If there’s one good thing that came out of the pandemic, it was a lot of home improvement! If you’re surrounded by concrete, sick of pulling weeds, or just looking for a fun family project – building a raised garden bed is a wonderful way to grow your own food.
Remember that time you tried to grow basil in the kitchen window? You watered it religiously but somehow it still wilted away. It’s because the microbiome of the soil was unbalanced and lacking diversity. What’s amazing about plants is they’ll pretty much grow anywhere with proper sunshine, water, air, and most importantly soil. It’s our job as farmers (and gardeners) to give them that! Raised beds allow better control over the soil content, so no matter what the surrounding terrain is like – you can create a rich environment to support microbial life within the soil.
If you’ve visited the Farm Café, you’ve probably seen our colorful raised bed garden flourishing with a variety of vegetables, flowers, and herbs.
Our secret is living soil.
By mixing a diversity of microorganisms into the soil, thousands of colonies thrive and create a balanced habitat of life. Use this recipe to grow the happiest, healthiest plants in the land.
Tools you’ll need:
3’ x 5’ x 15” deep raised bed or similar sized container
A small to medium tarp (10’ x 10’)
Optional: use cardboard to line bottom of bed to prevent weeds coming up from the earth underneath
Raised Bed Soil Ingredients:
Note: Items 1-4 can be found in most garden shops, items 5-7 can be found online
Peat moss - 3 cubic feet
Finished Compost - 18 gal
Black Cinder Rock - 18 gal
Worm casting - 25 lbs
Fish Bone Meal - 5 lbs
Agricultural Lime - 2 cups
Crushed Oyster shell - 2 cups
Directions:
Combine all ingredients on a tarp and roll back-and-forth to mix and distribute evenly.
Add ingredients to a wooden raised bed, measurements 3’ x 5’ and 15” deep. (optional: lay cardboard down first then fill with ingredients)
Drench completely with water.
Allow soil mixture to rest 10 days before planting. This will allow the microorganisms from the worm castings to colonize and become active, preparing the perfect environment for your plants.
Farmer Tip: After harvesting, add 16oz of bone meal and turn the soil. Finish by adding a 2" layer of finished compost on top, for best results.
Hi and welcome to our second blog! We wanted to put all of our lettuce hydroponics info in the same place, and provide a place for you to comment and ask questions as well.
Hydroponics is basically just gardening without using soil. There are many different systems that can be used to grow different types of plants. Static hydroponics is the type of system we use to grow our lettuce that we serve at the Farm Café. This system is great for growing lettuce which is harvested within six to eight weeks from seed. One of the great benefits of static hydroponics is it requires no electricity for pumps to move or circulate the water. Another impressive fact about static hydroponics is it actually uses less water to grow a head of lettuce than growing it in the ground.
If you are limited in garden area, a hydroponic system is perfect for lanais, under the overhang of your house and provides a great opportunity to grow your own food, even if you don’t have a yard. Home gardening is a great way to relieve stress, explore new hobbies, and also eat healthy <3
Our goal is to encourage backyard gardening and to give you -the home gardener- as many tips as possible to create a fun and successful experience.
So linked below are tips to help with planting lettuce and lettuce care. Best of Luck!
Click here for a whole pdf page with some tips and growing steps from us. You can also click here for tips from the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa!
Although Kahuku Farms does not sell hydroponic kits anymore, we still encourage you to cultivate your hydroponics garden at home and share your story with us on social media or in the comments below. Shout out local farms and other locations who may provide kits, let's build a hydroponics community around this!
Love Always, Kahuku Farms
]]>Agriculture has the word "culture" in it. Culture is lifestyle, like how local people take off their shoes before entering the house. There's lots of different lifestyles. There's one lifestyle that very few actually choose to live and it's called growing food for other people; agriculture. To us, agriculture is more than a science, it is our culture. Technology is advancing very rapidly but it is still important to us to maintain that human element in agriculture and nurture that connection we have with the land.