Updates on my Provident Garden

As promised, it is Friday and I am back to post some updates on my gardening efforts. I have loads of photos.

So I spent around six hours last Saturday working on the gardens. I've planted:

• pumpkins
• scallop squash
• three types of cucumber
• peas
• tigger melon (yes, that is Tigger as in Winnie the Pooh)
• carrots
• zucchini 

We've still got to put peppers, eggplant, lettuce and tomatoes in the ground. Oh, beans too. I'll do most of that tomorrow. 

As I worked, it quickly became clear that the chickens were going to destroy my planting beds and tear up any seedlings. I had to come up with a way to keep them totally out of the gardens. I think what I worked up will function well and is not too terribly ugly. Here: 

I put up some tall poles on the edge of the garden. These are left over from the portable carport we used to have that got torn to bits in one of Utah's windstorms. I also lined the entire garden plot with plastic wicker fences that are about eight inches tall at their tallest. I anchored the poles to the fence in several spots. Then I stretched a bunch of bird netting between the poles, tying it off tightly and using garden staples to get the netting close to the ground. From fifteen feet away, our garden looks like what you see above. Here's a corner: 

You can sort of make out the netting. I wove some of my heavy duty twine through the top of the netting and tied it off tightly in order to keep the netting from sagging too much. You can also sort of see the planting beds. This is where the cucumbers, squash and zucchini are planted. Should see sprouts in another week. 

Here's the other end of the garden: 

You should be able to see some mesh, as well as the pumpkin plants. The sun is about 1/2 hour from hitting those pumpkins full on. 

The chickens seem to be able to make out the mesh easily; they haven't even tried to go into the garden since I put it up. Here they are-- earning their keep. We haven't had a problem with pill bugs or earwigs since the chickens began spending their days roaming the back yard. 

Since Annemarie can't stand earwigs and pill bugs are a bit of a nuisance, I'm accepting this pest elimination by the chickens as a rent payment along with their eggs. 

We were also having a problem with the chickens spreading the compost hither and yon. Here's what I did to fix that: 

That's just a piece of plywood that I had sitting around. It took me less than five minutes to get this door up. No hinges, just a stake pinning the plywood against the compost frame: 

So it's easy to move because it's lightweight and isn't attached. The stake is far enough in the ground that I'm not going to trip on it: 

Look at that luscious compost! 

Now, one of the issues that needed to be dealt with was how I could protect the garden and still allow access to we homo sapiens. Easily done. I stuck another pole in the ground. I stretched the netting around the corner pole and tied it off to the new pole. Then I made a barrier from the fence to a point a few feet away from the pole. Now we just use a large piece of wood to fill the gap when we want to keep things closed and just move the wood to get in. 

It's working well!

Last, I wanted to share an image of my front yard and flower garden. 

Our phlox- the pink/purple stuff off to the right-- is just about finishing its blooming cycle. We have four salvia plants, this corner one is blooming like crazy and the other two in the front are getting going as well. There is a huge salvia in the middle of the phlox, but it usually goes later in the season. Salvia is the tall purple flower right in the corner. 

We are eating strawberries, harvest chives and parsley, enjoying the yellow/red of the stonecrop, and are stunned at the size of the daisy patch. 

The grass, yes, is lovely. I mow every week so I can mulch without a problem. I water for a long stretch about twice a week. Also, it's hard to see them, but we have some nice irises that are gearing up to bloom in front of the house. 

So that's the update. We are a little late with the garden this year, but we have high hopes of catching up in the next three weeks. 

Incidentally, we have about 25 tomato plants. I'm selling 14 of them, $5 a piece. They are all heirloom. I have a sign out front (it's behind the big salvia). This is a nice way to make a little bit of packet cash

Next time I'll post a clip of how my three-tiered compost works. I'll also discuss strategies for keeping slugs our and getting rid of them and snails when they show up. 

The power of mulch

Two things that turn some folks off of gardening are weeds and insect pests. But fear no more! There is often a very simple, natural solution to both of these problems. I'll explain how choosing and using a good mulch will both control and eliminate problems with weeds and many pests. But first, what is mulch? Mulch is organic matter that has been broken down some. You often see it spread around the base of trees. It is not big chunks of bark, but is rather cuttings of plantlife of all kinds.

WEEDS
Mulch is a wonderful, natural way of controlling weeds. When you spread it on yourgarden, it keeps the soil cool and also helps keep your plants' roots cool. It also helps maintain the soil moist. As for weeds, mulch basically doesn't allow weeds to grow. It gives them no room and no sunlight. In essence, a good mulch will choke out weeds so that you don't have to break your back pulling them.

PESTS
But how can mulch deal with the pests that plague our plots? Firstly, having mulch around the base of your plants and on open ground has been shown to confuse pests. Slugs and snails have trouble navigating through mulch, and other pests find it hard to get through the mulch and at the roots of your plants.

Furthermore, if you choose a light colored mulch, like cedar or even straw, the sunlight will reflect off of it and bugs seem to hate that. It repels them in droves.

So now it comes to testimony. I have never once used any kind of pesticide or herbicide on my flower gardens. I got lucky in that I met an organic gardener early in my own gardening career. She taught me the value of good mulch. So I have used it and have only had the occasional problem with grass encroaching (I don't have much in the way of borders around my plots.). In essence, mulch is one of a gardener's best tools.

Since it's Sunday

I'm going to post an article I wrote recently that provides a solid overview of organic gardening practices and principles.

Organic gardening can be broken into these areas: Soil, Plants and Nurturing.

SOIL
The basic idea of organic gardening is that chemicals that are harmful to the environment and potentially prejudicial to humans and animals are not used. So when you are preparing your soil, you basically just want to keep from using any chemical fertilizers.

Manure, that lovely waste product of equines and bovines, is the best fertilizer out there. What's more, you want to try to get manure from animals that have been fed on alfalfa, rather than on grain such as corn. This just yields better, more balanced manure.

You can get bagged steer manure from your local gardening center usually. When you've gotten some manure, the method of application is simple. Simply spread it over the top of your garden area. If you are doing container gardening, go ahead and put it on the top of the soil in the containers. You are looking for a layer of a couple inches of the manure.

With the manure spread out, you are ready to mix it in. So if your gardening area is small enough, do this by hand. Try to get about six inches down into the soil. What you do is dig down and then turn over each spadeful, breaking up the dirt clumps as you go. This will mix in the manure and loosen up the soil.

If your garden area is big, say larger than 75 square feet, you might want to use a roto-tiller. These are heavy-duty machines, but they save you time and do a good job.

Now you are ready to move to plants.

PLANTS
One of the hallmarks of organic gardening is the art and science of companion planting. This type of planting does three things: maintains soil/nutrient balance, encourages plants to support each other, and repels common garden pests.

First off, you can do as the American Indians did and plant corn, squash and beans together. Beans provide nitrogen and potassium to the soil, which corn needs since it is basically a grass. The tall, strong corn stalks provide poles for the beans to climb. The squash fills in spaces and shades the ground.

Another companion set is the tomato/pepper, onion and marigold set. If you plant your tomatoes and peppers with onions in amongst them and a border of marigolds, most common garden pests will keep away. Spiders will still show up, but these lovelies are wonderful because they eat bugs too!

The only other organic issue regarding your plants and their arrangement is the choice between organic seeds and non-organic. The truth is that organic is in the nurturing, not the seeds. So you can get any kind of plant you want and still raise an organic garden.

This is not to say that some organic seed and plant choices aren't worth it. If you can get heirloom seeds, your plants will actually provide seeds for each year's garden. This will not happen if you get regular old hybrid seeds and plants.

NURTURING
Your goal is to avoid all toxic pesticides and fertilizers. We say toxic because you can actually get mycelium (mushroom)-based pesticides that are in no way harmful to soil and animal (and human!) life.

As for fertilizer during the growing season, don't use Miracle-gro. Get another bag of manure or make a compost pile. Then, when the season is in full swing, spread the compost mulch or the manure around the base of your plants. Then just water as usual. The nutrients from these organic fertilizers will get the job done.

And that's pretty much it for this session of Organic Gardening. One final note about organic gardening is that it pays to be creative. Try new arrangements and experiment with lightweight row cloth to keep wicked pests away from your plants. For example, lightweight, water and sun permeable row cloth will keep quail from your lettuce and peas. So build a little framework and put some row cloth down. This is better than getting some nasty chemical that wards off quail.