Let's gather some collective knowledge on gardening and different methods used.

like, how can a person that lives in the city garden?

1. Bucket Gardening.
2. Indoor Gardening.
3. Renting gardening spaces from a friends yard or
4. community garden spaces.

some Tips:

surround the plants with a layer of hay or black plastic to keep weed populations down.

Compost makes GREAT fertilizer.

You can make a simple rolling composter from a 5-Gallon bucket. Just throw all your organic waste in it with some dirt and roll around a couple mins every day.

That's what I can think of at the moment, More later.

Anyone else?

OK, this post WILL get fleshed out but I'm starting it as an outline and will fill it in throughout the day as I take breaks from my various Extractions

URBAN GARDENING: INDOOR TECHNIQUES

Hydroponics

Deep Water Culture (DWC)
The Deep Water Culture is an incredibly cheap and efficient method for hydroponic gardening. It essentially consists of a single bucket of water that is aerated and allows the roots of your plant to take up the necessary water and nutrients. The necessary nutrient schedule and amounts as well as pH will vary depending on the type of plant being grown.

The DWC is probably the easiest (and cheapest) method for hydroponic growing. The most basic setup for a DWC requires a 5-gallon bucket, a net-pot lid for the bucket, hydroton (or similar hydroponic grow media), an air-pump, an air-stone, and tubing to connect the pump and stone. Seeds or cuttings that are to be used in a DWC system are best germinated or rooted in rockwool cubes. Once germinated or rooted, the rock wool cube is placed into the net-pot lid and surrounded by hydroton (the rockwool should be covered with a layer of hydroton as well, it doesn't need to be a lot, just enough so that no roots are being exposed to light).

The next step is to attach the airstone to the air pump via the tubing and place the stone in the bottom of the bucket (there are all kinds of airstones available, including tubing that can be bent to wrap around the bottom of the bucket, as long as it generates a decent flow of oxygen bubbles into the bucket, it really doesnt matter what you use). I find the easiest way to run the tubing from the pump to the airstone is to punch a hole in the bucket lid if its a 6in. diameter pot-lid (just wide enough that it accommodates the tubing). If it's a larger net pot, I run the tubing through the pot itself and up out of the hydroton. The bucket is then filled with water (initially 4 gallons should be sufficient to get the bottom inch of the net pot wet). The combination of the wicking qualities of the hydroton, combined with the upwards-directed moisture that results from the air bubbles popping as they reach the surface is enough to moisten the grow media sufficiently and give the roots cues as to which direction they should be growing. Once the roots emerge from the bottom of the net-pot, the amount of water in the bucket can be reduced so that there is about an inch between the bottom of the net-pot and the surface of the water. Once the roots grow well into the water, the "dry zone" between the bottom of the net-pot and the surface of the water can be increased to 3-4 inches.

Supplemental Reading: Dr. D's DWC: Cheap, Simple, and Effective Hydroponics

Shallow Water Culture (SWC)

Recirculating Deep Water Culture (RDWC)

Ebb and Flow

Nutrient Film Technique (NFT)


Aeroponics

Low Pressure

High Pressure

Aquaponics
Aquaponics is the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in single recirculating environment. Aquatic animal waste products accumulates in water as a by-product of keeping them in a closed system or tank (as with fish poop in a fish tank). This waste-enriched water becomes high in plant nutrients which is correspondingly toxic to the aquatic animals. In urban settings, plants are commonly grown in a way (as in most hydroponics system) that enables them to utilize a nutrient-rich solution. In aquaponics, the plants take up the nutrients resulting from the animals' waste thus reducing or eliminating the water's toxicity for the aquatic animals. The water, now clean, is returned to the aquatic animal environment and the cycle continues.

Aquaponic systems do not discharge or exchange water, instead they rely on the relationship between the aquatic animals and the plants to maintain suitable environments for both. Water is only added to replace water loss from absorption by the plants, evaporation into the air, or the removal of biomass from the system. Following tilapia, the next best adapted fish for use aquaponics systems are trout, perch, Arctic char, and bass. Given that many of these fish are quite delicious, it is conceivable that with a large enough tank, one could harvest both home grown vegetables and fish with some regularity.

Supplemental Reading: Aquaponics Overview: Considerations and Concepts; A Prototype Aquaponics System; Integrated Fish Culture/Hydroponic Vegetable Production System


Lighting

Fluorescent

High Intensity Discharge (HID)

-Metal Halide (MH)
-High-Pressure Sodium (HPS)
-Ceramic Metal Halide (CMH)

Light Emitting Diodes (LED)

Nutrients

Non-organic

Organic

Teas

All-natural fertilizer using your back garden weed

Don't you just hate the Stinging nettle? Yeah, I do too. But you know what? Your plants love it!

Instead of buying expensive fertilizer, you can just use this weed you will find all over the place. Personally I use both Urtica dioica (Stinging nettle) and Urtica urens (Small nettle), but other Nettles could propably also be used.

How is it done?
Fill a bucket half full of Nettle, then fill the bucket with water. Let it ferment for 14 days, refill with more water if needed. It is advisable to stir the water every day to give extra oxygen. After 14 days or more you have a smelling bucket of black water (you will smell it when it is ready), which your plant will love. Dilute this fertilizer with water 1:10, and it is ready for use.

Why does it work?
Nettle is full of goodies your plants love. Not only is there lots of nutrients and important minerals, the fertilizer will also promote the admission of nitrogen to most plants. It also contains bacteria that stimulate the decomposition of organic material in the soil. Nettle fertilizer will also prevent fungus from growing. As if that wasn't enough, it also contains plant hormones in the auxin class, hormones that will promote healthy growth.

You can also mix in some bark from any Salix species. Salix alba is preferred, but bark from every species should work. This contains salicylic acid, which works as a plant hormone to encourage growth.

Post temp reserved for shadowman's zany ideas on gardening & sustainable living, & such.
<3
Alright well, I'm fairly sure alot of you are aware of some of these basic things, but it's worth going over anyways.
- Compost buckets are greatly enriched & the composting process is greatly aided & sped up by worms.
- For tomatos and ganja, the mix that a friend of mine who's been in love with mj for 20someodd years uses is compost with a little bit of seaweed & starfish blended up & put in for the soil, and 1 part seawater to 20 parts regular water in a 4 litre jug for watering.

-For making a simple greenhouse quickly & cheaply, buy 2 pieces of rebar for every foot and a half or so of length you want for your greenhouse, then get plastic piping/tubing that's as long as you want the width of your greenhouse. Then cut & attach (with string..brackets..staples..whatever) some of that thermal see-through plastic sheet whatnot that's good for greenhouses & you've saved yourself the trouble of building a wooden structure.
more to come

SWIM has a bucket on his balcony filled with natural organic compost. Pruned off Canabis leaves, Union peels, Egg Shells, Bananas, Sweet blue forrestberries, unused parts of Carrots, unused parts of Zakini and unused parts of about every vedgetable and fruit that ever got cut up in SWIM's kitchen were thrown into that bucket and left to fungalise in open air for a while.

Then when it started stinking SWIM pulled an upside down plastic bag over the bucket, though a tiny, tiny bit of air can still get in and out of the bucket.
The organic plant mass is still infested with fungus, but now smells more neutral.

The idea is to make several compost teas from SWIM's own compost bucket. But with all the fungi in there SWIM is reluctant about giving the compost tea to his plants. Perhaps he could employ yeast to create alcohol(so SWIM adds molasses or cane sugar to the compost teas) to act as a fungicice. Then perhaps he can evaporate the alcohol off.

If all alcohol would have been evaporated out of the compost tea, SWIM guesses it would be a fine general plant fertiliser.

SWIM is currently growing a female cannabis plant growing buds, a rather bleak looking Datura Ferox, a Sweet moroccan mint plant, parsley, chives, Basil and a seedling that is either a cannabis or a zakini plant.

The long, dark, cold and rainy winters are comming and SWIM's otherwise so sunny balcony will soon no longer be that hospitable for plants.
He hopes the simple, mini greenhouse he's buidling and the compost tea might help the cannabis grow and fatten her buds better, despite the weather.

Any tips?

The fungus isn't even that bad in your plants as far as I know, but I don't know alot. In general, indoor lighting will help your cannabis greatly, look into reflective tinfoil or put it in a white corner to maximize heat & light distribution, make sure they're warm & make sure the light cycles are proper (although you probably already know)

As a fertilizer and in general, take some of your compost, go for a walk to the beach if you can (if there arnt alot of boats & industrial nastiness in the water) and get seaweed and starfish, mash those up with your compost and you'll have plant steroids.

You can stimulate bacterial/fungal life in the soil medium by adding melasse/vinasse solution. It contains lots of sugars, minerals etc.
Explosive growth of microbes will make nutrients become and remain avaible to the plants.
Just make sure the pH of the water remains is 5.8-6 (EDIT: dont!! it will only work on hydro MJ. Keep the pH of the soil in range that favors bacterial growth. About 6.5 i think (remember))

Also, it is a good thing to add mycorrhizae to the soil to give the plants a kickstart.

Gardening has become a real passion of mine these past few months, something I could never have anticipated. As it goes, you could say it was the Mushroom that foisted me into it: I discovered aquaponics via a random post on a mycology forum and was intrigued. The poster had wedded fish, plants and fungi in an attractive (if not terribly efficient from the fungal point of view) micro-system that just blew my mind. Permaculture, gardening and particularly aquaponics have been my central preoccupations since, and I'm struggling to cram as much knowledge into my skull as possible before spring comes. My ambition is to start up an aquaponics business, assuming I can become expert enough to grow enough for myself and my family first.

One of the most revelatory things I've picked up through all this book learnin' is the importance of the soil food web: the aforementioned beneficial bacteria, fungi, etc, that has, rather depressingly, only recently been discovered as absolutely vital to all vegetable life on the planet. Here's a quick, utterly mindbending example: mycorrhizal fungal growth, which science has known about since 1885, is now understood to multiply the effective surface area of a plant's roots by 700 to 1000 fold. This simple fact - and the concomitant knowledge that the tilling and loosening of soil is highly destructive to such fungal growth - was not widely acknowledged until the late 1990's.

If reading that doesn't leave you clawing at your face in despair at the monumental stupidity of humankind, I'll break it down: A basic, easily observable fact of nature with direct influence of every organism on this planet was totally disregarded for over a century. Why? Probably because people are marketed into trusting in their shiny new John Deere rototiller, or prior to that, Master Jethro Tull's magnificent seed-punch-o-matic, and still prior to that a virile male armed with some form of earth-rending tool.

Somehow, the consensus view of this world we live in is that nature doesn't really work properly unless you spend all day stabbing it with a garden fork. Turns out, that ain't necessarily so.

I heartily recommend the book Teaming With Microbes by Lowenfels & Lewis, in which the science and history of all this is explored. Their site:

http://www.soilfoodweb.com/

Many of the concepts western agricultural science is just now catching up on were espoused decades ago by Permaculture spiritual founder Masanobu Fukuoka, who drew much of his inspiration from Taoist principles of connectedness. The more I read of his works the more I grasp how the growing of plants is truly a spiritual task - it's the pursuit of understanding the very world we're a part of. Not surprising then that I was put on this path by the Mushroom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masanobu_Fukuoka

^thx. I will check those links later.

I have heard of the fish hydroponic system, and ive always been really interested in trying it, thank yo for the links and information! This is a great thread man, thank you for starting this

Here's a thread that might be of interest
https://www.dmt-nexus.me...aspx?g=posts&t=10889

It's for an aquaponic setup and has links to how you set one up aswell

Stevowitz










Guerrilla Gardening is also a lovely way to go if you live in the city...


Much Peace and Understanding

That's a cool little setup imPsimon. I had a hankering to build an indoor aquaponics system myself, but eventually the obsession grew to the point that I hatched plans for a 3000-litre system in a large greenhouse - all of which I'm hoping to get built before spring comes. Not fun with all this snow about.

Just FYI for anybody wondering about the differences between hydro & aquaponics - AP is generally found to be the more sustainable and fertile model because it comprises a fully self-contained ecosystem to which almost nothing (or at least, very little) need be added once it is established. The only inputs are fish food (which you can even grow yourself) and electricity for the pump.

Amazingly, an established AP system contains greater biomass of microbes than of fish and plants combined. Just as in the soil, it's this microbial life that does all the work of supporting and enriching the lifeforms in contact with them. Hydroponics and aeroponics, while both very useful, lack this vital element.

didnt read the thread fully but best thing i can add is mycorhizzal fungi
i use mycoroot - i noticed a major increase in plant growth speed and health with this - moreso than anything else
read up on it if you dont know about it allready - all plants in nature have fungal partners in their rootspace - planted plants in prepped gardens most often dont.

rainwater seems better than tap water for watering plants
orgonite - very hippy but seems to work

How about setting up two of these little ecosystems that communicate but live in different times of day?

MJ for instance likes humidity during the daytime when the lights are on. Unfortunately the lights will warm the area and thus (in combination with ventilation to keep the temp at about 25C) lower the relative air humidity. Also the level of CO2 in this area will drop, as the plants use it for photosynthesis. These limiting growth factors (low air humidity, low CO2 level) can be compensated by growing in two areas that communicate. The two areas would have different day and night regime and supplement each other:

In area1, lights on for 12 hours, the plants produce O2 and the humidity will drop. These plants now need CO2 and higher air humidity for better water management. In area2, lights off for 12 hours, the plants produce CO2 and the humidity will rise. These plants now need O2 for the night cycle of photosynthesis, and lower air humidity (to prevent molds.)

So by simply exchanging the air between the two growing areas by cleverly placed, temperature regulated pc fans, the plants in the different areas will supplement each other. The two growing areas can be placed next to each other. Or divide (separate) one area into two.

So one can grow allot of MJ while using little power at one moment. Such a growing area could easily fit into a box of about 1.5mx1m and 0.7m deep. If done clever, the 'box' can also supply the room with (indirect) light. Or perhaps even light a cactus growing area sitting on top of the box. Lighting a glass peyote graphting box or perhaps an aquarium from underneath?

Hi SKA. It may be tough to get good compost from a container as small as a 5 gallon bucket. To compost efficiently (AKA hot composting) you need to put the material through several phases of decomposition, and for each stage you'll need to build up healthy colonies of specific types of bacteria and fungi. Unfortunately, a 5 gallon bucket probably doesn't have enough volume to sustain such populations. Most recommend a minimum volume of 3'x3'x3' but you might be able to get away with less depending on your climate. Smaller volumes just might not compost as fast and will require more care. There is also a method called cold composting where you don't need to go through all the phases but it takes a long time, like up to a year depending on the material being composted. It also requires a much higher volume of material.

A good way to inoculate your compost with the right bacteria and fungi for efficient decomposition is to add a couple of handfuls of your native dirt and mix it in well. Any healthy dirt will do because it's already been through the process and contains high levels of friendly microbes. Avoid soil that's been sprayed with fungicides/pesticides, of course.

You can improve your chances of getting a good compost out of smaller volumes of material by shredding the material thoroughly to increase surface area and by balancing nitrogen sources (greens) and carbon sources (browns). I would start with 60:40 brown:green by weight. If you're really interested in learning the gory details, Google 'C/N ratio compost'. It would literally take pages to explain it all here. In short, most plant and food waste would be considered greens and things like unbleached cardboard, uncolored newspaper and paper towel rolls (all finely shredded) make good browns. You also need to stir the material regularly (2-3x/week) so that there's lots of oxygen to support the decomposition processes. Keep it moist too, but not dripping wet.

Finally, if your compost stinks and is infested with fungus, you're best bet is probably not to use it anywhere near your plants. Even making a tea will transfer the bacteria and fungus in your bucket to your plants and those nasties specialize in breaking down plant matter (they're primary decomposers). This could cause root and/or stem rot on your plants. Stinky bacteria and almost any type of visible fungus is a sign that your compost shouldn't be used until it's processed further. You can probably do better by your plants by buying a bag of compost from the local hardware store and making a tea out of that. They'll love you for it.

Anyway, I hope that helps. Sorry for the novel but it's a deep and fascinating topic. To me at least .

Let me know if you have any questions.

-JM