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    The Overhead Garden: The World's Greatest Backyard Garden
    The Overhead Garden: The World's Greatest Backyard Garden
    The Overhead Garden: The World's Greatest Backyard Garden
    Ebook156 pages1 hour

    The Overhead Garden: The World's Greatest Backyard Garden

    By John Herridge and Richard Gieseke

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    About this ebook

    The revolutionary Overhead Garden takes the raised garden concept to new heights.....literally! You’ve never seen anything quite like it....it’s the World’s Greatest Backyard Garden. Our claims may sound too good to be true, but in this book, we prove it!

    Many current books on existing raised gardens claim to eliminate bending and stooping, but this vertical garden truly delivers on that promise. All of your gardening is waist high, or higher. With our unique use of overhead arches, all of your vegetables are within comfortable reach....upward. Better yet, the productivity from vertical growth is increased by as much as 4 times relative to a simple horizontal bed. Vining plants like tomatoes can grow stalks 15 feet long, loaded with product. Furthermore, weeding is almost eliminated. Backyard gardening can now be relaxing and enjoyable, the way you always hoped it would be. You will have the nutritious, sustainable, money saving and secure food supply right in your backyard.

    This book is an abridged version of our printed book. It is meant to introduce you to our patentable new concept. It contains Chapters on Soil Preparation, Seeds, Composting, Micro Irrigation Techniques, Soil Amendments, Water Harvesting, Crop Layout and Construction Materials. We have developed a unique new way to use inexpensive Magnesium Oxide mineral board for your garden structure...this is a breakthrough you need to know about. We also provide computer generated, step by step Instructions for 7 different Overhead Garden modifications that will allow almost anyone to construct their own unit.
    Importantly, we have adapted Water Wicking techniques for use in our Overhead Garden structures. This is the ultimate in low water usage and water conservation, especially in water starved regions where drought is a major issue.
    Finally, we have a major section on “Why” you should have an urban garden in the changing World we live in. It covers the security threats of Increased Food Costs, Drought, Distribution System Shutdown, Soil Depletion and Empty Vegetables, and even the threat of shutdowns caused by Cyber Attack. These are the reasons why the experts predict that that over 20% of our vegetables will come from Urban Gardens in the next 6 years. Food production is undergoing major change, as we can no longer afford to ship lettuce in refrigerated trucks over a 1000 miles.
    Learn about the future of urban food and how you can take part in it. Growing nutritious, secure food abundantly with little effort is a game changer. Learn about it here.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Herridge
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781311157102
    The Overhead Garden: The World's Greatest Backyard Garden
    Author

    John Herridge

    John Herridge holds a Masters degree in Chemical Engineering and spent his early career in the Polymers Industry. He spent many years as a Marketing/Technical Consultant in that field. In recent years, he became interested in backyard gardening and recognized the advantages in nutrition, cost savings and security that it offered. In a collaboration with an old friend, he added his expertise in Materials and Engineering to a project to improve the home gardening experience. He has many ideas for future improvements for urban gardens and plans to develop and write about these going forward.

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      Book preview

      The Overhead Garden - John Herridge

      The Overhead Garden

      Written by

      John Herridge & Richard Gieseke

      Design and Illustrations by

      Susyn Herridge

      Copyright 2015 John Herridge

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever including Internet usage, without written permission of the author.

      Foreword

      The revolutionary Overhead Garden takes the raised garden concept to new heights…..literally! You’ve never seen anything quite like it….it’s the World’s Greatest Backyard Garden. Our claims may sound too good to be true, but in this book, we prove it!

      Many current books on existing raised gardens claim to eliminate bending and stooping, but this vertical garden truly delivers on that promise. All of your gardening is waist high, or higher. With our unique use of overhead arches, all of your vegetables are within comfortable reach….upward. Better yet, the productivity from vertical growth is increased by as much as 4 times relative to a simple horizontal bed. Vining plants like tomatoes can grow stalks 15 feet long, loaded with product. Furthermore, weeding is almost eliminated. Backyard gardening can now be relaxing and enjoyable, the way you always hoped it would be. You will have the nutritious, sustainable, money saving and secure food supply right in your backyard.

      This book is an abridged version of our printed book. It is meant to introduce you to our patentable new concept. It contains Chapters on Soil Preparation, Seeds, Composting, Micro Irrigation Techniques, Soil Amendments, Water Harvesting, Crop Layout and Construction Materials. We have developed a unique new way to use inexpensive Magnesium Oxide mineral board for your garden structure…this is a breakthrough you need to know about. We also provide computer generated, step by step Instructions for 7 different Overhead Garden modifications that will allow almost anyone to construct their own unit.

      Importantly, we have adapted Water Wicking techniques for use in our Overhead Garden structures. This is the ultimate in low water usage and water conservation, especially in water starved regions where drought is a major issue.

      Finally, we have a major section on Why you should have an urban garden in the changing World we live in. It covers the security threats of Increased Food Costs, Drought, Distribution System Shutdown, Soil Depletion and Empty Vegetables, and even the threat of shutdowns caused by Cyber Attack. These are the reasons why the experts predict that that over 20% of our vegetables will come from Urban Gardens in the next 6 years. Food production is undergoing major change, as we can no longer afford to ship lettuce in refrigerated trucks over a 1000 miles.

      Learn about the future of urban food and how you can take part in it. Growing nutritious, secure food abundantly with little effort is a game changer. Learn about it here.

      Contents

      Introduction

      What is an Overhead Garden?

      Gardening for Non-Gardeners

      The Best Raised Garden Ever!

      Hard Work

      A Simple Start

      Vertical Imperfection

      Improving on the Improvements

      A Really Raised Bed

      Vertical Productivity

      I Love My Arch

      Critters and Weeds Are Not Happy

      Urban Garden Revolution

      In the Beginning, There Was Urban Agriculture

      Future World

      Agricultural Angst

      Empty Vegetables

      Five Reasons Why Food Costs Will Increase

      Inflation

      Growth of Protein Consumption

      Ethanol for Fuel

      More Arable Land

      Drought

      Water Resources

      Where Will the Water Come From?

      Food Security

      Cyber Attack

      Solar Flares

      Materials of Construction

      Magnesium Oxide Board

      Concrete Masonry

      Landscape Timbers

      Polymeric Composites

      The Wire Grid Membrane

      Modified Overhead Garden Designs

      The Standard 8’ x 4’ OHG

      The OHG 4’ x 4’ Garden

      Which OHG Is Best For Me?

      Possible Distortion

      Wicking Garden/SIP

      Water Transport in Plants

      Capillary Action + Hydrotropism

      The OHG Wicking Garden

      False Bottom Boxes

      Extra Arches

      One Box, Two Arches

      Inside-the-Box Arch

      Two Boxes, Three Arches

      Crop Layout

      Vines

      Inside Row

      Outer Row

      Indeterminate Tomatoes

      Gardening Techniques

      Composting

      Make Your Own

      Getting Started

      Soil

      Starter Mix

      How to Get Sandy Loam?

      Amendments

      Worm Casting

      Generic Compost

      Sphagnum or Peat Moss

      Vermiculite

      Mushroom Compost

      Chicken Manure

      Amendment Mix

      Which MgO OHG Modification Is Best?

      OHG, with No Soil Displacement

      OHG Displacement Methods

      Topsoil Layer

      Filling the Boxes

      Seeds

      Seed Saving

      Heirloom or Hybrid

      Bio Engineered Seeds

      How to Save Seeds

      What is a Seed Bank?

      Irrigation Systems

      About the Authors

      Introduction

      We would like to introduce you to a revolutionary new garden. In it, vegetables grow, climb, and twine upward from a waist high bed onto a permanent wire arch that reaches over your head. This garden produces high yields in small spaces, requires much less effort than any other garden design, conserves water consumption, and greatly reduces pest/disease problems. Although it looks deceptively simple, it is actually a complex merger of structural engineering and modern materials. We call it The Overhead Garden (OHG).

      The Overhead Garden saves considerable time and work; eliminates backbreaking tasks; makes cultivation and harvesting easier; and maximizes use of space. Conservative watering in closely spaced beds is more than sufficient to grow a deep root system. Chores, like weeding, fertilizing, and pest control, are greatly minimized; while yields are increased through the use of vertical vine growth. Where the plant forms new flowers as you harvest throughout the season, vegetables on a vine are capable of continuous yields, and the vegetables or fruits are more efficiently exposed to the sun, which speeds up ripening.

      Does the world need a unique, new garden assembly that makes growing vegetables in your backyard easy, healthy, and productive? We think so…and we think that’s just what the patentable Overhead Garden offers!

      Like all technology development, our expertise evolved step–by-step. The OHG adds big advancements to urban gardening; yielding a vertical garden that is very easy to maintain, has very few weeds, keeps out pests, is productive, and is incredibly space efficient.

      The three main objectives of this book are as follows:

      1. Convince you that urban gardening should become an important part of your future.

      2. Describe why the OHG is the World’s Greatest Backyard Garden ever!

      3. Show you, step-by- detailed-step, how to build, and maintain your own OHG.

      Let’s also be clear what it’s not about. It’s not another tabulation of vegetables, one on each page, with a nice picture and some comments about when to plant, seed spacing, seed depth, and so on. There’s more than enough of that out there! What it is…is a book that will lead you, through the OHG process.

      What is an Overhead Garden?

      An OHG has at least two waist high, garden bed/planter boxes, oriented with the long sides parallel; containing deep planting media for maximum root growth. A wire grid panel is formed into an overhead arch, arising from one raised garden bed and flexing over to the other. This assembly allows gardening under the arch, with no back breaking bending, and provides very space efficient vertical growth of vines upward onto the wire support structure.

      The raised planter boxes contain horizontal reinforcing membranes that hold against the lateral outward forces of the planting media. This allows the use of thin-wall, economical members in the assembly of the box sidewalls. A patent for this innovation is pending. These reinforcing membranes, which are sandwiched between slats

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