Monthly Archives: February 2014
No series on Making Gardening Easier would be complete without a discussion on raised bed gardening. Raised beds are typically frames built in your yard that are filled with planting soil of some sort. These frames can be constructed from a variety of materials and they don’t have to be very deep to grow a lot of food. Six to eight inches is plenty, and many folks have good results with as little as 4 inches of soil.
But how does gardening in shallow box make gardening easier? Let me count the ways:
- Many yards are cursed with poor soil, whether it be that the topsoil is too thin or too sandy or too much clay or whatever. Improving your native soil can be a lot of work. It’s easier to start from scratch. Raised bed gardening doesn’t use the dirt from your backyard. Instead, raised bed gardening allows you to fill your beds with whatever planting medium you want — topsoil, compost, vermiculite, peat moss, and so forth. Dream big. If you have more than one raised bed you can experiment with different mixtures or you can have custom blends for the specific types of plants that you’re growing in each bed.
- Since you’re not growing in your native dirt, you don’t have to till the garden plot. Even a small tiller, though very handy to have, can be expensive. There’s no need to buy or use one to prepare your soil with a raised bed garden. The growing medium that you fill it with will be loose from the very start. And it will stay loose because you build your beds in such a way that you can reach every part of your garden from the outer edge. That means you never walk on your bed, so your soil doesn’t get compacted.
- Raised bed gardening allows you to have a productive garden in places that you never could before. Since you fill your raised bed with your own soil mixture, you can place the frame on a concrete patio or asphalt driveway if you want to. What’s under the frame doesn’t matter. It’s what’s in it that counts.
- Raised bed gardening is ideal for those who have very limited space available for gardening. This is a city dweller’s delight. While most raised bed gardens are 8’ x 4’ or 4’ x 4’, you can make yours whatever size and shape that works best for you. There are many people who have successful raised bed gardens on the balcony of their urban apartment.
- Raised beds make gardening easier by being more productive and efficient. You will be able to grow more food in less space than you could with a traditional garden. The combination of custom soil, optimal placement of the bed for best exposure to the sun and its small size all contribute to high-yield growing.
Build your raised bed frames to any height to best meet your needs.
- Some gardens are plagued by burrowing critters that chow down on your plants from underground. It that’s a problem in your area, you can construct your garden frames with a wire mesh in the bottom that will keep the hungry critters out, but still provide good drainage.
- One of the best ways that raised beds make gardening easier is that it reduces the number of weeds in your garden. If you build your frame on top of a weed blocker that allows for good drainage, you won’t be getting any weeds from the surface of the ground. The fresh soil that you fill your beds with should be free from weeds. That leaves only airborne seeds as a source for weeds, greatly reducing the amount of weeds that you’ll need to deal with in your raised beds.
- The soil in your raised beds will warm up sooner than the regular dirt in your backyard. This means that you can plant earlier. A longer growing season gives you extra time.
- Raised beds make gardening easier by increasing accessibility to the garden. It’s amazing how much easier it is to pull weeds when they are just 6 inches off the ground. If that’s not high enough for you, you can build your frames deeper and add a ledge around the edges of the bed frame that you can sit on while you tend your garden. Still not high enough? Who says you have to plant your raised bed garden on the ground? You can construct (or buy) a raised bed that sits on a platform, making the garden accessible even to people who are wheelchair-bound. Disabled people can continue to enjoy gardening.
Here’s a tip about the materials that you use to make the frames for your raised beds. Don’t succumb to the temptation to use pressure-treated wood. It sounds like it would be a good idea, but treated wood can leach chemicals into your garden that you shouldn’t be ingesting. There are other materials that are rot and insect resistant. Options include cedar, concrete building blocks, brick, and composite vinyl.
Traditional gardening in long rows is great if you have the space for it, but raised bed gardening is a wonderful approach for many other folks —newbies who want to give gardening a try on a small scale, people with limited space, gardeners with physical challenges who can’t bend over very well – or just folks who want to make gardening easier!
If you plant a traditional garden with rows of vegetables, you will love this new tool. Whatever the size of your garden plot, it will save you a lot of time and effort.
You know the process – before you can get to the fun part of actually planting your seeds or starter plants, you’ve got to till the soil until it is loose and well aerated. When that’s done, you still have the tedious process of making your rows. That’s where the RowMaker® comes in. (Click on any of the photos for a larger view.)
The RowMaker is a one-of-a-kind garden tool that takes the work out of making farm-style rows. It is completely manual (powered by just two feet and a cool drink of water) and you’ll have all your garden rows done in minutes instead of hours. In the video below, after an introduction to the RowMaker, you’ll watch as rows are completed for a 27′ x 19′ garden plot in just two minutes. Yes, two minutes! You simply pull the RowMaker behind you and as you slowly walk backwards, your rows are made. Because you can make them so easily and quickly, if you change your mind, you can simply remake them – without even raking them out if you’re really in a hurry.
About this time last year we were introduced to the RowMaker by its inventor, a retired Army officer from Texas. We were so impressed with it that we’ve helped launch the company’s website. When you watch the video, it’s Sandy’s voice you’ll hear doing the narration. That’s how much we believe in it. Watch rows being made in less than two minutes in this video that demonstrates how to use the RowMaker.
You can learn more, see more images and see alternate ways of planting in the rows made by the RowMaker on the RowMaker website. But…don’t push the buy button from their site because they’ve offered TheApproachingDayPrepper readers a special price. Read on.
The RowMaker is in the introductory phase of its launch. It is available from their website at the introductory price of $239 plus $10 shipping. When the first 100 units have been sold, the price will increase. For a limited time, RowMaker is offering TheApproachingDayPrepper readers a special price of $225 including shipping. Purchase using the link below to get our special price. If you purchase from the RowMaker website, you will pay the full introductory price plus shipping.
The RowMaker uses two defining phrases – “We Make Rows Easy!” and “Powered by two feet and a cool drink of water.” Both phrases say it all – using your RowMaker will make getting your garden ready for planting quick and easy. And all it takes is your two feet (or a helpful 10-year-old’s feet) – then reward yourself (or the helpful 10-year-old) with a cool drink of water.
Remember – to get the discounted price of $225 including free shipping, you must purchase from the buy button below. Visit RowMaker’s website to learn more about the product, but come back to The Approaching Day Prepper and purchase it by clicking on the button below.
This blog is the second in our Making Gardening Easier series. Sign up to receive our blog by email and you won’t miss a single one! Simply add your email address to the subscribe block at the top left of this page. Click here for a previous of the Making Gardening Easier series.
I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, but I’m guessing that for many of you it feels like gardening season is a long way off. I have good news and bad: It’s really not. It will get warmer and the snow will change to rain and plants will come back to life…sooner than you think…but perhaps not as soon as you’d like. The flip side of that, of course, is that it’s going to be planting season sooner than you’re ready for it if you don’t begin planning for it now.
Seems like a perfect time for a series about making gardening easier. If you’re a regular reader of The Approaching Day Prepper, you know that we are novice preppers. We come from a totally unprepared background. So the bottom line is we’re just learning, folks. Last year was our first foray into gardening. Even with our late start we enjoyed fresh green beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers with many meals. Our other plants didn’t like the late start so much, so we didn’t get a lot of action from them – a few squash, onions, carrots, and beets.
But that was last year. We intentionally started small so as to not become so overwhelmed that we didn’t want to try it again. That worked – this year we’re raring to go and looking forward to expanding upon what we learned from last year. We’ve been researching many topics and plan for this to be a year of experimentation with many different types of gardening techniques.
This blog is the first in a six-part series on ways to make gardening easier:
Part 1 – This introduction — Were introducing the upcoming blogs and sharing some tips for starting out the right foot.
Part 2 – Introducing the RowMaker – This blog will be directed toward traditional gardeners — folks who have the space to plant a medium to large garden with farm-style rows. We’ll be reviewing a great new gardening tool called the RowMaker. It will significantly – and I mean significantly – cut your garden prep time. More on that tomorrow. If you want a preview, head over to their site, but here’s a spoiler alert – don’t buy from their site unless you want to pay the full introductory price. They’ve given us a special discounted price that is even lower than their introductory price, and it will be available in our next blog.
Part 3 – Raised bed/Square foot gardening – “Square foot gardening” is really just a refinement of raised bed gardening principles, so we’ll talk about both in this blog. This was how we did most of our gardening last year. Loved it. Now we’re ready for some modifications to it and to try new things.
Part 4 – Container gardening – Phil’s sister gardens extensively year-round in Florida and she does more and more of it in containers. Container gardening is a great approach for apartment dwellers, but Phil’s sister has a big yard and has simply found container gardening easier than traditional gardening.
Part 5 – Straw bale gardening – Gardening without dirt in bales of straw! Using bales of straw as your growing medium, you can plant a garden with no soil at all. We recently attended a seminar on this and are looking forward to trying it this year. Initial start-up costs are minimal, it’s flexible, portable (how many gardens can say that?), and very low-maintenance. We’ll be doing at least a few bales of straw bale gardening this year.
Part 6 – Vertical gardening – Another favorite of city dwellers, vertical gardening allows you to grow a lot of plants in a small space. You can train many plants to grow vertically instead of spread out over the ground. We incorporated a bit of it into our square foot garden last year, but we want to learn more. Now’s the time.
Who knew there were so many approaches to gardening? And this is by no means a comprehensive list. But it’s probably more than anyone can start with – although I think we’ll be doing a nice combination of most of them.
Start Smart
We have some recommendations for getting started, and it all starts with having a plan. Yes, this is part of making gardening easier, because establishing a good plan ahead of time will get you off to a good start and keep you on track through the growing season. Planning as you go isn’t really planning at all. It’s more of a knee-jerk reaction, and it often leads to re-doing work you’ve already done because halfway through you realize that you didn’t think through the potential pitfalls.
- Start small – Especially if you are a novice gardener. Starting with a large garden is a recipe for failure regardless of the approach you take. You will find that it is more work the first year than subsequent years and you may quickly become overwhelmed. That leads to a neglected garden, a lot of effort put in for little results, and quite possibly a negative attitude towards gardening that keeps you from enjoying food picked from your own garden for years to come.
- Decide what plants you want in your garden – Think first about the food you eat and/or would like to eat. If you’re a novice gardener, you’ll want to start with plants that are easy to grow. Tomatoes and beans are great vegetables for beginners. Cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, squash, and peppers work well for most folks, too. OK, we’ve had no luck the two whole years we’ve planted peppers, but they grow like weeds for other people. I think the rabbits have always gotten ours.
- Consider what gardening method(s) most appeal to you – Traditional, square foot, vertical, container, etc.? We’ll discuss each of these in upcoming blogs.
- Create a planting layout:
- Consider the best area of your yard for direct sunlight and for ease of watering. (Lots of people forget the ease of watering part and get really frustrated dragging a hose across the yard every day.)
- Consider how tall your plants will grow as they will provide shade for things planted near them. Shade may be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s usually a bad thing in vegetable gardens.
- You can download a grid here to use in developing your layout.
- Create a schedule for preparing your soil and planting your garden. Timing is an essential element in gardening. It’s why we’re doing this series while it’s still winter.
- The easiest way to create your schedule is to start with your desired planting date and work your way backwards. The best way to determine your planting date is to ask other gardeners in your area. They’ll have the best answers for you. Bear in mind that different vegetables like different starting dates. Some are cold weather crops and others need the soil to be warm before they will grow well. We’ve provided a scheduling assistant with the grid layout. Download it here.
- Whether you start your plants from seeds or you buy starter plants from a nursery, you don’t want to get a late start (like we did last year). A late start will mean a smaller harvest or perhaps no harvest at all because you’ve run out of growing season.
- If you are using starter plants and wait too long to buy them, it’ll be slim pickins. The best plants will be gone and all that will be left will be the less popular and less healthy ones.
- Allow enough time in your schedule to prepare your garden plot, containers, raised beds, or whatever other method you choose.
- Properly prepare your soil. We’re not going into detail about that here, but suffice it to say that it can make you or break you. In some of the options we’re going to talk about, local soil conditions aren’t a factor at all, specifically raised bed, straw bale, and container gardening. This can be a huge factor in making gardening easier. Stay tuned for more.
As we said at the start of this blog, we’re still newbie preppers, as are most of you. We spent a lifetime avoiding prepper-type things like gardening, but now we see the need for it so clearly that we can’t stay on the path of blissful ignorance that we once enjoyed. Storing food is good and necessary. We hope you have a ton of it, but it will eventually run out. You need sustainability, and that means being able to grow your own food. That’s what’s got us out there digging in the dirt. We’re looking forward to this growing season. Check out the coming blogs in this series and you’ll find ways to make gardening easier.
Photo credit: www.UltimateReloader.com
Disclaimer
What you’re about to read is the result of a lot of reading, learning, and comparison shopping. The final product was the formation of an opinion as to the best choice of a first reloading press for me. I expect that if you go through the process carefully, you’ll find the best press that meets your needs, but I don’t necessarily expect you to arrive at the same conclusion that I did. I’m not trying to persuade you to agree with choice that I made. There are a lot of good presses made by lot of good brands. Each of them has the potential to be the absolute best option for someone. I present this article to you because there are a lot of people in the same place I find myself in — relatively new shooters with no previous reloading experience who have come to the conclusion that reloading is a valuable skill for a prepper to have. Making the right choice about where to jump into the reloading craft is an important decision.
My Story
Last summer, after waiting two months to get an order of 9mm and .380 from my local ammo fabricator, I decided that it would be in my best interest to learn how to reload. I just couldn’t face another year of ammo shortages and escalating prices. Sandy and I didn’t shoot nearly as much last year as we did in 2012. Money was tight for us and ammo was hard to find. Shooters who weren’t sitting on a big stockpile of ammo curtailed their practice sessions because they didn’t know when they’d be able to restock their supply — and at what price. Sandy and I have set a goal of shooting more in 2014. Having the ability to make our own ammo goes a long way toward ensuring that we’ll be able to keep that resolution.
Sandy’s only stipulation was to make sure there was no exclusion in our homeowner’s insurance policy that would cause a claim to be denied because we make ammo in our home. I called them and was told that reloading for my own personal use would have no impact on my insurance coverage or rates so long as I limited my supply of gunpowder to less than 20 pounds. You should check with your insurance company to see if the same holds true for you.
Single-Stage Presses — The “Training Wheels” of Reloading
OK then, what kind of press should I buy? Conventional wisdom says that you learn the craft of reloading on a single-stage press — a press where you batch process one cartridge at a time, performing one reloading function at a time — in order to thoroughly learn all of the stages of the reloading process at a safe and manageable pace. Making ammo is inherently dangerous, but it is completely safe if you approach it with sanity and wisdom. The object for newbie reloaders is not to make ammo as fast as possible, but to learn how to not maim or kill yourself as a result of your ammo-making.
There are a lot of great single-stage presses on the market and they can be the most economical presses you can buy, so there is a lot of appeal to go with a single-stage. And the noble single-stage press is the way to go for the highest precision in reloading. Many competitive shooters and hunters hand craft each round on a single-stage for the ultimate in control and quality. Some of these presses include the RCBS Rock Chucker
, the Forster Co-Ax, the Redding Big Boss, and the Hornady Lock-N-Load Classic
But the downside of any single-stage rig is production speed. Eventually I would learn the process well enough that production speed would become an issue, especially when it comes to reloading for handguns. It takes multiple pulls of the reloading press lever to complete one round of ammunition on a single-stage press. Production speed isn’t an issue for those who reload for hunting rifles because they don’t shoot as many rounds in a year as I blow through in an hour of shooting handguns. Single-stage is the best way to go for high-precision hunting rifle ammo, but the online reloading forums are full of guys who say that if they had to load all their handgun ammo on a single-stage they’d rather give up reloading and just buy factory ammo. Those guys say that a progressive press is the way to go for handgunners.
Progressive Presses — The Speed Demons of the Reloading World
Once you’ve completed the first cycle, a progressive press completes a round of ammo with every pull of the lever. Instead of working on just one cartridge at a time and doing just one step of the reloading process at a time, a progressive press does it all at once. All of the dies are mounted in a circle with a cartridge in place under each die. Every pull of the handle engages each cartridge with the die it’s positioned under and then advances all the cartridges to the next die position. After a cartridge has made it through the entire circuit, a completed round pops out and a new empty case takes its place.
Once you get the hang of it, you can crank out 400 or more rounds of ammo per hour with a progressive press. Equip one with an automatic case feeder and bullet feeder and you’ll easily be able to do 600 or more rounds per hour. As you can well imagine, progressive presses, especially those that are tricked out with all the bells and whistles, are considerably more expensive than a simple single-stage press, but time is money, too. What is it worth to me to be able to make 600 rounds in an hour on a progressive press versus maybe 30 rounds on a single-stage press? Based on that, I started my search with a long, hard look at the progressives.
The seduction of lightning fast production rates was too much to resist. Despite the chorus of old-timers who were saying to start with a single-stage and work up from there, I decided to start my shopping with the progressive presses. Here are the contenders:
- Dillon — If you’re in the market for a progressive press and you don’t give serious consideration to a Dillon, you’re doing yourself a major disservice. I consider them to be the gold standard of reloading machinery. If there is a cult among people who reload, it’s made up of owners of Dillon presses. Dillon has a rabidly loyal clientele, some of whom tend to regard any other brand of equipment as not worthy of consideration. Dillon earned their reputation by consistently manufacturing top-notch machinery, backed by the best “no B.S.” warranty in the industry.You can’t buy a Dillon just anywhere. They control their marketing channels pretty tightly. If I were buying a new Dillon, I’d get mine from the website of top competitive shooter Brian Enos. His site is packed with solid info on the products and he has some kit bundles that are carefully thought out.Having said all of that, and believing in my heart the Dillon Precision sets the industry standard for reloading presses, I didn’t buy a Dillon for my first press. I looked longingly at their whole product line, drooling over their sturdiness and reliability. But the workhorse of their line, the RL 550B, doesn’t auto-index (automatically advance the cartridges being worked on from one die station to the next). For a progress press to not perform this automation function seemed to be contrary to the whole purpose of a progressive press. The next step up (the XL 650) and the one after that (the Super 1050) both auto-index, but they were just too far out of my beginner’s price range.
- But still wanting a Dillon, I dialed my sights down to their Square Deal B. This is a press that is just for reloading straight-walled handgun ammunition. Since that’s what I shoot, it looked like a real contender. But one of the significant disadvantages of it was that it doesn’t do rifle cartridges at all — just straight-walled handgun ammo. While I only shoot handguns now, I wanted to leave open the possibility of reloading for rifles in the future. Another big strike against the Square Deal B is that it is the only press that uses proprietary dies. The dies for this press aren’t interchangeable with any other press, nor can you use standard dies, even those made by Dillon, with this press. I didn’t like that. Time to broaden my search to other options.
- Hornady —Hornady is best known for their great bullets, but they also make a lot of high-quality reloading tools and equipment. Their progressive press is called the Lock-N-Load AP, and it’s a real honey. One reviewer who did an excellent comparison of progressives from Dillon, Hornady, and Lee (click here for How I Spent My Winter and Then Some). You really should read it and see how your values line up with his, but I’ll cut to the chase and reveal that he ultimately chose the Hornady LNL. And I almost did, too. All impressions I have of it is that it is a technically more advanced press than the rock-solid Dillon, and that it has some reliability issues that come with that distinction. Sandy actually encouraged me to buy one of these while we were at our favorite outdoor specialty store, but I wasn’t far enough along in my comparison shopping process to feel confident with this decision. When I did spring for my first press, I didn’t buy this one, but there very well may be a Hornady LNL in my future. They have tons of appeal.
- Lee — Let me say one good thing about Lee’s two progressive presses: they’re inexpensive. The Lee Pro 1000
can be found for under $200, and the Lee Precision Load Master
goes for close to $250. But my experience was that on the forums I was seeing far more complaints and problems with them than anything else. Lots of folks, even those who loved other Lee products, had some less-than-splendid remarks about the Lee progressives. They have some very loyal fans, but the negatives seemed to far out-weigh the positives for these machines. A fool doesn’t learn from his mistakes. A smart man does learn from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others and doesn’t make them himself. I want to be a wise man. I didn’t give the Lee progressives any serious consideration.
- RCBS — This was the last of the major contenders I looked at. Best known for their outstanding single-stage presses, RCBS also make a progressive called the Pro 2000. I didn’t do nearly as much research on this one as I did with any of the others because the price stopped me in my tracks. With a list price of $777 for the auto-indexing version of this press ($694 for the manually indexed model), I was in the deep end of the pool. I have no doubt that RCBS makes a fine progressive. It may even be superior. But it was too far out of my price range to give it any consideration for a first-time purchase. Maybe some day.
All of this research in progressive presses left me with no clear winner between Dillon and Hornady, but one thing it did succeed in doing is convince me that I really wasn’t ready to plunge into a progressive as my first press. Others have done it with good results, but one thing that I kept reading in the forums were comments by actual owners and users that progressive presses require a fair amount of mechanical aptitude to set up, to operate, and to maintain. As Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry was prone to say, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” This is one of mine. I don’t tinker with machinery. Not with good results, at least. I barely know which end of a hammer you’re supposed to hold on to. The preponderance of comments about the need for mechanical aptitude caused me to abandon my quest for a progressive press. For now.
Turret Presses — The Middle Ground
If a single-stage press was too slow and a progressive press was either too expensive or beyond my ability to troubleshoot and maintain, was reloading out of the question for me? Thankfully, no. There is an intermediate class of presses that address some of the limitations of a single-stage without introducing the complexity and expense of a progressive. I’m talking about turret presses.
Like a single-stage press, a turret press only works with one cartridge at a time, but like a progressive, all the dies you need for the complete reloading process are installed and ready for use. You don’t need to swap out dies to go from one reloading step to the next. They’re already there, mounted on a turret that can be rotated to place each die over the cartridge that you’re working on in turn. This means that you don’t have to batch-process your cartridges like you do with a single-stage. You can do all the steps to go from an empty case to a completed round of ammunition before you need to swap in a new case.
Production speed can be a lot higher with a turret press than with a single-stage, but you can choose to operate a turret press in single-stage mode if you want to. (For that matter, you can operate a progressive like a single-stage, which might be a good idea in some situations, but still doesn’t overcome my personal reservations against going directly to a progressive.)
So the search was on for the best turret press for my needs. There are a number to choose from with offerings from Lyman, Redding, RCBS, Lee, and others.
I went shopping at my favorite outfitting shop and the reloading specialist gave me a strong sales pitch for the Lyman T-Mag 2 press kit
When I was considering a progressive press, I read a lot of negative about Lee’s progressives. This led to an unfavorable opinion of the company in general, but as I did more research on turret presses, the name that kept popping up was the Lee Classic Turret
Among the many reviews that I read on the Lee Classic Turret was a great series of articles on the website RealGuns.com. Highly recommended reading. The author pointed out that the turrets on most turret presses are mounted with a single bolt in the center of the turret. The dies are arranged on the outside edge of the turret and the ram on the press engages the dies on this outer ring. That design essentially makes most turrets a “C” press, which is a weaker and less accurate configuration. By comparison, the Lee Classic Turret is supported by three rods in a triangular pattern on the outside edge of the turret, and the dies are mounted much closer to the center of the turret. This design allows for a more compact machine, and it also focuses the force of the reloader’s ram closer to the center of the turret.
Besides being impressed with the smart design of the turret on the Lee Classic, it also is the only turret press that auto-indexes, which is to say that as you pull the handle, the machine automatically rotates the turret to align the next die over your cartridge. This feature is common on progressive presses, but Lee makes the only turret presses that auto-index. The auto-indexing capability can propel your production rate to 200 rounds per hour or more. That’s not too shabby for a humble turret press.
You will be hard pressed to find a bad review of the Lee Classic Turret Press from someone who has actually used one. Sure, the web is full of Lee bashers who have a bad impression of their progressive presses or reloading snobs who view their budget prices as being indicative of inferior products, but Lee Precision is a company that has dedicated itself to giving you the best bang for the buck. So while you’ll see a lot of people who talk trash about Lee, you will also be amazed at the number of glowing reviews of the Lee Classic Turret
The Bottom Line
I’m glad that I kept an open mind and didn’t let negative reviews of one segment of a company’s product line sour me on the whole store. I chose the Lee Classic Turret
