the insects, but they also kill off the microbes and the earthworms. If I could do away with the municipal water I would, because it is has chlorine and fluoride in it, fluoride is also a form of pesticide. But there is nothing I can do about that. I do capture rainwater when it rains. I wish I had a big tank that I could store a lot of it in, but that is may be for the future. But I store as much rainwater as I can and use it as much as I can. I especially try to use it on the compost pile when it gets a little dry.

Sustainable Living Concept

Basically what we are trying to do with the sustainable living concept, is to live our lives so that we basically sustain ourselves. What we need to do is basically do as much as we can to make our lives have less impact upon the planet. We don’t need to over burden an already over taxed ecology system. I personally feel that the ecological system is breaking down. There are frogs in the American Central Valley, in the Amazon and in the Americas that are developing mutations and dying. I think those are overall symptoms of an ecology system going bad. I think that it is on a larger scale that the whole ecological system is breaking down. Which means, in our food production we need to make it so that we have less impact. That means basically growing our own food and recycling the by-products of that process as much as possible. Make it so that you do buy organic foods, but also keep in mind that organic food is transported from their location to the store, from the store to your house, and then it has to be packaged. We all just need to cut out all that process down and make it so that basically there is no transportation. It cuts down on pollution.

Adanajah

Adanajah was very helpful to us. He basically gave us the foundation for the garden. I have another friend, Christopher – a master gardener - who has some information on this site who is a master gardener and has won many awards for his gardening skills. He had been trying to get me to buy a book, essentially for my wife. Because I had pretty much had given up on the whole process of doing the garden. He wanted me to buy this book and for years he had been after me to do this process and to start gardening. But what Adanajah did was he allowed us to really get a foundation, essentially lighted a fire under us to start planting. He cleaned off the area that needed to be landscaped for the garden and it no longer gave us an excuse not to grow. But he also gave us a foundation or the concept of rebuilding the soil and developing the biology. Once you develop the biology, it essentially builds the plants, and that was something that we didn’t quite understand. Basically we thought fertilizers and things like that would just do the process. But the fertilizers alone won’t do it, the biology is really incomplete and it really is not what we wanted. We did not want food that had fertilizers or pesticides on it. So he basically gave us that concept. Once we had the basic concept down and the understanding of the process, it was easy for us to go to the library and start reading and learning and talking to people. Those things just became a lot easier as time went on. So I have to give Adanajah credit for lighting the fire under us and getting us going and helping us with our garden. Thanks Adanajah.