Posted by dianega 7 - ATL (My Page) on Thu, Jan 22, 09 at 17:42 Just looked at Raybo's site & he has great instructions! I noticed he uses a 31-gal container & other sites (ft2garden) used 18-gal containers. Obviously, bigger sounds better... but anyone think the 18-gal ones do just as well? Just thinking of cost, etc. Also, all I've heard of is tomatoes in the SWC... any reason for that? Are they more of a water hog than other veggies? Anyone planting other veggies in them? Actually Raybo has all kinds of veggies in his SWCs. Corn, snow peas just to name a few. I had tomatoes in my SWCs last year which were 18 gallon ones. I had two betterboys in one, two romas in another, and two sweet millions in a third. They didn't do too bad, but I had to prune them religiously. I'm upgrading to the 31 gallon this year for the tomatoes and plan on devoting the 18 gallon SWCs to other veggies...just haven't decided what yet! So many comments, so little time Justin, lol. Actually, leaching doesn't worry me, but if you use pvc, it's a serious pain to get the hose into it after the tomato grows in around it. I've heard people suggest the tubing, but (sounds stupid, I know) I have no idea how to attach the hose to the tubing. Do you just get large enough tubing to attach the hose to? Is there an adaptor from hose to tubing? I do most of mine by hand, also eg, but I'm really talking about the thing that fills the reservoir. I hope this doesn't come out as unintelligible as I'm reading it. Not sure what to make of your post, but I didn't even have a fill tube last year. I just stuck my hose in the overflow hole. It was much easier to do that then use the PVC. I like being in the garden too, but watering isn't part of the fun of it for me. Watching the plants grown and coming up with cooking for all the produce..that's fun to me!

Hi; I did some experiments 3 years ago with leaf mulch as a growing media. It was very interesting and confirmed some things that I had heard and seen over the years. The first thing is that I had mulched mainly oak leaves. These tend to be very acidic, so your results might vary. I basically did three things: 1) I took my regular bed for mainly tomatoes and amended it as always with compost, some peat moss, blood & bone meal, and just for kicks added leaf mold (about a shovel full for every 3 cubic feet) I usually use it as mulch, but here I mixed it in deep about 8 inches top to bottom. 2) I took a bed and about 6-8 inches down put a layer of 3 inches of leaf mold (fluffy) and then covered it up. 3) I build a new bed in a corner of the yard and used 80% leaf mold as the media. The rest was peat moss, earth, and some compost. This was before I was doing any of Mels SFG method. I had read the book years before but my focus then was herb gardening & composting. The results were interesting,in bed #1 did just fine and the leaf mulch was gone, when I turned the bed over in the fall. No difference in the beds production from the year before, I could have probably been more liberal with it. Bed # 2, had issues, the plants, tomatoes & basil, did fine for a while and then stopped growing for a while, I had to use compost and some MiracleGro to get them to start growing again. When I dug up the bed in the fall there was still a bunch of leaf mold down there, it had not dissolved into compost as I had hoped. Bed #3 had a lot of squash in and various other veggies. This bed had nothing but problems, insect infestation, weak plants, and mildew/mold/fungus problems. Produce production what 1/10th what I can normally get even in a bad year. The squash died a long and horrible death. The bed looked like leaf mold the next year when I moved. My conclusion, is that mixing a moderate amount of leaf mold into the ground that has good nitrogen, is fine. Layering leaf mulch underground is a nitrogen sink and if I did it again I would put a nitrogen source with it so it could compost underground. Finally, leaf mold as a growing media is not advisable, and will cause you nothing but headaches. From other experience and some reading I have done leaf mold makes a great mulch and you can dig it into the ground in the fall when you apply more compost & manure. I tend to compost my leaf mold with lots of soil, lawn clippings, and kitchen scraps and make a nice compost that can be used as a growing media. Because of all the oak leave we have here I add a fair amount of garden lime to the compost. One more thing, I read someplace about growing potatoes under leaf mold. This guy put down 6-12 inches of leaf mold in his garden and put (just placed under the leaf mold not in the ground) a bunch of potatoes. He said his yields were 5-6 times his normal yield and the potatoes spread like wildfire. I tried this with a small area in an herb garden I had in Maine back 5 years and it worked great. I donÂt do this now because I can buy potatoes and am limited in space right now. So you can supplement your beds with your leaf mold and save yourself some cash, but donÂt make the leaf mold the majority of the bed. If your leaf mold is not mainly oak leaves, you might have different results, but it will need an increase amount of a nitrogen source in the bed. Also if leaf mod was a good growing media the woods around here in Northeast would be lush as a jungle, which they are not. Probably because the leaves are high in carbon but low in nitrogen. ThatÂs the long answer Compost the mulch some more until it is compost. "I have seen references on the internet indicating that the mineral content of soil is needed and pure compost is not good. I assume that the vermiculite overcomes this problem in Mel's mix." Well, vermiculite has no mineral content except it is mainly a mineral in the strict sense. (yeah thatÂs clear..) Mel add vermiculite if I remember for a number of reasons 1) because it doesnÂt float like perlite, 2) because it holds air (like perlite) and keeps the media "fluffy", & 3) because it holds water (go figure it holds air & water). The compost brings most of the mineral & trace elements to MelÂs mix. This is why Mel has you add compost to the squares when you rotate the crops, not vermiculite. You have read correctly compost makes a poor growing media by itself, just like leaf mold it has issues, and one exception might be squashes but even here it holds to much moisture and mildew is a problem. If you want a cost cutting measure used MelÂs old Mixture recipe and use some soil from your property, but IÂm agÂin it if you are learning this method and have little gardening experience. MelÂs system is a recipe for success! CloneZero

Hey aztomn (I take it that is Arizona to Minnesota???) What a difference in growing conditions. I live in Northeastern MN...right in the arrowhead region that people see on the national news as having the coldest weather in,say, January...lol first year doing sfg. Mel's mix is the ONLY way to go. Planted broccoli in sfg and the leftovers in a 1/2 barrel. No contest. Frisbee size compared to golf ball size. Initial start up in dollars may seem prohibitive, but with substantially larger harvests (think equivalent price per pound at the grocery store) and less back breaking work (your time in dollars per hour) it pays for itself in my opinion. I just picked another small basket of snow peas an hour ago. My 3 y/o twin grandsons love going down to the garden and picking packman broccoli or peas. Soon carrots and tomatoes. I too made mine narrower. 3 x 12. Mine is concrete blocks, two courses high so I can sit on the edge and plant, weed, harvest. I have more weeds, but I think they are from some of the compost and then dandilion and maple spinner seeds blowing in. Very easy to pull out. I am already planning for another sfg next year. Think I will ask my local landscape store to order the coarse Vermiculite for me. The only had medium this year, but it worked out fine. You can see how we built our garden at the sfg web site and user upnorthgardener. Good luck and keep us updated. Lori

Hi, newbie here. Has anyone had success doing a hybrid version of lasagna and Mel's mix? I'm trying it but I don't really know what I'm doing and may just be making a big mess. I've been reading a bunch of forums on this site and I'm basically combining most of the stuff that seemed to make sense to me or seemed to make my life easier. I built two 4x4 raised beds with cinderblock (two high) and lined the bottom with cardboard. Then I layered coffee grounds, leafmould, manure, and gravel wetting every layer. Because I need instant gratification, I topped the gravel with 6-8 inches of Mel's mix and plan to plant in that. My hope is that next season I'll have nice compost in the bed and won't really need the mix. Both boxes have a gentle slope that I hope will help with drainage. I filled the blocks with soil and rocks and then planted some flowers in the holes to soften the look of the blocks. Before I build another, any suggestions for improvements or red flags here?