Soil amendment, it’s sort of like a constitutional amendment…

...only more complicated. On Tuesday I dumped some Miracle-Gro Garden Soil and some Earthgro Organic Humus and Composted Manure Mix on my garden. Then had a moment of gardener’s remorse.  Was that really the best thing for my garden?

As I understand it soil amendment or soil improvement is crucial to successful gardening.  Without question the best way to improve the structure of your soil is with home-prepared compost. I’ve talked elsewhere about my inability to compost effectively. So the next best thing is to buy the necessary amendments. But what to buy? You can buy the individual elements and mix it yourself (more on that in a minute) or you can choose from a typically dizzying array of possibilities--topsoil, garden soil, potting soil, humus and composted manure, as well as some I’m probably missing.  Btw, NOT potting mix. Potting mix is used in container gardening, while the others I’ve listed are mixed directly into the soil to improve its structure and fertility.

So how to decide? Here we get into garden philosophy, one of my favorite topics. You have to ask yourself, are you cooking or baking? If you are baking then you measure all the ingredients very carefully and add them to the soil in a specific order and you make sure you’ve had the ph of the soil tested and you know exactly what nutrients are available in your soil. This is a delicate balance—like making a soufflé or a cake. If you are cooking, maybe like making a stew or a salad, you pretty much eyeball it and toss in whatever sounds good. I’m of the latter school. So today, after a trip to Martin’s Home and Garden, I added two bags of organic compost to the garden. And I’m eyeing some more Miracle-Gro garden soil to add right before I plant. Also, you can see at the end of the garden, a very dark section. That’s my very own vegetable compost that was still a little damp, shall we say, but I don’t plan to plant there until May so it has a little time to finish.

Sugar snap pea fence to the right, potato box center

 Now here’s the problem…I am working my way toward sustainable gardening and eating as much local produce as possible. To me it is not just the right thing to do, it is the smart thing to do. We have got to figure out how to live in this world without using it up and wearing it out.  We have children and grandchildren, for crying out loud. We can’t just hand them the world and say, “We screwed it up. Sorry about that.”

Obviously, buying bags of garden soil of the mass marketed variety is hardly sustainable. And while the organic compost I bought comes from a small, family-owned organic farm in South Carolina, it’s clearly not local. More to the point, it's expensive and required fossil fuel to ship from South Carolina to Tennessee. In fact, I spend a lot of money on the garden and do a lot of shipping, ordering seeds from the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virginia, buying soil blockers from a farmer in Oregon, buying Jiffy flats from who knows where to start my seedlings. The list just goes on. Oh, and new garden gloves. They are sort of like sunglasses: I have multiple pairs lying all over and I can’t ever find one when I need them!

Anyhow, this idea of gardening in a way that’s sustainable is in my blood and my upbringing. I was using Doris Janzen Longacre’s More-With-Less Cookbook when I first got married back in the late 70s--long before sustainability was the trendy buzz word it is today. I grew up in Lancaster County where there were more Mennonites per square mile than most any place else in the United States. Mennonite frugality was, and is, a thing of legend. So for me the big challenge will be to find a way to grow food that is not just good and beautiful and cheap (all good things) but also the fruit of good stewardship. Now that’s an old fashioned word you don’t hear anymore.

The Boro Victory Garden is back!

Poor little faded garden gnome still hard at work

Well, after an almost two year hiatus from blogging, I am back to both gardening and blogging. In the middle of my first year of blogging (2009) about the Gro-biointensive method, my camera died and so did my blog! The garden ultimately turned out pretty well.

Then last year, my husband (aka the "muscle" in this blog) and my two dogs and I took a lovely, long trip to Colorado right in the middle of gardening season so I opted not to put in a garden and instead relied on my tasty box of organic vegetables each week from Doe Run Farm.

This year I am armed with a new camera and the most recent issue of Mother Earth News Guide to Organic Gardening. For those of you who remember my transplanting woes, I am also awaiting with great anticipation the arrival of my soil blockers! More on that soon...

No double dig this year, just a couple of bags of Miracle Gro organic garden soil and a couple of bags of humus/manure. After the double dig one year, followed by a year of lying fallow, the soil seemed in pretty good shape. Maybe this year, I'll learn to make compost. It is NOT as easy as some people make it out to be!

Hoping to hear from some of my gardening friends as I keep trying to figure out this gardening thing--and maybe some cooking and canning too.

And here is the garden prepped for the new year.

I still need to spend some time digging out some roots from previous plantings. Also, you can see at the end of the garden next to the shed is a pile of leaves I plan to use for mulching around the plants. I have not mulched sufficiently in the past. As they say in Mother Earth News: Mulch! Mulch! Mulch!

Something's eating my sugar snap peas!!!

Just kidding. It's only me. My husband says we'll never have any peas because I stand in the garden eating them. He might be right on one level--he's not getting any peas, but I'm doing just fine.

On other fronts, my Mississippi Silver peas, my Jackson Wonder butterbeans, and my Blue Lake snap beans have all germinated. And maybe some of my flowers--can't tell the difference yet between them and the weeds.
Mississippi Silver peas run amok!

Whatever is eating my potatoes has slowed down. I talked to Judy at Doe Run Farm some more and told her I had yet to see a beetle and she offered the alternative suggestion that it might be slugs. eeww! I know I have slugs in my backyard because they sometimes wander onto the screened porch and leave their slime behind. So they may be the true culprits. Everyone has lots of suggestions for these guys including eggshells, salt, beer, and diatomaceous earth. If they don't eat so much, I may just let them have their bit.

The remaining problem is that something is decimating my herbs but just on one end of the garden. Something has chewed away my lavender, thyme, and citronella and taken a few bites of just one of the bell peppers. (I'm sure I broke one of the cardinal rules of companion planting with that arrangement of plants.)
This is the citronella with ends chewed off.

And thyme similarly decimated.

This end of the garden never does well and I can't even imagine what would chew on one end of the garden, skip the peas and the lettuce and then move on to the collards and potatoes. Maybe they just don't care for peas and lettuce. Who knew? Pests have opinions. I may just let nature have it's way.

I do plan to harvest my collards this weekend, buy 2 more cucumber plants at the Co-op, and remove the cucumbers I have planted because they are not thriving. They look sort of mildewed. I started them from seed, but they were not healthy when they went in the ground. This goes back to my failure as a transplanter. sigh. Oh well, I'm a good germinator!

Helpful Organic Gardening Advice

I am a lucky gardener. I have found some good sources of advice. In addition, to Tennzen's very helpful suggestion of kaolin clay, Judy & John of Doe Run Farm (the CSA I belong to), offered some good insight too. They think the problem might be Colorado Potato Beetles (leptinotarsa decemlineata). I haven't actually seen any adult beetles:

But I'm wondering if I mistook larvae for ladybugs (both photos from Wikipedia):

You might wonder how I did that, but remember I'm a novice and my eyesight is not that good! Judy and John recommended picking them off (that's assuming I can find them!) and dropping them in soapy water. Or just living with some leaf damage. Or spraying them with a bacterium called bacillus thurengesis that paralyzes their digestive tract and then they die. That's a little daunting, but I guess it's the reality of gardening.

Garden Musings

So what's a garden without a gnome? This one's a working gnome too. He's holding a rain gauge. Unfortunately, he's not scaring the pests out of my garden. I noticed some holes in my potato plants and in my collards yesterday. So I went out today to photograph them close up.

Not good...
Potatoes

Collards

So the next step is to figure out what to do that is environmentally friendly. Tennzen in her blog described a homemade insecticidal soap that sounds pretty good. And Mrs. JP gave me a heads up about Jerry Baker's books that take a natural and non-toxic approach to pest control. So I'm off to figure out what to do!

I'm also trying not to write such loooong blog entries...

Planting and transplanting redux

I ate my first sugar snap pea from my garden today. Crispy and delicious. And tiny. I must be patient.

My mother is a flower gardener and I agree, flowers are beautiful, but I think vegetables are every bit as beautiful and nothing is lovelier than the sugar snap pea.


The decision to sow seeds directly into the ground turned out to be a good one for me. I understand the principles of Grow-Biointensive gardening and plan to implement more as I gain more experience. Planting seeds and then transplanting seedlings is the most efficient way to garden. You use less water and you have a greater yield for the energy and resources expended. But sowing directly is better than no garden at all and probably better than buying all of your transplants.

With the exception of my swiss chard, everything I planted in late March has done well, especially my potatoes.
They are growing more like weeds than potatoes!

Tennzen, in her blog, indicated that she planted her potatoes in tires. I didn't have any tires and I was having trouble keeping earth mounded up around the potato plants. So my muscle from the double dig (my husband), who is also very handy, built a box around them.


We filled the box with dirt and then topped it off with straw--on the advice of another gardener who claimed this was the easiest way to grow potatoes. As I understand it, the potatoes will form in the dirt and straw surrounding the potato plants. In mid to late June, the plants will die. We'll wait 2 weeks and then remove the boards and pull the potates out of the straw/dirt mixture. Keep your fingers crossed.

Our lettuce and collards are doing equally well. I think the collards are soon ready to harvest and the romaine lettuce is starting to form heads. You can see the second potato box in the lefthand corner of the picture. Here's an interesting side note: In the Grow Biointensive method, they argue that certain vegetables can actually inhibit growth if planted next to one another. Specifically, they recommend NOT planting peas and potatoes together. The potatoes to the left were planted beside the peas, however, because I happened to have a little extra room there and some extra potato pieces. The potatoes in the box next to the peas are not as big as the ones further away! So maybe there is something to this companion planting...


One more thing on potatoes...If you read earlier entries in this blog, you'll remember "The Great Potato Controversy": To chit or not to chit and to cut or not to cut. Well, I cut and sort of chitted and then waited way too long to plant after I cut. Apparently, it's impossible to screw up potatoes. Famous last words. I'll let you know when the bugs get them!

Now, you'll also remember that I have almost no tranplants from the seeds that I started. So today I went to the Co-op and bought some plants. All I had of my own to plant were 2 cucumber plants and 4 teeny tomato plants that I hope are Cherokee Purples. Fortunately, the Co-op carries some heirlooms so I picked up two heirloom Bradleys, 2 Pink Ladies, 2 Rutgers, and 1 Mr. Stripey (not an heirloom, but who can resist a name like that?) While I was at it, I grabbed 4 bell peppers (2 red and 2 green), basil, rosemary, thyme, and parsley. I also snagged a lavender plant and a mosquito plant that smells like citronella. I planted some more seeds, too, sowing directly into the ground. I actually planted some flowers--Early Sensation cosmos, State Fair zinnias, and calendula resina. I also planted Blue Lake snap beans, Mississippi Silver peas, and Jackson Wonder butter beans. My husband pointed out to me that I don't like butterbeans (he does, so you would think he wouldn't complain) and I told him I like them fresh. We'll see.

Citronella, lavender, parsley, & thyme plus 2 red bell peppers; About an hour after I planted, someone (maybe a bird?) shredded the lavender. geez. I planted this where my swiss chard used to be. I planted the swiss chard in late March and in 2 months it had grown only about 5 inches tall. Something wrong there! When I got my delivery of vegetables this week from Doe Run Farm and saw their gorgeous foot long swiss chard I knew it was time to put mine out of its misery.
Thanks to the Co-op, there will be tomatoes. The 4 tiniest tomato plants with no basket around them yet are the transplants I started from seed.

More reflections on the grow biointensive method...This method calls for the gardener to plan every inch of space in his or her garden, start every single plant from seed and then transplant, and use home processed compost to enrich the soil, along with the double dig. It makes a tremendous amount of sense to me--it's smart and sustainable, but I haven't been able to fully or even partially implement the plan. First, the gardening season starts while I'm still crazy busy with school so planning (and implementing!) is tough. Second, I'm the world's worst composter. Never have been to produce beautiful, useable compost. I get either slime or my composter gets indigestion and stages a sit down strike, refusing to compost. As a result, I had to buy more bags of Miracle-Gro ogranic garden soil than I care to admit. Third, while I appear to have the gift of germination, I have not yet gotten the hang of turning those tiny 2 inch seedlings into strong, viable, transplantable seedlings. As a result, I've had to sow seed directly and have not used my garden space efficiently, so I have seeds I haven't planted--no space for them. I'm thinking about buying (yet another purchase!) some containers so I can plant my Waltham Butternut Squash and my heirloom Seminole pumpkin. The corn will have to wait until next year. And finally--and here's my greatest weakness--I buy seeds because I like the names. And so I have too many--more than I'll ever use. Surely, there's some place in sustainable gardening for plants with beautiful names.

Planting and transplanting

So...more on how hard it is to garden, blog, and have a full time job. I'm sure my students are grateful that I graded their papers instead of blogging in April. I did, however, keep up with the gardening even when I wasn't blogging about it. I made a good start at planting in March. Transplanting, on the other hand, didn't go so well. I made two crucial errors (other than starting my seeds too late!) First, I planted a bunch of seeds and then forgot to label them. Yikes! Then I planted a bunch more and didn't get them transplanted quickly enough to larger containers (that's where grading trumped gardening.) This failing came despite the best efforts of my friend Gabe who met with me and then emailed me wonderful, detailed instructions about how to proceed. I plan to start some seedlings for a fall planting and hope to figure out then what I did wrong in this round.

Shortly after my last blog entry, I opted to sow seed directly into the ground just so I would have something. All the pictures in this blog entry were taken between the point of my last blog entry (March 23) and the Good Friday tornado here in the Boro. We actually escaped any damage on our side of town and other than a few hours spent sitting in the hallway tracking tornado triangles on Weather Underground, we were unscathed. Others, of course, were not so lucky.

In the first round of planting, (last week in March) I planted, potatoes, collards, 3 kinds of lettuce (oakleaf, romaine, red deer tongue--and yes I bought those seeds just for the name) sugar snap peas, and swiss chard.

The sugar snap peas I planted as both seed and transplants. They were the only seedlings I had that did well. What's funny is that there is a raging argument among gardeners about whether to plant seeds or seedlings for sugar snap peas. As you'll see, both of mine ended up doing well. Not so for my poor swiss chard.
Sugar snap peas

So much bad weather rolled through middle Tennessee in early April that my poor little peas were in constant danger from hail. The day after I transplanted them, the forecast called for hail, so I covered em! With heavy stuff.
Creative sugar snap pea protection

Eventually, I added a fence for my peas and after what felt like an eternity, the first sprouts appeared. I scattered my lettuce seed so I got enormous numbers of plants too close together and have been culling them over the last few weeks and eating baby lettuce salads. mmm.
Fence for the sugar snap peas

My first potato! I couldn't be prouder...
My clumps of lettuce

I've included a picture here, too, of my azaleas. I need to be clear--I have nothing to do with their success. They are completely the result of benign neglect and whatever leaches out of the foundation of my house. Unfortunately, they were decimated by the storms of April, although beautiful while they bloomed.