ALWAYS EXPERIMENTING - This shot from Donna Best's garden in the Woodlawn community illustrates some of the different growing techniques she uses for growing vegetables. In the foreground, her "kiddie pool" garden holds 10 fabric "grow bags" with new transplants. She covers the bottom of the pool with gravel before placing the bags inside the plastic pool and then covering the bottom with water. The fiber bags allows the plants to "wick" the water up from the bottom while also allowing air to penetrate the sides of the bag to "prune" the root system. Pictured in the background are couple of grow bags with strawberries while berry bushes growing in containers can be seen in the background. (Photo courtesy of Donna Best).
RISON - Donna Best of the Woodlawn community has a passion for gardening, and she will be sharing some of her growing techniques at the Arkansas Homesteading Conference to be held Saturday, March 29, at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds.
Ahead of her presentation, the avid gardener joined the Free Range Conversations podcast to talk about her experiences of living in a "tiny house" and going over some of her gardening methods.
Chatting with host and organizer of the conference, Britt Talent, as well as co-hosts Roy Phillips and Douglas Boultinghouse, Best also shares her journey from being born in Hong King, China, to living in a tiny house in South Arkansas.
She and her husband live in a 14x40-foot "shed house," fulfilling her dream to have a small house.
"At that time, 14x40 was the biggest that you that you could get," she said, having built the tiny house in 2012. "I'd much prefer a 16 foot (wide shed)." According to Best, just two extra feet of width makes a huge difference.
Even with the small living space, she still has full-size appliances, a spacious bathroom, closets, kitchen and more. She said they do have a storage building to keep things.
For anyone considering downsizing to a tiny house, she said the starting place is always the same. "Get rid of lots of junk," she said, which she really did not find all that hard.
"It wasn't hard. It's just me and my husband here. All our family lives out of state," Best said. "You just kind of really have to be brutal on what you decide to keep." She found a perk along the way - with a house taking up less space on the land, she has more land for gardening.
For Best, gardening is a passion she has always had and has found success with varying systems of growing crops like lettuces, tomatoes, broccoli, peppers and more. This prompted Talent to invite her to the Homesteading Conference.
At the conference, she will be discussing how to build a rainwater gutter garden system. Her system incorporates a couple of the most popular gardening concepts: a "wicking" system that provides a steady source of moisture from beneath the plants as well as an air-pruning system that "prunes" the plant's roots in order to encourage more rigorous root growth overall.
Best's system uses a series of buckets that sit atop a rainwater gutter which serves as a water reservoir for the system. Each one of the buckets has several large holes cut into the side before lining it with landscape fabric and filling it with a growing medium. The holes in the sides allows air to penetrate into the growing medium thereby "air pruning" the roots to form a more vigorous root system overall.
Over the years, Best has used a variety of gardening methods ranging from fabric grow bags, kiddie pools and raised beds. One the advantages she shared in the podcast is that you don't have to bend over as much with raised beds, especially with here gutter garden system. She said she was looking for what she calls "gardening made easy," and she plans to share more of those tips at the conference, while learning more from other speakers.
The Arkansas Homesteading Conference is entering its 11th year. Talent started the event in 2014 at the Pioneer Village in Rison with just four educational sessions related the homesteading. Talent explained that the homesteading is essentially the practice of becoming more self-sufficient, which can include gardening, food preservation, small scale livestock, alternative energy, herbal remedies and more. Best, a past spectator at the conference, encourages people to attend.
"I think the the homesteading conference is such a resource. If only I could have had this resource when I was young, when I really was had these interests and had the energy to do them," she said. "I really encourage young people to be able to go to a conference like this and learn because they there's so many people that have have the knowledge that that can help you get started in this type of lifestyle, whether you're doing it full time or part time or whatever. It's it's just a great resource." During the podcast, Best also shares what it was like being born in Hong Kong, where her grandparents were missionaries to China, and parents served in the military. She's lived in both China and Germany before relocating to the United States, where life has taken her from Arizona to Tennessee (and back to Arizona), then to Hawaii for a decade, on to Oregon - and eventually to Arkansas roughly 20 years ago. A job with the Arkansas Department of Corrections is what brought her to South Arkansas, a place she now calls home and is finding her community.
The full episode of the podcast is streaming now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and ClevelandCountyHerald.com
For more information on the Arkansas Homesteading Conference, including other presenters and topics, visit ArkansasHomesteader.com