The Shibaguyz and their Shibas!Time for another RW&G's Profiles in Victory installment showcasing ordinary folks undertaking extraordinary efforts from which we can all learn.This week, I'm pleased to introduce RW&G readers to Shannon & Jason Mullet-Bowlsby who blog and garden in Seattle. Their new-ish Victory Garden is gorgeous, and they've generously and carefully documented their adventures in gardening for self-sufficiency at Here We Go! Life with the Shibaguyz, which I discovered on Blotanical. Would you believe that their container Victory Garden is so lush and prolific that they call it the "Jungle"? Talk about inspiring!After you read this post, you'll definitely want to check out their blog which has a great, energizing tone...these guys really enjoy what they're doing and will make you proud of your own efforts, too!Here's the virtual interview:RW&G: You guys have to have one of the loveliest container Victory Gardens ever. What led you to create it, when did you start it, and what prompted you to tag it with the VG moniker?
Shannon: Thank you so much for your kind words. We certainly love our garden, and it's so encouraging to hear someone like yourself enjoying it as well.
We have always talked about having herbs that we would grow and possibly a tomato or two, we just never had the time or the inclination to work very hard on it. Jason grew up in Wyoming and I grew up on a cattle farm in Ohio so gardening was in our blood from the start. What really kicked off our gardening fever was moving into our wonderful townhouse. When we saw that patio out back with its horrid "landscapers plants," we just knew there was something more we could do to it. We can't remember what happened from there exactly but...
We do remember that we bought a few sugar snap peas and planted them along the back fence just to see what would happen... that was Spring 2007. About that same time, I was driving home from work LATE one night when I heard an interview on NPR with some woman talking about growing her own food and making a frittata out of her own eggs, asparagus and herbs. She was talking about her newest book and I was so enthralled with the interview and what she had to say about the importance of local food and growing your own food as much as possible that I sat there in the garage in the dark listening until the very end. The interview was with Barbara Kingsolver talking about her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I ran in the house babbling like and idiot to Jason about how amazing this concept was and why couldn't we do it? We bought a copy of the book about a week later and we've been blaming Barbara Kingsolver for our addiction to gardening ever since!
I guess it just really hit home to us that it we needed to drastically change the way we looked at our food. Where was it coming from? Who was producing it? What could we do ourselves? The more we learned, the more enthusiastic it became. By July of that year we had a full-on edible "Jungle" and were eating from our garden or from farmers markets for 90% of our food.
The Victory Garden concept kept floating past us as we did research online and bought seeds from heirloom seed companies. We would often see these packets of seeds that came labeled as "grow your own victory garden." We had heard of them before but never really gave it all that much thought. What finally made us jump on the Victory Garden idea was the Victory Garden Challenge. When we read about what the ideals were behind Victory Gardens we just looked at each other and said "huh... guess we have a Victory Garden... COOL!!"
I think it was the history of the Victory Gardens that we found so interesting. Researching their background and the principals these people held important that prompted them to grow their own food was right in line with our desire to be more self sustaining. This Victory Garden idea really added another dimension to what we were doing and helped us think more intensely about how we were going to structure our garden. It became very important for us to grow more of the food we ate and rely less on the corporate food machine to do it for us.
RW&G: Could you tell us the specs...approximate total area of your patio, about how many pots, what are some of your most productive plants, etc.?
Shannon: The specs... about 20 feet by 20 feet. There is a large concrete slab in the middle with four areas for planting around it: one bordering thin strip to the south, one bordering wider strip to the north, one bordering short, fat little strip to the west then one big raised bed with a block retaining wall to the west. You can see from the pictures on our blog just how small those bordering strips are... that's where the pots come in.
We had to find a way to increase the useable space in our back yard so we started using the containers like little moveable raised beds. Mind you, we didn't know anything about container gardening at the time and were just trying it out to see what would happen. We started with just a few pots for tomatoes and beans and increased the number this year. Right now, we have seven pots of tomatoes, four pots of beans, one pot of tomatillos, three pots of peppers, one long pot of cucumbers, one big square pot of zucchini (mound... pot... it all works the same, right??), three hanging baskets of basil, one hanging basket of oregano and thyme, one hanging basket of lettuce, three hanging baskets of strawberries... oh yeah... another big pot of strawberries... what else... there is the long basket hanging from the second floor balcony full of tumbler tomatoes and basil. Is that it?? Jason is counting out the window right now. That looks like that's it. OH WAIT!! Does the Potato Condo count?? That's one huge container! Maybe that's more of a raised bed?? If you count the Potato Condo, there are roughly 28 containers out there. GOOD GRIEF!!
Our most productive plants are... well... just about everything right now! The potatoes are HUGE, we have tomatoes that are literally hanging with green fruit, the dry beans usually give us two harvests in the pots. This year we are particularly pleased with our cucumbers and zucchini containers. They just took off like a shot and aren't showing any sign of stopping.
RW&G: Any tips or advice for neophyte container gardeners?
Shannon: The best advice we could give to someone wanting to try out container gardening is: don't over think it... just do it! It really isn't nearly as much work as getting down on your hands and knees weeding and watering is a breeze as is fertilizing. The most fun part of our containers is we can move them around to just about any configuration to create different spaces within the garden.
The most important thing we always tell people is start small. Don't try to create what we've done all at once. If you take on too much right off the bat then you run a higher risk of burn out and frustration. Just start with a couple of pots of your favorite edibles and add on from there as you become more comfortable with maintaining and tending to plants in containers.
Oh... and DON'T think that you have to use toxic chemicals to fertilize your containers. We have gardened organically from the start with mainly heirloom varieties of seeds and seedlings and we've never need chemicals to encourage our plants to grow. As a matter of fact, right now we have a few tomatoes that are five feet tall and one that is nearly seven feet tall. You don't have to force your plants to grow just because they are in a container.
RW&G: Your site mentions that your container garden will be included in an upcoming garden tour. In August right? How'd that come about? And are you ready?
Shannon: WOOHOO!! How cool is that?? We are one of ten gardens that will be on the first ever West Seattle Edible Garden Tour on August 2nd. We are so excited we can hardly wait for it! If there's one thing we love, love, love talking about, it is our garden. Get us started and you'll have a hard time getting us to stop.
We got involved in this first tour by answering a call for submissions. The organizing committee put a posting out on the local community blog asking for edible gardeners of all types to contact them if they wanted to be considered for this edible garden tour they were putting together. We thought it wouldn't hurt to try so we sent them an email with a link to our blog. The response was swift and enthusiastic. Two of the ladies came out to look at our garden to see if it would fit with their tour concept and they were very complimentary and lively in their excitement about our space. The rest is history... or will be after next weekend.
We're definitely ready for the tour. Our Jungle is definitely living up to its name right now. Everything is in full bloom and weighted down with fruit. We have put in a third planting of pole beans for a late fall harvest and we've started planting our other fall crops like kale, chard and broccoli. These folks are going to be blown away when they walk out our garden door.
RW&G: Taking into account the full journey thus far, what have you learned from the Victory Gardening experience overall?
Shannon: As we stated earlier, the Victory Garden concept really helped us add another identity to our garden and focused us on putting in food that we used the most. That really pushed us beyond what even we thought our little space was capable of. For us, eating locally and having a VG of our own means we get to take one more step away from our dependence on foreign oil and the use of fossil fuels to produce and transport our food. That means we have one more piece of independence we can be proud of. We feel stronger knowing that even if the entire industrialized food chain were to go down, we'd know how to take care of ourselves.
What kind of amazing possibilities does that open up to a person? This meant that we could stand in the face of the global machine and stare it down without fear of repercussion. What was that Barbara Kingsolver said? If every person ate one meal a week from completely local sources, we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil a week!! Are you kidding me?? Don't worry about buying a hybrid... just eat locally once a week. That's what got this whole garden started. We really thought about how much more we'd be saving in oil if we grew those local meals right in our own back yard.
Again with the possibilities... we now feel like we could, if necessary, go completely "off the grid" if we had to... for whatever reason. Voluntary or otherwise. This really lead us to thinking more about what we were doing in our lives every day to make sure we were self sufficient. It really has changed everything we do from driving to recycling, the coffee we drink and where we buy our food. It really is empowering.
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Finally, we asked the dynamic container gardening duo to provide a list of five sites from which they draw inspiration or just otherwise enjoy. Here's what Shannon & Jason gave us.
• http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/ -- This is the site for Barbara Kingsolver's book that really started this whole thing for us by showing us the important points behind having your own sustainability. In the early days of our garden, we drew inspiration from the stories of others striking out for their independence.
• http://www.growbiointensive.org/index.html -- The Ecology Action website. This year we have really been inspired by the book, How to Grow More Vegetables, by John Jeavons. This technique of "biointensive gardening" radically changed the way we worked our soil and planted this year. And the results have been fantastic!
• http://1greengeneration.elementsintime.com/ -- Our friend Melinda authors this blog. She and her husband, Matt, have really been a big influence on our journey over the past year. Watching what they have done and seeing the choices they have made really encouraged us and her Growing Challenge pushed us one step further toward creating the ultimate Victory Garden.
• http://www.eatlocalchallenge.com -- This blog was key in getting us connected with other bloggers and with getting us up and running with the Eat Local Challenge. Having a network of support is important when you first start to unplug from the grid.
• http://www.seedsavers.org/ AND http://www.heirloomseeds.com/ -- We know... that's two... but these are where we do our dreaming (drooling) and ordering of seeds for 99% of our garden. Growing heirloom varieties and learning how to save the seeds is going to be the key to our long-term sustainability.
Thanks to both Shannon & Jason for their efforts at promoting Victory Gardening online and in real life. If you're in Seattle and can see their garden on the tour, feel free to come back and post about it. Lots of us would love to hear more.
Finally, don't forget to check on the Jungle's progress regularly at Here We Go!...
For Further Exploration:
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