“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.

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.