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!