The Overhead Garden: The World's Greatest Backyard Garden
By John Herridge and Richard Gieseke
()
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.
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