My First Year on the BathroomFarm

It's been a year and a week since I planted the wall on my BathroomFarm and it has been a wonderful year indeed. My landlord bolted a flooring scrap for a better nailable surface on the wall of my bathroom during post fire renovations. I filled various beverage containers with dollar store dirt and barely thriving seedlings, hung them up and turned on my homemade BathroomFarm lamp.

This first year has been quite a learning experience which is fine because I am the Queen of Failing Forward and willing to learn from every mistake and try anything a couple of times. I have gone from an inexperienced gardener with not one clue to actually eating food from my garden. I've read zillions of books and blog posts and Googled every stupid gardening question ever asked. And, I keep doing it because I believe that it is 100% possible to empower yourself by gardening even if you you have no yard, no experience, no traditional gardening tools and no money.

The BathroomFarm is designed to be a very low cost, almost no cost venture. Many urban people are finding themselves without a source of fresh food these days and many people are also finding themselves in financial situations they have never expected. That's why I designed my garden with simple and inexpensive materials and use grocery store and dollar store seeds. Food producing plants and seeds can be purchased with food stamps if the retailer accepts them as a form of payment. It was an exciting moment to become a partner with snapgardens.org and help spread the word that food stamps grow gardens.

It's true that gardens require more than seeds, so I raised the money to buy things my garden needed (like the materials for my garden light and some products like peat moss and Perlite to make my dirt better) by having a yard sale and earning Amazon.com gift certificates answering surveys online to demonstrate that resources can manifest to support the needs of a garden without stressing a budget. By Christmas, the fruits of my labors were starting show!

I was inspired to learn more and work harder to get more of these positive results. I am studying the needs of each plant and making the conditions as optimum as possible because the goal is to have a variety of fresh food all year long in a compact space. The really interesting thing about container gardening indoors is that plants with proper care can live a very, very long time without needing to be replaced. The only reason many die after one season outside is because of the change in the weather.

Thousands and thousands of people follow @BathroomFarmer on twitter. As soon as they stop laughing, they click "follow" because there are so many good reasons to grow your own food. The price of food is always going up and the questionable quality of food these days has people very concerned. I have a solution for many people who thought a traditional garden was just not possible. I do not believe in *not possible*! Growing bell peppers indoors is not possible, they say. If you need to be really, really impressed, this little pepper is growing indoors and upside down from a beverage bottle upcycled into a wall pocket!

I pollinated that pepper blossom with a paintbrush on the way out of the door to speak at the first ever Indianapolis Food Independence Day event at Earth House. It's such a good idea to come together as a community and share ideas about growing and eating better food as a community because it does inspire positive cultural shifts in the community. The good word about personal empowerment by gardening was further spread in print and online articles in Indianapolis' NUVO newsweekly! Speaking at the event was good, but attending was even better. There were so many great ideas shared that day, I will keep quite busy on the BathroomFarm until the next Food Independence Day.

So here's my year old BathroomFarm and such a wonderful garden it has become with plenty of room to grow. This is probably one of the best and certainly one of the most unusual ideas I have ever had. I'm really proud of the results so far, but, most of all, I just love to let it be. All  gardens are such wonderful things. I grew this myself. From seed. With faith. Just like the real farmers do.

Super Sow Sunday

While the majority population was rapt with watching the premier sporting event of the year, I joined a group of gardeners and participated in a twitter chat celebrating the kick off of the 2012 gardening season in the northern hemisphere. This is Super Sow Sunday, a special online event of the popular garden chat forum hosted by BGgarden. It does seem to be a bit early to think about gardening, but it is realistic to start seeds indoors and then transplant them after the threat of frost. Although, BathroomFarming is independent of the cycle of the seasons, this is the time of the year to buy seeds in retail stores and a little community spirit doesn't hurt either!

Last year, I started seeds in toilet paper cores well in advance of moving back into my renovated room. This year, I decided to try something different and make seed starting

containers from upcycled milk jugs to put on the wall of my BathroomFarm. I was inspired by Susan Klatz Beal's article:

How to Make a Mini Milk Jug Greenhouse for Starting Seeds.

I, however, wanted to make changes in the design to be able to hang them on my wall.

Many other people were getting their hands dirty with gardening activities while chatting so working on my garden seemed really natural. First, I cut the side open on the jug, leaving the handle intact. I also punched some drainage holes in the bottom as well as a few holes around the opening to loop paperclips through to be a closure. The original design is to cut the top all the way off. But this compromise gives me an easy way to hang the little greenhouse as well as an easy way to open it for watering and tending the plants.

Then, I kept true to the original design and lined the interiors of the bottoms with wet newspaper. I like the idea of being able to use the newspaper to easily extricate the seedlings for transplanting. If I am very clever, I can design wall pocket containers that will make transplanting easier by planning ahead for the shape of the bundle to be removed. It won't be difficult to cut the soft milk carton plastic apart with scissors when I'm ready to do that. I can go ahead and plant the newspaper along with the seedlings in the wall pockets and the newspaper will biodegrade gracefully adding carbon to the soil.

Then, I got my hands dirty and filled the newspaper lined milk carton bottoms with wet potting soil mixed equally with perlite and peat moss. Since I fluffed up my dollar store dirt, at the suggestion of Susan Klatz Beal, my garden has been doing much better! I started some cherry tomatoes and spinach first. The nice thing about BathroomFarming being independent of weather and seasons, is that I can add crops gradually. I think this is my best strategy because container gardening is more challenging than I had anticipated. It would be best to master it slowly and have better results in the long run.

The final step was to close the little greenhouses up and hang the handles over nails on my wall. I edited a picture of my project for the evening and posted in the chat. What an interesting and fun thing to do!

I was also surprised by winning a great gift basket from BBB Seed containing wildflower seeds and heirloom vegetable seeds as well as some personal care goodies! How awesome is that?

Cycles in My Sustainable World

Gardening is a world of cycles. Even though it is January, our attention now becomes focused on beginning our gardens for the next year. Every year on Super Bowl Sunday, there is a huge gardening chat anyone can follow at #supersowsunday that takes place while the football game is being played. Even though my city is hosting the Super Bowl this year, I don't feel any deep connection with things athletic, so this chat interests me greatly.

I'm not much connected to the out-in-the-yard gardeners, but do choose to participate somewhat in the usual culture of gardening. Starting seeds as a group and planning a garden online is a great way to participate in the larger culture. The BathroomFarm is a year-round venture independent of the calendar seasons, but I can learn much from the out-in-the-yard growers. I also intend to volunteer in gardens this summer to get more experience.

For all of time, gardening has been not only related to the cycles of the seasons, but also to the cycles of the moon. Many ancient sustainable cultures looked to the sky to better organize their time in the fields. In more modern times, growers look to the phases of the moon and one of the best known references, The Old Farmer's Almanac has moon-based planting information. I love all things moon! Astrologically, my sun, moon, ascending sign, and Venus are all in moon-ruled Cancer. Historically, my childhood was spent rapt in watching the goal of America landing on the moon. When my parents and I were watching my hometown hero Frank Borman read from Genesis while orbiting the moon on Christmas Eve 1968, they gave me the tiny gift of a Fisher Space Pen accompanied with the giant announcement that we were going to watch the Apollo 11 launch! One thing that always interested me was that moon cycles were often used to organize time. Everyone's heard that from the new moon phase to the full moon is a great time for beginning new things but what happens for the rest of the lunar cycle?

That mystery was solved when I became acquainted with Rev. Michele McGrew who gave away a simple system for planning time by the phases of the moon in a self-self giveaway. The reality is there is no wrong time to do anything but there are better ways to do everything when moon energy is harnessed. I won a free coaching session with her and was able to discuss these ideas. Do they work? I'll find out! I blocked out one of my planning calendars shown above with the phases of the moon to remind me of time. I have never thought that time was anything but a "made up" parameter, with which now science agrees, so any act of organizing time is personal. My view is to use time and organize time and radiate positive thoughts about time and NEVER, EVER be a victim to it! By using moon phases in BathroomFarming, I can feel attached to a system of cycles. If nothing else, I think people feel soothed by familiarity found in cycles and other patterns.

January 2012 has never been a better time to experiment with moon phase marketing and organization principles! The first new moon phase of the year started on January 23, a Monday. Yeah. I know. I just can't turn off being the oldest living Duran Duran fan. Not real sorry about that either. Enjoy!

'Tis the Season for Chili Peppers!

BathroomFarmer feels like dancing this holiday season because results are showing after failing forward on this project this year! I started with nothing but a willingness to learn and to experiment and I think I'm finally getting my personal permaculture act together!





The peppers have grown much since my last post! The chili peppers have started to bloom. Because of total lack of BUGginess in my garden, I need to help mother nature and "get in the business" with a water moistened paintbrush and pollinate the flowers by hand.



Look at this! Teeny tiny chili peppers are starting to appear as the blossoms fade! The best news is that there are many more buds forming. According to many sources, chili pepper plants will live for several years in containers!










The collards have also begun to develop sizable leaves! They are growing both up and down in this inverted beverage bottle hung on the wall. I'm not sure if I like inverted growing, but wanted to try it anyway. So far so good. It is definitely an option to better use the space at the lower edge of my nailable surface.




Not to be out done, the green globe pepper plants have nearly doubled in size since I added the fluffier soil mix containing peat moss and perlite to their containers. And, yes, I do see buds forming here, too!





The official holiday foliage on the BathroomFarm is definitely chili pepper blossoms this year. No need for poinsettias here. For all of you who prefer a traditional decoration, here's some more musical inspiration from the Red Hot Chili Peppers!

The Peppers Look Good!

It has been almost exactly one year since I got the idea to grow a BathroomFarm. I am truly proud of myself for making as much of this happen as I have so far. After all, there is no perfect instruction book for growing a vertical vegetable garden in one's bathroom. I am also feeling serious disappointment for the lack of productivity of the project.

I am doing the only thing I know how to do when there is an obstacle and that is to go right through it. I spent the better part of this afternoon planting new crops. I started a LOT of seeds this time because I have been optimistic in my expectation that every seed is going to grow which is not the case. Being too conservative has definitely hurt productivity. The big change this time was to make a fluffier soil by adding peat moss and perlite to the potting mix. I have noticed that the potting soil I have been using turns into "concrete" and the plants begin to wither and die. The ones that do survive look good, though, but seem to develop slowly. I am not disappointed at all in this chili pepper plant. I also have to take into consideration that some plants do develop slowly especially when grown in containers.

Another big problem that I personally have is the tendency to compare my progress with the timetable of the out-in-the-yard farmers. No matter how hard I try, it's hard to ignore the natural cycle of the seasons even though they don't apply to BathroomFarming. One thing I'm planning for the New Year is to devise a moon-based calendar for my particular activities to focus more on what is actually happening than be constantly distracted by what I think should be happening. The tendency to compare is a bad habit and reframing time will help.

Because winter is coming, I decided to postpone hanging more plants on the wall and started seeds in pots instead. I did plan on cold weather issues and the surface of the garden wall was built with a dead air space behind it to insulate the plants from the exterior wall behind them. I'm just not certain how well this design will work yet. There is a major positive side to winter in the BathroomFarm. As the trees in the south yard outside the windows are losing leaves, a tremendous amount of sunlight is flooding into the room! And, there are no bugs! There were a few issues with insects coming into the room during the summer.

I made a few mistakes simply from inexperience and misunderstood what I should be pinching off the tomato plants. There is a good chance thatI may have been pinching back shoots that should have bloomed. I just won't do that again! I started several varieties of tomatoes and two of the vines already growing are more than four feet long and appear healthy. The green pepper plants appear healthy, too. I am optimistic that I will eventually fail forward to bountiful harvest success!

And, did I mention that the peppers look good?

Too Much Of A Good Thing!

When planning my BathroomFarm, I often worried that light would be insufficient for growing vegetables indoors. There is precious little information on this subject and the information is often presented in terms so different it's hard to determine how anything applies to this situation. I know I added 7,000 lumens to the ambient sunlight in the room. I'm not sure how that compares to research with results measured in foot-candles or how that applies to the "plant in full sun" on the seed packet.

Apparently, things are growing. That's a good thing. However, I have noticed that as the plants grew toward the light, some leaves would appear to burn. It has been a little bit of a challenge to keep the plants distanced from the light which is intense. I have also looked into companion planting to solve part of the problem. Companion planting is interesting because it can solve a variety of problems just by placing plants in proximity to each other. Because container gardens can be crowded, I'm going to take advantage of many physical and chemical advantages companion plants give each other.

My ceiling baskets were a disaster. I wanted to grow leafy greens in them and nothing was

working. The spinach and Swiss chard seeds died as soon as they sprouted. It turned out they were getting too much light for too long even though both seed packets said "full sun". I browsed random Internet gardening forums for guidance. It turns out that greens aren't that keen on sun worship. My solution is to not keep the light on for as many hours, to lower the baskets away from the light and plant green beans as a companion for shade. After less than two weeks, the results are showing. The spinach has sprouted and started to grow!

The amount of time the light is on may also be

inhibiting the flowering and fruiting of the plants.

My Minnesota Midget Melons have been vining LIKE NUTS but not much more. I read about the forcing of flowers and learned that long periods of simulated sunlight might inhibit flowering so I cut back on the hours and have the room completely dark at night. I had been leaving standard

fluorescent bulbs in the wall fixures on at night, but I stopped that. Voila! In less than a week, the melons have started blooming!

I'm glad I was a little bit conservative in the quantity of plants I started for the initial BathroomFarm because it has been challenging to determine what this system needs as it develops. The plants on the wall are doing well. I have a 5' long tomato vine growing in a gallon milk jug. The changes in light should also benefit its fruiting. I will probably not use milk jugs for future plantings although they do work. I do like the gallon beverage bottles with plants growing up and down.

I have collected canopies from umbrellas that had bad experiences in Indiana thunderstorms for making wall pockets. I feel that I can confidently add more crops at this time. I'm making wall pockets to fill in the space on the wall and using more containers on the floor and on top of the slipcovered

shelves I use for my garden shed. I also decided there is absolutely no reason to start seeds separately from planting them directly somewhere in my garden. Of course, I decided that after starting more seeds! So, when I transplant the seedlings now on the window ledge, I'm going to use that space for growing collards in pots and vining zucchini around this extremely sunny window!

Temperature has also been an issue in this room. I may have kept it a little too cool during the day and a little too warm at night. I'm going to try to maintain 80 degrees during the day and 65 degrees at night and see how that works. The window ledge where the collards will grow IS a little cooler than the rest of the room, but they should be fine in cooler conditions. I'm not so sure the zucchini will like that so I also started some plants in pots on the side of the room with the vertical garden which is warmer and will let them vine on to the wall.

I am always willing to fail forward on projects with uncertain outcomes and the BathroomFarm is no exception. Now that the light and temperature issues have been resolved and results are showing, I can move forward more quickly now. Winter may be an optimum season in the BathroomFarm. There were some insect issues throughout the summer that are over now. *Something* ate an entire basil plant in just one night! There were other casualties, too, but nothing so stunning. I am optimistic that the most difficult parts are over and the fantasy of plucking midget melons from the vine while soaking in a hot, bubbly tub in the dead of winter will be a reality!

My Garden IS Growing

EIEIO! WOW! This Bathroomfarmer is pleased to report that my garden is growing. I spent time this afternoon rearranging the BathroomFarm and being generally pleased with the progress I am seeing. The seedlings I planted were in questionable shape from lack of light and cool temperatures while I was waiting for room renovations to be finished but most of them rebounded nicely and are growing like crazy!

I made a few changes on the wall. Because two more of the tomato plants did not thrive, I discarded them and planted carrot and radish seeds in their place. I have this idea to execute my projects with the phases of the moon in a farmer almanac-y kind of way, so I decided adding root veggies to the wall during the waning moon was a good move keeping with the folklore of farming.

I also compressed the farm into a smaller space to take better advantage of the light I designed. I want to stick to using upcycled food containers on the wall for awhile because this is the lowest skill and cost option. I want everyone to be able to achieve good results with indoor growing with minimum expense.

Some collard greens seedlings were planted upside down in a bottle on the left. The tomato plant originally in there was the first to die. It's better to plant the upside down plants in the bottle first, but I carefully inserted the little seedlings with the help of an ice tea spoon and I'm hoping for the best! The green pepper plant planted upside down next to it was in very bad shape when I planted it but is growing well now!

I tidied up the inside of my garden shed which

is second hand metal shelving covered with upcycled bedsheet. There were already two pots of cucumbers growing on top of it. I added some small terra cotta pots of herbs that I started on my window ledge next to my desk. I noticed when I water the plants in the milk cartons on the wall, the excess water drips through the holes punched into the bottoms directly onto the pots below! There is a south facing window next to the garden shed and I have had good results in the past growing houseplants here. I do have one of the floor lamp bulbs focused on this area, too.

The third growing area is the large pot on the floor in front of the wall with a right angle trellis made from an upcycled display easel behind it. Everything in this pot is doing well. The midget melons are ambitiously vining toward the wall. The tomato, green pepper, and lettuce plants are all growing. I sowed some more lettuce seeds in there and those are sprouting. I added just a few carrot seeds today to see how they would do.

The spinach and Swiss chard greens in the hanging basket by my ceiling light replaced with a grow bulb have also sprouted. I have a few new seeds started on the window ledge next to my desk. The collards were transplanted today, but the only other one that's sprouted is chili pepper. I will be starting new seeds with regularity because the idea

is to have a continuously producing garden. It's nice to be able to disregard the seasons. It's equally nice to garden in an airconditioned room, far away from the dreadful Indiana heat and humidity! I DO keep this room warmer than my bedroom adjoining it during the day but let it cool down a little during the nights. It seems to be working.