Category Archives: mulch

Golden Harvest Time, And Greens Go Wild

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Leaves
Leaves – they are appearing by the bagful on curbs all over the city. And I’ve been driving about, collecting as many as I can. I particularly like the large clear bags of leaves so that I can be sure it’s just leaves, and not trash.

Leaves are gardener’s gold. They provide carbon for the compost pile. They are a good soil amendment and are great for mulch. I use them prolifically in my hugelkultur beds.

And most important – They are free.

So save your leaves and put them on your garden beds or work into your compost pile now and gather a few extra bags for use later in the year.

Garden greens more dec 2015

Remember that hugelkultur bed I installed a month or so ago? The greens are taking over! We had our first dish of greens – collards and mustard – from the garden last week. And I go through and remove ragged leaves for the hens – which they, of course, love. The greens have weathered our almost-freezes well, and the chard is beginning to take off.

Now, we’re going to be installing a spiral garden in another part of the yard, and more growing space. Stay tuned for updates!

Fall Planting – Mulch and Crop Rotation A Must

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So fall is upon us. Just like spring, it’s time to think about planting!   So what do you consider? First, there’s mulch and feeding the soil. Second it’s planning what to plant – and that means rotating crops.

Mulching

Mulch, mulch, mulch. That means don’t till. Do you know what happens when you turn over the soil? You destroy this whole civilization of micro-organisms that are just waiting to help your plants grow! Can’t you hear the screams?

Okay….maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but there is a whole world of life in the soil ecosystem. It starts with mycorrhizal fungi that form the base of the pyramid. These little folks send out microscopic hairs, called hyphae that go through the soil and grab minerals and nutrients and bring them to plant roots.

What happens when you till or turn over the ground? Those miles and miles (yes – in a small space!) of hyphae are broken and have to re-grow. Which takes time that they could otherwise be feeding your plants.

Instead, add organic material on top of the ground – like leaves, or compost, or mulch. That way, you’re giving the bacteria (who also live below-ground) something to munch on and add to the fertility of the soil – as well as its moisture tolerance.

 

Crop Rotation

Certain plants grow best when they are planted after another type of plant. For instance,

Legumes (think: beans and peas mostly) fix nitrogen from the air to the soil for leafy plants.

Leaf Plants (as in coles, leafy greens and corn) like lots of nitrogen. They grow best when planted after the legumes.

Fruits (as in tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, squash and melon) like phosphorus to set fruit, but too much nitrogen prevents them from setting the fruit. They just grow and grow and grow, but don’t set fruit.

Roots need even less nitrogen, but they need potassium. Roots include beets, carrots, turnips, radishes, garlic and potatoes.

Then cycle through again.

It’s also important to note that when you plant certain things in the same place year after year, they get covered with pests – like tomatoes get covered with hornworms. So never plant tomatoes in the same place year after year. Even if that is the best sunny spot.

So Rotate, Rotate, Rotate.

Drought Planting Technique Works in Flood….and Carrots

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about planting techniques that worked in drought conditions.  Now it’s apparent that heavy mulching also works in flood.

A garden columnist recently recommended that gardeners just pull their spring tomato plants and give up until fall planting. The reason was that so many tomato plants were suffering from the abundance of rain, and suffering from fungus and other ills caused by wet conditions and wet feet.

Tomatoes may 2015

However, as you can see from the pictures, tomatoes planted using heavy mulch – and in some cases only mulch – fared quite well and are flourishing and producing tomatoes.  The tomato plant in my straw bale also is doing well, blooming and getting ready to put forth tomatoes.  In addition, my container tomato just yielded a lovely cluster of cherry tomatoes.  It is not suffering either.

The secret?  DRAINAGE.  As long as the days are long, there are a reasonable number of days in the 80s, and the plant’s feet are wet, the tomato will be just fine.

 

What about fall tomatoes?  There are a couple of ways to achieve this without going out and buying new transplants (although it’s nice to support local businesses).

First, June is the time to start seeds so that your seedlings will be ready to plant in time for a fall crop.

Second, the suckers that develop at the junction of each tomato branch can be removed and placed in a rooting mix to develop roots and should be available for transplanting in time for a fall crop.

Finally, there is the lazy person’s way…just prune those plants that are doing well.  Tomato branches that have borne for the spring will be less likely to bear fruit for the fall.  So, prune them off during the heat of the summer when production has fallen off.  Those suckers I mentioned earlier?  Leave them and they will develop new branches, ready to bear at the right time.  You can get two crops off the same plant, without the labor of transplanting or the expense of buying new transplants.

 

Carrots Carrots 2

I mentioned some time ago that I “winter” plant my carrots.  With the cold weather, their growth and maturity has been delayed, but they are now ready for harvest.  Since the carrots were lonely in their container, I transplanted a couple of tomato plants to keep them company this spring.  As the tomatoes have now grown and need space, I started harvesting carrots.  Wow – was I surprised (I always am)!  Here’s a picture of the harvest of these few.  There are many more waiting.  They are bound for a roasting with some red potatoes and onions, chunked and covered with olive oil and a sprinkling of time.  Add a little water and cover the roaster, then put in the oven for an hour or till everything is nice and tender.  Another lazy person’s dinner – and so delicious!

Carrots 1

Gardening During Drought – Part I

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As I was driving through Plano the other day, I was thinking of California, which is in the news with state mandated water restrictions.  There are signs on most well-travelled roads that watering restrictions are in force.  Water conservation is good any time, but with a continuing drought, we have to re-think how we garden and how we water.

There are a number of ways to reduce watering when installing/replanting a garden.  First, the more organic matter that is in the soil, the more it will hold the water it gets.

Sometimes folks use things to break up the soil and aerate it, but don’t realize that it isn’t helpful for holding water.  Peat moss has been the favored clay loosener, but I was reading the other day that peat pots tend to cause soil to dry out faster – leading to more frequent watering.  Does that mean that it also doesn’t hold water as well when mixed in the soil?  A better amendment for potting is sustainably harvested coco fiber – it also holds water quite nicely.

What’s that?!

Coco fiber is that fiber on the outside of a coconut.  It comes in bricks and I’ve seen them available at local garden nurseries such as Redenta’s as well as North Haven Gardens.  The bricks are made of fibers that are dehydrated and compressed. The fun part is when you put that brick in a LARGE container to rehydrate (not the regulation 5-gallon bucket, which I heard one person busted during the rehydration process, because it wasn’t large enough).  Put water in the water in the container with the brick and watch what happens – it’s great for kids to participate in this process.  If you want to get mucky, start massaging the fiber off the brick into the water – you get a slurry of muddy mass.  THIS is what you use to mix into potting soil or into raised beds to loosen clay, aerate the bed, and provide moisture retention.

Because the coco fiber does hold moisture – you just witnessed this quality when you rehydrated it!

So we need organic matter – that also means compost and lots of it!  If you haven’t started your compost pile, now (whenever now is) is the best time.  Never too late.  I’ll write another week on compost piles – the slow, the soon and the real quick methods. You can also buy compost (bagged or by the pickup load or by the dump truck load) from folks like Soil Building Systems.

Organic matter – lots of it.  That’s number one.

Then there’s mulch.  Lots of it, too.  Mulch can be bagged stuff you get from the nursery, or delivered by the dump truck, or gathered yourself on the side of the street (read:  leaves in bags). You can also buy straw (not hay) to use as mulch.  Newspapers work, as does cardboard, spread around your plants and watered in well and then covered with leaves (watered in well also).

Leaves make excellent mulch.  Think of a forest floor and how the leaves carpet the ground, keeping it moist and soft, then deteriorating and becoming part of the soil.  Leaves are also free.

I should note here that if you get a dump truck load of mulch, you might want to invite some friends over to help you distribute it.  Here’s a picture of a mulch-spreading party this last weekend.

Mulch mountain

Mulch is magic.  It serves many purposes – first, it keeps weeds down (yay! less work!).  Second, it shades the soil so that the plants’ feet stay cool even in the hottest baking sun.  That means less water, because it prevents the soil from drying out.  And third, mulch condenses moisture from the air during the night, bringing more moisture to the soil and your plants.    (NOTE:  Do not use cedar bark mulch on vegetables – it’s best used in ornamental plantings.)

All that compost and mulch results in less watering needed to keep your garden going and producing.

In doing some calculations for a community garden’s rain water collection needs, I read that 100 sq. ft. of conventional vegetable garden needs 60 gal. a week at 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Obviously as the temperature goes up, more water would be needed.  I couldn’t find any figures for how much mulch and organic matter reduce that, but I’ll bet it’s quite a bit – maybe as much as 50%.  Be kind to your water bill – and conserve.

In Part 2 (next week) I’ll talk about how we can build garden beds that require even less water.

Garden Uses Simple Method of Rainwater Capture; Chard Loves the Snow!

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DK rain capture

 

One of the challenges of small community gardens can be the cost of bringing water to the property.  If the garden is on a vacant lot, then there is no large building from which to gather rainwater. What to do?

But there is a solution, and one garden in Dallas, the Divinekinship Community Garden, is serving as the model.

They have constructed a roof on poles – I call it a rainwater capture shelter.  More specifically, it is a roofed, open sided structure approximately 8-9 ft. square, supported with 8’ landscape timbers at the corners (buried about 18” into the ground for stability), with a plastic/fiberglass corrugated roof.  The roof is approximately 6 ½ feet high at one end of the structure, and approximately 6 feet high at the other end, so there is a slight slope down to a gutter, which feeds via a flex-spout into an IBC tote.  The IBC tote is connected to a second IBC tote for overflow.

An estimate of the rainfall harvesting capacity is:      9’ x 9’ = 81 sq. ft. of roof.  x .6 gallons/sq ft/inch of rain = 486 gallons captured in 1” rainfall.

The total cost, exclusive of IBC totes, is approximately $100-$110, if materials are new.

Here are some pictures of the setup.  If materials can be scrounged someplace, the cost goes down.

DK rain gutterDK rain roof

The drought conditions in the Dallas/Fort Worth area continue.  And some communities may be facing more severe water restrictions this summer. A check with the National Weather Service revealed that we received 21.32 inches of rain in 2014. In 2013, the annual rainfall was 29.4 inches; in 2012, it was 31.26 inches.  Even if there is another water source for the garden, capturing rainfall has the potential to cut the water bill substantially.

And there’s another way to reduce water usage:  Mulch. Heavy use of mulch as well as working lots of organic matter into the beds will help reduce the water needs of the growing beds.

 Chard after snow

 

 

My chard came through the recent freezes and snow with flying colors.  Almost as if it energized the plant.  Love chard.

The Garden in Winter

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“So what should we do with the garden this winter?  It seems like it wasn’t growing things as well as it has in the past.”

That’s the question I was asked this last week. 

My first response was:  if they are not growing any winter vegetables, to bury the garden in leaves – several inches thick, watered down.  Even some cardboard, well moistened.  This will help put organic matter back into the soil.  Another way to help the soil is to grow a cover crop during the winter – maybe hairy vetch – which fixes more nitrogen in the soil. 

Leaves are so plentiful this time of year.  If they do not come from your own lot, you can easily find bags carefully left on the curb – ripe for the removal by scavenging composters and gardeners like me! The last place they should be going is the landfill.  Many community gardens are lacking the carbon/brown needed for a good compost pile – leaves on the curb are an excellent source.

Compost is another treatment you could use for wintering over, layered a few inches deep on top of the soil, and then maybe spreading some azomite to add trace minerals to the garden bed. 

Azomite is said to contain as many as 70 trace minerals that are needed to grow healthy plants.  We have systematically removed these trace minerals from our soils, by growing plants with simple, commercial fertilizers.  The plants take up the trace minerals and, when the plants are removed, so are the minerals.  However if we mineralize the soil, the plants take it up, we eat the plants and our health is improved. Then, when we compost the waste and then put it on the garden, those minerals are returned to the soil.

A good garden soil will be rich and soft. So soft, you can easily grab a handful from deep down.  If it’s dry and dusty, then it is lacking in organic material.

If you are growing winter vegetables, make sure they are mulched deeply. This will not only help the plants weather cold spells, but that mulch will work its way into the soil and help improve soil fertility as well as water-holding capacity.

The bed pictured on the left was well mulched with straw before the cold weather hit.  It is still growing mustard and chard, and the mulch protects the feet of the plants from freezes, as well as holding in moisture – and that protects the plants from cold, drying winter winds. By spring, the straw will have started decomposing and becomes compost to feed new plantings.

And the soil….this is where it all starts!  If the soil is not healthy (read:  full of micro-organisms) then it will not produce healthy plants.  I’ll talk more about soil in another post – as well as give you a way to inexpensively do a soil census of your soil’s living organisms.