MAKE A SKETCH of what you want your food garden to become. Not in one year, but eventually. Cut out illustrations from magazines and newspapers to make a collage of your future food garden and hang it on the wall. Importantly, mark locations for perennial vegetables that stay for years: asparagus, globe artichokes, rhubarb, and perennial spinach. These are quite ornamental in season, so plant some in the front garden or along a boundary or fence.
Next, make a list of things to grow in Styrofoam boxes: mint and sorrel (to prevent roots from spreading), salad greens, radishes, or garlic. Finally, plan where your rotational plots are going to be. You may only plant one plot this year, but the cabbage family and leafy greens, root crops, onions and garlic, peas and beans and sweet corn, and the Solanaceae family of potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers, and chilies all need to be rotated seasonally or annually. So mark six plots in the sun, a 3-foot square each, and don’t panic. If they are not too weedy, you can cover five with layers of cardboard, manure, and thick mulch, so they’ll be ready when you are.
Prepare your first winter plot. If the ground is hard and has sparse growth, dig it once to a depth of one and a half spades. Hard work. Hence, I keep urging new gardeners not to start with more than one or two plots in the first season. If the plot has grown plants other than lawn, you can get away with testing how easily a trowel enters the soil.
Remove all weeds and plant remnants. If you can surround the plot with an edging, it will help to keep mulch in place. Don’t use treated timber because toxic substances will leak into the soil and get into your skin or even the vegetables. The pH of your soil is important. On a scale of 0 to 10, it ought to be around 6.5 to 7 for vegetable production. If you suspect the soil is acid (lower), or if you live on alkaline limestone ground (higher), buy a cheap pH testing kit at the garden center and do the simple one-minute test. For acid soil, adjust by lightly sprinkling lime and raking it through, then wait three weeks before planting. Repeat this every season until the pH reading is at 6.5 to 7. To adjust an alkaline reading, sprinkle sulfur, following instructions on the packet. In both cases, make a note of the date and reading, test again in spring, note date and reading, and adjust soil until it has a pH of 6.5 to 7.
Enrich soil by digging in well-decayed animal manure. If you can’t get this from a farm, garden centers have small bags of aged manure, and a helpful attendant may even lift it into your car trunk. Use this with a few handfuls of B&B.
After a few years of adding organic matter and manure each time a bed is empty, the results in levels and produce will be fantastic.
After the hard yakka and scientific testing, you are suddenly ready to commence planting. What shall it be? See Common Vegetables: How to Grow and Use Them. Buy seedlings or sow seeds directly or in containers with six toilet paper tubes each.
Organic matter is food to a garden. Mulch also becomes soil food. Anything organic that will decay can become compost. Buy a bag of compost to start with, but set up bins to compost all organic matter from kitchen and garden—see Compost Compositions. Enrich home compost with dolomite lime, lucerne pellets, B&B, charcoal, wood ashes (from untreated wood), shredded woody herbs, and a few yarrow leaves as activators. For small conical compost bins, buy a corkscrew-like implement for a few dollars to aerate the contents regularly.
Using ready compost, build up garden soils organically to hold moisture like a sponge, keeping plants alive even in very high temperatures. Plants in such soil, protected by shade cloth during the worst heat waves, will be able to set fruit and produce, whereas without soil improvement, plants may wither despite daily watering. If you can obtain coarse sand, mix it in with compost when you fill a bed to improve drainage.
You are sequestering carbon by composting so many organic materials. Worms move in and work it over, adding fertile castings. It gets better every year. It also sinks every year. If you are filling raised beds, you may despair whether the soil will ever reach the top, and if it does, stay there! After a few years of adding organic matter and manure each time a bed is empty, the results in levels and produce will be fantastic.
Drainage: Add gypsum and coarse sand to heavy soils.
Structure: Add plenty of organic matter, compost, and manures.
Moisture: Mulch to prevent evaporation.
Protection: From extremes of heat, wind, and lashing rain by means of shade cloth, wire or netted cages, racks and trellises.
Trace elements: May be needed by impoverished soils.
An important component of fertile soil that used to come from Nauru is harvested from guano, or bird droppings. That source was used up, and the world will be out of phosphate in a decade or less.
But wait a minute, we all produce phosphate. The word is out: urine is a universally sound and sterile fertilizer for all soils, and a good source of phosphate. Or should we say: the word is out again, for the Yates garden guide of 1914 advised to activate compost with urine and during World War II the Victorian Department of Agriculture recommended a pint of urine diluted with a gallon of water as “a good liquid manure.”6 Although rustic people have peed on their compost heaps and around lemon trees for centuries, one scientist finally made this century’s official statement in 2010 that urine was a reasonable replacement for mined phosphate. Unless you have acres to fertilize, you don’t have to collect urine every day. Think of placing a lidded bucket in the toilet for males on weekends, when people have time to think about what they are doing—in this case, helping you to grow the food they eat. Or dole out a little daily, on the soil, not on the plants, diluted with water 10:1. You will see a difference in the depth of color of vegetables and the leaves of trees before long. In permaculture, this would be a pretty tight closed cycle: eat greens, return yellow pee to the soil, eat greens again.
If you can’t get over the idea to do this yourself and would rather buy greens in the shops, take note: urine, said the scientist, is now being separated out from our other excretions and collected by farmers who put it straight on their crop lands.7 The choice then is: use your own or eat vegetables fertilized with communal donations.
If you mulch your plot well with straw, weeds will be suppressed. Weed seeds blowing in will grow new weeds, but these are easily pulled. Make a virtue of weeding by adding these nutritious green plants to the compost, or lay them flat on the soil, or gradually fill a bin to grow potatoes in next year. In the latter case, alternate layers of weeds with sprinklings of soil and/or straw until the bin is full and no longer sinking. It makes such a nutritious medium to grow food in.
When I had large gardens, I made it a morning exercise to pull a bucket of weeds to feed the chickens, ducks, and geese in their run. It gave them pleasant work to do the sorting and made their eggs’ yolks deep orange. Mixed with their droppings, the dried leftover weeds eventually returned to the garden.
Weeds are not a problem, but an asset. Each weed, depending on its root system, delves into the earth to bring up one nutrient or another that can feed your vegetables. Don’t waste them. Badly infested weedy problem areas can be covered with layers of wet cardboard and newspapers, covered with layers of straw. Leave for a year, and the problem will be gone and a new plot of arable soil created.
The main mistake is to let weeds go to seed. Weeds are weeds because their survival tactic is to carry thousands of seeds. When you see weeds flowering, pull them up. Put pretty flowers in a jar in the kitchen. You’ll come to love your weeds. (Also see What to Do about Weeds.)
THE 2000 CENSUS found that 80 percent of the United States population lives in cities, towns, and villages with millions of backyards. Backyards may have suffered less of the contamination caused by the agricultural revolution, although Bill Mollison, the founder of permaculture, believes the opposite. Gardeners do buy a lot of toxic sprays, but look in any shed, and they sit there mostly unused as many never bother to use them.
There are still soil secrets in suburbia. Microorganisms do have a life in backyards. Without microorganisms in the soil, plants cannot take up nutrients and good soil structure is not maintained. Compost and mulch add to soil structure, keep soil moist, protect from UV rays, and so help microorganisms to work. Seasonal small applications of calcium-containing lime help if the soil is acidic. Rather than turning soil over, put on layers of manure, compost, and mulch. Don’t walk on garden plots.
Some plains’ soils are very ancient, while the Hawaiian Islands have the youngest soils, which are still being formed and added to. Land-hungry Europeans are a relatively recent addition to North America’s ecosystems. Forests were cut, rivers were tapped for the irrigation of export crops, and super-phosphate was imported to whip tired land into productivity. Wind and water erosion became rife; salinization administered the death knell.
At this point in time, vast stretches of land have been subjected to various degrees of industrial pollution and may harbor accumulations of agricultural chemicals. Billions of tons of topsoil are eroding annually. Yet, most arable land grows crops for export. Some small farms grow excellent food for local markets and restaurants, but much of the food North Americans eat is produced hydroponically in tunnels or is imported from thousands of miles away. It’s time to consider what’s left.
What remains apart from the land is what was brought to the continent: domestic animals and millions of people. Both produce more manure than this continent saw for millennia. There are decreasing amounts of hay and straw from introduced crops. There are mountains of old newspapers instead of the forests we once enjoyed. There are still leaves for sweeping up and a lot of other vegetative remnants. What can be done with these if one doesn’t have a composting toilet yet?
I wish I’d been paid ten dollars for every person who told me: “Oh, you can’t grow anything in my soil/your soil/that soil, it’s no good!” Wholesale condemnation of soil is just an excuse to get out of gardening. Soil can be made by “industry and art,” as the Shakers said. The chapters on compost (see here) and mulch (see here) tell you how. The first year you have a vegetable plot, you may resort to buying bags of potting soil to start plants off, but in the second year, you’ll have your own compost.
Before asphalt roads and refrigerated transport brought food to faraway places, the people of the frontier and indigenous peoples of the Southwest and Great Plains grew vegetables and fruits in what soils they had, adding wood-fire ashes and animal manure and watering with pure soapy washing water. Now, they, too, can choose from seven long-life vegetables and pay a dollar for an orange.
My forest garden’s subsoil in the Adelaide Hills was tens of thousands of years old, studded with ancient rocks releasing prehistoric smells. We pick-axed planting holes to fill with potting soil, mulching the surface. We pruned native shrubs to bulk up compost and backfilled. Plants did not curl up stunted when roots filled the holes, but took off as if they’d hit the jackpot! This happened in the second or third year. The secret was good drainage due to all those rocks and minerals unlocked by moisture and mulch. We used manures and compost, but minimal fertilizers.
In our alluvial clay garden, we could grow anything as long as animal manures, compost, and mulches kept the top from drying out to a hardpan surface. We used gypsum and mulch on “concrete” plots. Had the clay been stickier, we would have had to double dig—once to work in organic material, but mostly it responded to top dressing. Holes for fruit trees received compost and gypsum. The only snag with clay soils is that they must be made to drain well. Compost mixed with gravel can improve drainage.
Our ridge garden seemed to have easy soil, but nothing grew beyond adolescence due to a pH of 4.3 which is very acidic (7 being neutral). This soil required lime, dolomite, and gypsum as there was hardpan clay underlying the sandy soil at a depth of 15 inches. After repeat applications of compost, manure, and mulch, vegetables grew to edible size. This soil, looking easy on the surface, turned out the hardest to raise vegetables on, although, by the third summer, we had small amounts of broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, garlic, kale, lettuce, onions, pumpkin, chard, spinach, squash, tomatoes, zucchinis, and herbs.
Do test your soil for pH and chemical makeup.
Do pH test your soil—simple test kits are available from garden centers. Adjust acidic soil with lime. If your soil is too alkaline—above 7—adjust with a mulch of acidic material, dust with sulfur, or sprinkle with 1 cup of vinegar per bucket of water.
The Obamas’ organic White House garden, widely publicized when begun in spring 2009, made news for a different reason a few months later, when it came to light that the soil had tested positive for lead. Despite initial alarm, the initial lead level of 93 parts per million (p.p.m.) was well below the EPA danger level of 400 p.p.m. The good news is that the very things done to adjust the soil’s pH and improve its fertility—such as adding lime, green sand, and crab meal—also helped reduce the lead levels to 14 p.p.m. The example set by the White House garden is a good one in more ways than one. Not only should more people be growing their own food organically at home, but before doing so, it is important to do pollutant testing in addition to pH tests if you live in an area that has been inhabited by humans for any length of time. The story is equally valuable for demonstrating that the very organic and mineral soil supplements that are good for plants are just as good at helping to make soil healthier for all living things.
So, if you set out to make an urban or suburban garden and your soil tests positive for heavy metals or other pollutants, don’t throw up your hands in despair. Take a leaf from the Obamas’ book (or garden) and set about improving your soil today, test again, and commit yourself to its continued improvement over the years.
If your soil grows a bounty of different weeds, it is probably fertile and well drained. Weeds protect soil from baking in sunlight and many have deep roots that aerate the soil, while decaying weeds leave a beneficial layer of humus. Weed-supporting soil is often crumbly and friable; just keep weeds down with mulch where you plant vegetables.
If you are starting out new on rocky soil, you’ll have good drainage. Plant trees whose roots can find their way deep down to where the nutrients are. Within two years, they will form a windbreak for your food garden and provide leaves for compost.
If your soil is totally bare, the question is: why does nothing grow here? Has the soil been chemically contaminated? Try to find out your plot’s history. Have cars driven up and down here, or leaking lawnmowers? Stick a spade or fork into the soil. Can it be rehabilitated by forking, adding gypsum to break it up, a wetting agent to make it take up water, or digging in compost, and mulching? Most probably. One instructor with whom I taught a vegetable-growing course grew carrots in his driveway!
Soils range from pure clay to pure sand. Many gardens have something in between, a loam of sorts. Experiment with pots containing the same soil, adjusting the pH in one, adding gypsum to another, fertilizer to a third, all three in a fourth, then grow lettuces in all pots and see what does best.
You can easily prepare one or two square plots on a weekend morning. Have a soup-and-sandwich Saturday to free up time to bake a soil cake in the garden! During the week pick up:
◆ a bag of mushroom or other compost.
◆ a bag of organic potting soil.
◆ a bale or pack of straw.
◆ a bag of animal manure. (Available from garden centers. Horse manure from roadside paddocks where kids bag it up for pocket money is probably safer than from racing stables, as hobby horses are less full of antibiotics. Chop manure with a spade before spreading.)
◆ a small bag of gypsum for clay soil.
◆ a tiny bag of lime for acidic soil.
◆ organic fertilizer pellets or liquid seaweed fertilizer.
Many of these are available in small packages you can sit on the backseat, cradle in your arms, or put in your shopping cart.
That was hard work and quite an outlay of money, but you’ll get it back with interest. Some supplies will last years. If unable to lift bales and bags, ask the garden center people to deliver, or lift them into the trunk of your car—then ask a neighbor to help you unload. Open a bag of manure inside the trunk and spade the contents into buckets. Wear garden gloves and do the same with the potting soil, gypsum, and fertilizer. Borrow a wheelbarrow and sweep up a heap of fallen leaves or grass clippings. Collect seeds and/or seedlings.
From here on, it is as easy as making a layered no-cooking cake!
First, aerate the soil by pushing a garden fork in many places and wiggling it. Pull out any clumps of weeds and rake in gypsum, following directions on the packet. Add lime if acidic. Rake in chopped manure to compost in place.
Lucerne, pea straw, or wheat straw are good in descending order, as are the prices. Baled straw usually peels off in “biscuits.” Cover your plot entirely with straw biscuits. If tightly packed, tease them out and fluff them up. Most gardeners settle for pea straw—it turns into beautiful soil.
Water well to settle the “cake.”
Leave for three weeks if you limed. Draw a planting plan, start off seedlings, and remove weeds around the plot while waiting. Read other relevant chapters.
Then, open pockets in the straw and fill with potting soil and water. This is easiest on the junctions where biscuits meet, but for small plants, make more pockets by pulling straw apart. Plant seedlings, sprinkle organic fertilizer, spray with diluted seaweed, and water in well. When planting seeds, sprinkle fertilizer after plants emerge.
All done! Water daily. No weeds. Soon, you’ll eat!
If you have pure sand that runs through your fingers, it may not retain water and could be magnesium deficient, causing yellowing of leaves. Add magnesium by mixing a spoon of Epsom salts in a bucket of water. To make the soil hold water, make a thickly layered plot on top of the sandy soil. Hold layers in with rows of half-buried, water-filled plastic bottles, planks, or railroad sleepers. If you can obtain a bucket of clay, make a clay slurry (one spade to a bucket of water, stir well, and pour onto raked sandy soil). Do this several times to increase water retention. Put down layers of wet newspaper over animal manure to attract earthworms, and layers of straw in which you will make pockets for potting soil to plant in. Keep mulching as the season progresses and add all the organic matter you can find: leaves, seaweed, broadleaved weeds (without seeds), seedless grass clippings, small twigs.
Both the pure clay gardener and the pure sand gardener have to start a compost heap quick-smart, for these soils need more organic matter than others. Prune and chop anything growing in your garden that will benefit from a haircut: daisies, low acacia branches, ornamental shrubs. Mix with kitchen scraps, leaves, lawn clippings, and manure.
On a nice loam, you still need compost to maintain fertility. So after planting your first square, read Compost Compositions. Start a compost heap now to be ready the following season. Get into the rhythm of the seasons, those realms they write music about.
SOIL ENRICHED by organic matter is the foundation of a healthy food garden that produces vegetables and fruits of high nutritional content. Compost gives plants the opportunity to graze about with their roots for what they need, just like chickens are healthier when able to scratch around an orchard for grass, worms, and herbs than when they are fed a scientific formula.
The Shaker community in America, where the renowned Shaker furniture was produced, was almost totally self-sufficient. Shaker compost—now there’s a concept worth exploring—was made from vegetable refuse and herb stalks with guano, gypsum, seaweed, fish waste, pond mud, and ground-up bones. Shaker gardeners added this compost with animal manure to their shallow, rocky soil. Herb plots received as much as vegetables and fruit trees. Their recipe—moderated by leaving out salt and adding extras—goes somewhat like this:
◆ One part mineral substances: wood ash, lime, sand or clay, gypsum or dolomite.
◆ Five parts organic matter: weeds, straw, leaves, roots, stalks, thin bark, sawdust (from untreated wood).
◆ Six parts animal manures (animal manures should be composted where possible before use to prevent E. coli and other bacteria proliferating).
◆ For a 3-foot-square plot, you can stir this up in a bucket! Decide whether your soil needs sand, clay, or neither. Don’t overdo the sawdust, and balance it with a handful of lime.
◆ Having acres of food gardens, the Shakers collected organic matter all year, piling it in layers to compost. When matured, they spread the compost at the rate of forty oxcarts per acre, and became the best food gardeners in 19th-century America.
Compost is new earth made from old organic matter, including kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, ornamental garden prunings, leaves, twigs, and anything organic that is locally available. It can really end up looking like that beautiful black stuff you see on TV. But even before it looks glamorous, it will be useful.
There are a number of ways to make compost. Choose the one that gives you the least pain and most pleasure. Remember everything that is or was alive, and is subject to decay, will convert to compost. But don’t add meat scraps and bones into your garden compost as they attract vermin, although you can pulverize the bones. Depending on matter and method, you should have compost in a few weeks, months, or years.
Making compost at dawn.
Not everyone agrees. Hot composting destroys pathogens. Cool composting is now said to be better as the “cooking” process uses up lots of nitrogen and carbon. No doubt the last word is still to be spoken.
The gentlest composting is done in bins. Keep two composting bins behind the shed and as you fill up the second, the first will be composting. Or if yours is a small operation, use two plastic laundry baskets lined with wet newspaper and covered with doormats held down by a brick (this may not be critter-proof!). Or, buy a tumbling bin on legs and turn it twice a day. You will need a covered storage bin for scraps while the bin is filled to capacity yet still composting. In the bins, the material should be mainly kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, soft weeds, leaves, vegetable matter, and soft prunings.
Put hard prunings in a heap at the back of the yard and don’t look for a year—they will compost eventually. Gardeners working on a larger scale, or people with lots of ornamental garden prunings, will profit by building a composting area of pea straw bales. Throw it all in, as shredded as possible. When it’s time to turn or take the compost out, simply remove one bale. Bales attract earthworms, which live underneath until the compost has cooled enough for them to work it, lacing the stuff with their castings.
Build a small compost heap using a round circle of chicken wire, 3 feet in diameter, pinned down with stakes. Line it with layers of wet newspaper and throw in organic matter. Sprinkle occasional handfuls of lime, straw, and manure into the mix and water regularly. When the bin is full (it sinks constantly, so this may test your patience!), cover it with a piece of old carpet and set up another wire bin. When that is full, the first bin will have useable compost.
There are those who do and those who don’t, but turning speeds up the process. Build two adjoining square bins from corrugated iron or planks, no less than a cubic yard each, for it is mass that produces enough heat to make hot composting work and break down plant pathogens and weed seeds. In a wet climate, build bins with slats for air circulation.
If you have space, build three, four, or five bins in a row by extending the back wall. The extra bins allow you to turn compost a second time from Bin 2 into Bin 3, to obtain that friable black and gold of TV pictures. Bin 4 can be a long-term composter for tough stuff such as wood thicker than your thumb, thorny rose prunings, and shredded paper. A year later, it will be compost without any turning at all. Bin 5 is for bad weeds, things you never want to see in the garden again. Leave them composting for a small eternity, or “cook” them in plastic bags.
Collect and spread where you will mow:
◆ prunings from the ornamental garden.
◆ weeds, except bad ones likely to regrow from pieces.
◆ leaves.
◆ very thin bark.
◆ a bag of animal manure.
◆ a small bag of lime (you only need handfuls).
◆ other organic matter, like spoiled hay.
◆ fallen branches no thicker than your finger.
If you like, add onion material, citrus peel, nut husks, rhubarb and elderberry leaves, tea leaves, and coffee grounds. Spread shredded paper and a layer of wet newspaper in the bottom of a bin.
Use two shredded yarrow leaves as a compost starter. There are commercial compost starters if you don’t grow yarrow, or a cheap starter is urine, diluted with water and sprayed between layers—magic stuff. Or mow the lawn first—the clippings can also be used. Finally, make sure the mower’s blades are sharp. Wear goggles, earplugs, and steel-toed boots!
Spread out the collected material and mix with a garden fork. If it’s too wet, let it dry off. Spread out part of the material and mow across it several times until it is roughly shredded. It doesn’t matter if there are small sticks in the mix, as they will break down, if not in the heap then later it will compost in place.
To build a heap, spade in an 8-inch layer of shredded matter, a handful of lime, a shovel of manure, hay, or straw, and add a compost starter. A dry heap won’t compost fast, so water as you build. When the heap is finished, water the top long and hard, then cover with carpet (or other porous material), and wet that also. The heap should start “cooking” within hours.
To check whether the heap is brewing, lift up the carpet on day three, poke a hole in the top, and watch steam rising! Cover up and water twice a week. When the heat subsides, worms will move in and accelerate the process. After one month, turn the heap with a garden fork. From Bin 2 or 3 it can be returned to garden plots. Your compost could be ready one month after turning, depending on your climate and what went in. If a handful looks like soil—albeit full of twigs and on the rough side—fill a wheelbarrow and spread it between the vegetables, worms and all. It will compost further on the plot. If you want finer compost, turn it into Bin 3.
Should you have gone beyond a one-square food garden, you’ll have spent vegetable plants by summer’s end. After feeding your feathered flock and worm farm with greens, tops, and fallen fruit, and after the backyard bins are full, you may still have heaps of decaying organic matter to clear away. Then do it in bed, as follows.
In autumn, clear one plot to be a composting bed and spread manure. On this, throw excess chard, zucchini leaves, pumpkin vines, vegetables gone to seed, and anything else that is reasonably soft. Shred big cabbage trunks first. When the bed is covered with 12 inches of organic matter, sprinkle with two shredded yarrow leaves and cover with 4 inches of compost, straw, or layers of wet newspaper held down with stones. When watering food plots, also water this bed.
Depending on the weather, the composting bed will be ready to grow cabbages or cauliflowers by late winter. Remove skeleton stalks to composting area. Some partly-decayed matter will continue to compost over time. You can fork the bed over or plant straight into the compost cover. If you used newspapers, peel these off carefully, guiding worms back to the soil, and place decaying newspaper in your compost bin or worm farm.
Commercial composters use a lot of cardboard and shredded office paper, but in backyard compost, I find these a nuisance. You have to shred it fine and disperse it so it doesn’t form lumps, and even then, paper often shows up in the final compost as just what it is. Use it underneath compost instead.
Some seeds survive the composting process and, once back on the plot, will surprise you with vigorous seedlings. If they are vegetables, leave these where they are, they will turn out the best!
Scott Nearing, inspiration for the Good Life series of books written with partner Helen Nearing, built eight compost bins to grade material according to hardness. The hardest bin would not be used for several years, but eventually even thick branches decomposed.
Harvest fallen debris from your trees—leaves and twigs will compost, branches can become fire wood, edgings, or brush fencing or be put in long-term compost. Nothing need go to waste; nothing should be burned.
Worm farms can range from a size you can put on the balcony to vast structures housing zillions of the critters—city councils with foresight feed the district’s organic rubbish into enormous worm troughs and sell the compost back to the public.
The balcony-size farm is a clever set of plastic trays that fit on top of each other and hold a worm population, kitchen scraps, and weeds. The bottom tray with tap drains off the worm juice. The sets are rodent-proof. This is the ideal composting system if you live in an apartment or condominium and should produce enough castings and worm juice to keep several boxes with food plants in optimum health. Larger sizes are available for gardens.
Worm farms come with instruction booklets listing the addresses of where to buy composting worms (epigeic, smooth, several varieties), which apparently do like living in small apartments and will procreate in plastic trays. There is some controversy about whether composting worms will ever thrive in garden soil as earthworms do. They will, but only in the top layers where they compost leaves and sticks and become bird food. The earthworms that turn over deep soils are anecic worms, which have a red band around their bodies. Cardboard boxes with a thousand worms that will breed in the box are recommended for worm farms. If your worms don’t thrive despite regular feeding, seek advice from the supplier.
Worm juice is liquid fertilizer, a fine boost to young vegetables. Tap it regularly and dilute with water 1:10 before spraying on plants. The worms’ main product is castings, which is pure compost. When this matures, pick out any tardy worms and surprise your seedlings and vegetables.
Old bathtubs are popular as worm farms, with a wooden cover and old carpet to keep the worms cool. Collect the juice by placing a tray under the plughole, plunging your hand in the mass and pulling the plug.
Always place worm farms in the shade and cover with wet carpet, felt, or towels. In winter, a small farm may do better under cover, but if you put it in the shed, don’t forget to bring food. The worms will let you go on holiday for up to a month if you leave them a big feed. Give them cores, stems, and peelings, cut fine like you would for kids, as well as old manure, tea leaves, tea bags, coffee grounds, eggshells, fallen fruit, shredded wet cardboard, and newspaper, old vegetables, and mixed weeds. On special occasions, for instance when a worm has a significant birthday, throw a few lettuce leaves their way. They love rotten apples.
Two compost bins are sufficient to recycle all vegetable and fruit remains. If worms are active, a bin can mature for six months, with compost spread each spring and autumn.
THE GIVING GARDEN has to be a sustainable garden, because above all, it is the seed base for the future. The seeds nature drops, the ones the birds drop in, and the seeds we gather, dry, and store, ensure that plant-friendly micro-climates continue as long as we are here to gather, maintain, and sow, and to refrain from interfering too much.
The inventors of the commercial seed packet were the American Shaker gardeners, adding value to their products. Growing vegetables from seed is extremely economical, especially with open-pollinated seed, as the resulting plants produce seed true to type to save and plant again. These well-tried heirloom and heritage varieties, kept going by farmers and gardeners since the beginning of time, produce seed reliably.
Why is this so desirable? Just as you appreciate the taste and quality of homegrown vegetables, so you will appreciate the taste and quality of heirloom vegetables. Some may not produce as prolifically as hybrids whereas others may outperform those. Grow a variety of vegetables, rather than overproducing a few.
An heirloom is something precious passed down through the generations. In my understanding, an heirloom vegetable is from before the time of widespread commercial genetic engineering, like seed my grandfather grew because his grandfather told him it was dependable.
The word “heritage” could imply that something has inherited qualities or characteristics. That may apply to my great-great-grandfather’s cabbage seeds, but with a bit of word wrenching it could also be claimed for a modern seed emerging from a GE laboratory, as ultimately its ancestor is also ancient seed. After all, everything has qualities and characteristics that come from somewhere, no matter what they have been turned into.
There was a time when large seed companies feared small seed companies offering open-pollinated, organically grown seed of common as well as unusual heirloom and heritage vegetables, herbs, flowers, and trees. There are several such small seed companies now, as well as the Seed Savers Exchange, that offer this type of seed. If you like buying from catalogs, take the time to ponder hundreds of varieties and send away for a few (check Useful Addresses or organic gardening magazines carrying advertisements from sellers of seeds, roots, and bulbs).
Commercial seeds in shops are increasingly based on fewer varieties, may be genetically modified, and are often impregnated with toxic substances to ensure shelf life. Most are hybrids, bred by companies for improved size, production, and pest resistance. Hybrids may grow fast but do not usually produce viable seed, or if they do, it may not breed true to type (i.e., the hybrid type it grew from), or its offspring may deteriorate after a few seasons. Lack of quality control can occur under the biggest labels. A representative of a large seed company once tried to convince me that their packet of undersized and broken fava bean seeds would still grow good beans! Not for my money. Some commercial seeds don’t germinate at all, which could be the fault of retail outlets. Never buy seed from a counter in the sun, for it will be cooked.
The Seed Savers Exchange is an amazing non-profit volunteer foundation that, since 1975, has collected in a seed bank as many varieties of open-pollinated vegetable, herb, and fruit seeds as its members can find, including heirlooms from immigrant gardeners. Its newsletter offers seeds of unheard of vegetables. Annually, SSE prints a catalog of seeds offered by members from which subscribers can buy old heirloom varieties. Members grow these seeds on and some donate supplies back to the seed bank. The SSE label “Give Peas a Chance” claims that whereas people once planted sixty-five varieties of peas, now they choose from less than ten. Their “Let Lettuce Be” sticker encourages gardeners to let lettuce go to seed, let seed fall, rake it in, and watch new lettuces come up. The Seed Savers Exchange founders have also published Seed to Seed, the essential seed saver’s handbook.
In America, the Seed Savers Exchange has collected 18,000 vegetable varieties grown across the country. Such networks are of crucial importance in preserving global food resources. A tragic story of seed-saving dedication comes from St. Petersburg in Russia. During the Second World War, German forces besieged the city (then Leningrad), and the population was starving. The Soviet Union’s seed bank was located in the city, protecting a store of containers preserving the seed of many varieties of grains, oats, peas, beans, and other food plants. These could have provided food for many people. But the seed bank personnel were so dedicated to their task that not a grain or bean was missing by the end of the war, even though some of the guardians died of starvation themselves. They believed the seed bank was so important to the future of all Russians that they laid down their lives to protect it. Director Nikola Ivanovich Vavilov, who founded that seed bank to eliminate hunger from the world, died of starvation in one of Stalin’s prisons, suspected of espionage. He probably corresponded with seed savers abroad. The Vavilov Institute in St. Petersburg still maintains a seed bank despite dire economic conditions.
While out shopping for other supplies, keep an eye peeled for roots in Asian groceries. Unless your knowledge of Asian horticulture is academic, buy good-looking roots, cook half to see whether you like them, then plant the rest. Some rot, some die, but some may grow.
Potato onions can still be found in farmers’ markets. Pounce on them, propagate, and share them with friends to grow on, as they are quite rare. Look for slim bunching onions, Egyptian onions that produce tiny pickling bulbs at the top instead of underground, and other old onion varieties. Make space for these hardy varieties so you’ll always have onion material for the pot, be it tops or bottoms.
Buy lemongrass with a bit of root left and plant in a warm spot. Look for other vegetables to grow on. Just as potato pieces with an “eye” will grow a plant producing potatoes, so will sweet potato if grown in a warm place. Experiment.
Spices are bought more economically in Asian and Middle Eastern groceries. Lay in a store of “whole” spices, which keep their aromas better: aniseed, cardamom, coriander, caraway, cumin, fennel, fenugreek, mustard. Keep the jars in a dark cupboard to keep seeds viable for growing. You can enhance all you bake or cook with spices. You are now ready to sow some spice companions such as dill, cumin, and cilantro. Pick the green leaves of spice plants to create a gourmet feast.
Asian vegetable seeds can be found in most Asian supermarkets. Some packets have English text, but for others, you’d better brush up your Mandarin and Japanese. Plant some seeds in spring and again in autumn to find out which season they prefer. Experiment using the pictures on the packets. Gourds, squash, and beans are mostly summer vegetables, but many leafy greens like cooler seasons.
Asian vegetables still have good resistance against many North American pests and diseases, with the exception of the greenish-white Chinese cabbage, which gets attacked by snails, slugs, cabbage moth, and aphids to the point where you don’t want to deal with it in the kitchen. Most Asian vegetables presently available are the products of forty centuries of companion-growing horticulture, mostly in China, and the Chinese were too hungry and too practical to waste time on vegetables that could not survive prevailing conditions.
The right depth is generally held to be the thickness of the seed, but sow beans two to three times their own thickness. Rake very fine seed through the top of the soil. A very loose straw cover provides protection. Use a fine nozzle or mist to water seeds.
There are systems to guide gardeners to plant seeds on beneficial days.
Planting by the Moon is an ancient method based on the notion that when the moon is waxing, it draws new seedlings toward its light, and when it’s waning, root growth takes place. Fruiting and leafy plants are sown in the last quarter, beans and peas three days before full moon, and root crops in the middle of the first quarter. That’s a rough guide, but you can buy moon-planting charts, and some magazines print monthly directions.
Biodynamic Planting Calendar: If you like order in your life, then the biodynamic planting calendar is for you. Biodynamics was Rudolf Steiner’s answer to feng shui. This is where every possible function of plants and trees guided by the moon and stars is worked out annually by a very knowledgeable person, so the calendar tells you every morning just what you can and can’t do in the garden. This presumes you are available for horticultural work at any time, so it works best for full-time farmers.
If through necessity you are a weekend gardener, you can probably manage to keep to the rough moon-planting scheme. If your gardening has to be done whenever life allows you a few moments, plant and harvest to your heart’s content when you can. Nature always strives for the light, always prefers growth, and ever renews itself, so you will have marvelous successes just the same, even if a little slower. You can blame the few fiascos on the weather. Even biodynamic and moon gardeners find excuses.
Soak hard-coated seeds such as beans in water with a few drops of LS before sowing. As seeds germinate, apply LS every few days. Seedlings can go into the ground when the first root tip comes out of the bottom of a toilet paper tube, or a seedling is about 3 inches high with at least four leaves.
Seeds raised outdoors, protected from wind and sun and raised up from the ground, will be hardy. But as a lot of summer crops need five to six months of warm weather to mature, an earlier start may necessitate starting seedlings indoors. This avoids rodent damage, too. Seeds do not need much light to germinate, so you can start containers off in shed or cellar, moving them to windows when two leaves have appeared.
Bottom Heat: Containers set on a small electrically warmed bottom-heat mat will have improved germination rates. For a one-square plot, it may not be worth the outlay.
A Cold Frame warmed by the sun gives seedlings an early start (see The Seasons).
An Old-fashioned Hot Frame is fun to make. Start late winter and find a glass window or door to place on top. In a sunny, sheltered place, mark out a frame with four bales of straw, or make a frame with planks or bricks to fit under the glass cover. Dig out the floor area to a depth of 10 to 12 inches and fill with animal manure, straw, and grass clippings. Water in well and spread the soil on top. Place the glass across the frame. Give it a week to heat up, keeping it moist. Then half submerge pots with seedlings or seeds into the soil. Ventilate as you do for the cold frame.
Weaning: When seedlings have at least four leaves, wean them from the protected environment through “hardening off.” Place seedlings outside on nice days and back in the frame at night until they appear robust enough to go into the ground when the weather is fine.
Alternate rows of lettuce and beets with carrots seeded under the straw.
A number of things can upset your plans. “Damping off,” causing seedlings to rot, occurs in containers when the soil is too wet or air doesn’t circulate. After a particularly hard winter, the wildlife may be so hungry that whatever you sow they dig up and devour! Resort to timing and hardware until it becomes routine. Once you master seed raising, you will only buy shop containers as an exception. Water seedlings with weak LS solution twice a week.
Preventing Transplant Shock: The roots of many seedlings get transplant shock when taken out of a container and put in a hole in the ground. This may set them back weeks. No growth occurs; sometimes death follows. The way to avoid this is to grow seedlings in biodegradable toilet paper tubes (see here) so that most of the roots remain protected when the tube is planted in open ground. Transplant shock also occurs when directly sown seedlings are thinned out. Pulling them up by the roots exposes neighboring seedlings and these may die. Better to let them grow to toddler size before pulling the bigger ones.
Row Covers: By covering a row of early seedlings while the soil is still cold, you help them get into gear in their cozy tunnel. Make your own covers by bending reinforcing or chicken wire in a V- or U-shape and covering with transparent plastic punched with breathing holes, shade cloth, or hospital gowns—see Hardware in the Food Garden.
Hardy Vegetables can be raised in the open. You can’t raise pumpkins in winter, as they expire on cold nights, as do tomatoes, beans, melons, and cucumbers. But the cabbage cousins are hardy customers. Cabbage, cauliflower, Brassica juncea and other mustards, broccoli, brussels sprouts, bok choy, kale, tatsoi, and Chinese cabbage can all be sown in open ground in autumn and mild winters, growing on into spring. If your winter is not mild, sow Asian greens in open ground in late winter and start broccoli, cabbages, and cauliflowers off in the cold frame at the same time. A small Percy’s portable plastic roof also helps germination—see Hardware in the Food Garden.
A Seed-Raising Table is useful when temperatures rise and the cold frame starts toasting seedlings. I found a waist-high small workshop bench measuring 1 × 2 feet. Around the edges, I placed water-filled plastic bottles in a metal filing system frame I just happened to have. Seed containers sit inside this instant mini-hothouse open to the air, but an old fridge grid with shade cloth attached to it lies across the top to keep birds out. This table holds six containers containing thirty-six seedlings. By always keeping the space occupied, it provides plenty of well-formed seedlings grown to the stage where they can hold their own in the big world. These need no “hardening off.”
Continuous Sowings: Raise single containers of six beans from October to January for a continuous supply. Also raise back-up pumpkin and squash seedlings, as in some years the weather destroys early ones in the ground. In late summer, start raising autumn vegetables.
Toilet Paper Tubes: Raise seedlings in toilet paper tubes to avoid root disturbance when planting out. This is not necessary for vegetables that are best sown directly into the ground, like root vegetables and sprawling greens such as chard, spinach, Asian greens, mustard, arugula, and the like. But toilet paper tubes can prevent mishaps with beans, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbages, cauliflower, corn, cucumbers, melons, peas, pumpkins, and tomatoes. If wildlife digs up your directly planted sweet corn seeds, re-seed in toilet paper tubes and place in seed-raising mini-hothouse as in A Seed-Raising Table, above.
Collect toilet paper tubes in a cloth bag hung in the bathroom. Start saving today. Six rolls fit into a margarine container and four in a seedling container, so you need forty to sixty rolls to sow ten varieties of four to six plants each. Punch drainage holes in margarine containers. Fill rolls with potting soil and tamp the container a few times to compact soil, then fill tubes to the top. Push in one seed per roll, add a nametag, and put in the cold frame, hot frame, or on the seed-raising table, depending on the time of year.
The advantage of tubes is that they double or triple the height of a container, allowing strong root growth. Often the roots hang out of the tube when seedlings are big enough to go into the ground. At this stage, the plants don’t seem to suffer the brief exposure of root ends during transplanting. Dig a deep, narrow hole and half-fill it with water. Plant the tube, push it down a little, and tuck in firmly with soil. These plants grow much better than seedlings that have to be torn apart from a container or have bunched roots from lack of space. The cardboard tube disintegrates to become part of the soil.
Brassica and bean seedlings raised in toilet paper tubes in a sunroom. The bowl contains six small baskets with six rolls each, enough to fill one Magic Square. The beans are ready to be planted out.
FRUIT TREES are as sensitive to climate as vegetables but have to cope with more wind, rain, and scorching sun, while providing shelter for lower plants. They may dry out at the wrong time when fruit is developing, have all their fruit blown off when half ripe, or attract possums and fruit bats, bugs, and diseases. So for the beginning food gardener, fruit trees should be of the hardy, easy-care type.
Easy-care fruit trees that leave you time to be an intensive food gardener as well are those still close to the wild. In my garden, the very first fruit in spring is the loquat. If you have heard that loquats are all pips and not worth bothering about, you haven’t tasted loquats from a tree that receives manure in autumn and a pruning after harvest. After winter rains, the fruit is plump and sweet and can be harvested for two months as bunches ripen gradually.
By then we are into early stone fruits: apricots, nectarines, peaches, plums. Mulberries and bush berries follow. Near summer’s end, pears and apples ripen. The home fruit harvest ends with grapes and quinces in autumn. Because quinces keep so well, their fragrance perfumes the kitchen until January. My small espaliered orchard together with some old inherited fruit trees provided fruit three-quarters of the year, some of which was preserved. Lemon trees carry fruit virtually all year, while other citrus species fruit for extended periods to ripen in winter, as do persimmons.
Do keep in mind that even if a fruit tree is bred for optimum production, some revert to the natural system of carrying only a few fruit the year after a bumper crop. Don’t expect big crops every year from each tree. Plant a mix of early and late fruit, feed them all spring and autumn, and you will be richly rewarded. Stone-fruit trees often bear from their second year, others may take a little longer. Quinces and loquats are quick to bear, and berry bushes fruit in their first year.
The Shakers, renowned for their food-growing success, planted fruit trees in very large holes filled with rubble for drainage, old broken-down manure, and compost. They tamped down the earth and put fences around the trees. They had magnificent fruit harvests.
Espalier is a system of training young fruit trees on wires. Run wires north-south if possible, to gain light and fruit on both sides. It is not advisable to espalier on fences as the fruit may get too hot and not get ventilated. Set up poles at either end, with strainers, and run four or five horizontal wires at 12-inch intervals. Don’t place wires higher than you can comfortably reach. Plant trees 2 to 3 yards apart in a 10- to 15-yard row. If you have less space, erect four posts with wires in a rectangle of 6 to 12 feet and plant six fruit trees around it. Plant the rectangle full of companion herbs (see Part Four) to help the fruit trees. This arrangement is easy to net.
As each tree grows up, let the leader (the main stem) grow, bending branches to left and right on the first and second wires, and attach with pruning tape or pantyhose strips, which expand with growth (wire ties and string will cut into branches as they thicken). Prune off superfluous branches. In the next growing season, let two branches reach the third wire and so forth until all wires are occupied and the leader has also been espaliered. In summer, the tree looks like a curtain of leaves and fruit. Prune summer and winter to retain this shape. Espaliered trees fruit more heavily because they are restricted from putting effort into lots of branches.
An espalier.
Netting fruit trees is necessary if you want to eat the fruit yourself. Use appropriate wildlife-safe netting. The birds may get some fruit before you have netted and peck fruit pressing against the netting. Espaliered trees are easy to protect from birds. Throw a long length of netting over the wires, pull down and away on either side, and pin to the ground with bricks to prevent birds crawling underneath.
For freestanding trees, you need one big square net per tree. Tie the net underneath the tree, for birds will try anything to get in. Knitted nets can be used for years with a little repair. Nets do double duty by protecting first the early-fruiting trees, then the late-ripening ones. Once you get serious about netting, you will work out your own system. The price of posts, wires, trees, and netting, may be what you pay for shop fruit, but your fruit is sweet, organic, and fresh, and in following years, you will buy nothing but a bag of manure.
Never water fruit trees with overhead sprinklers; instead lay out drip irrigation with a timer. Mulch trees to reduce evaporation and protect roots. During dry summers, water once a week for a set time. If you should be so lucky that it rains for an hour once a week where you live, the trees will do with that.
The spraying of fruit trees against pests and disease is generally unnecessary in a small mixed orchard situated in an organic mixed garden with vegetables, herbs, flowers, shrubberies, and hedges. This environment helps maintain fruit trees in good health, attracting birds to control insects and disease-bearing grubs.
Old fruit trees that do not look well need a good pruning and thinning out in winter. Remove grass around the trunk for more than a 3-foot circumference and under-plant with feverfew, tansy, and yarrow. Spread a load of manure and mulch under the tree’s drip line (the perimeter of the branches), and see what happens in spring.
Now turn to the List of Easy-Care Fruit Trees and Berries in Part Four for more detailed descriptions.
JUST AS with humans, some plants retard each other’s development while others flourish in each other’s company. Companion planting and intercropping is a science born from millennia of observation by food growers. The oldest known example is from Mexico where, some eight millennia ago, the Aztecs grew corn, beans, and pumpkin or squash together.
Climbing peas under-planted with French and red chard, bordered by mignonette and oakleaf lettuces. Siberian kale near the bee bath.
The main reasons for intercropping and companion planting are to group together those plants that chemically enhance each other’s growth, stimulate fruit-set, protect each other from predators, prefer similar conditions, and provide or seek shade. Plant shallow-rooted lettuce between deep-rooted carrots and beets that find nutrients further down and provide shade when planted south of lettuce. Tomatoes stay healthy with chemicals exuded by mustard plants.
Companion plants are listed in the List of Common Vegetables, but should you plan to expand your food gardening, buy a book on companion planting. Many of the companions listed I observed in my own food gardens. It was a surprise to see a tomato plant intertwine spontaneously with an onion plant to their mutual benefit, or lettuces gallop along with beans. Just observe your square to see what works and what doesn’t. Get familiar with different vegetable groups in Part Four, as their growth habits and requirements are often similar.
Intercropping is what the Aztec Plot achieves. It is a regulated type of companion planting, the beans enriching the soil for the corn in exchange for a climbing stake or perhaps chemical protection, while pumpkin leaves shade the soil. Slow growers planted with quick ones save space, like carrots with lettuce. Radishes sown with seeds of carrots, turnips, beets, and rutabagas loosen the soil for germination and provide growing space for the others when pulled.
Onions benefit by cohabitating with pansies.
Carrots, onions, and lettuce are intercropped, growing roots at different depths. Radishes and green onions are compatible, while climbers like peas, beans, and cucumbers benefit from having low-growing lettuce or bok choy nearby to shade their roots. Sow small turnips, rutabagas, and radishes between cabbages and cauliflowers, but don’t forget them. Carrots with spinach, spinach with kohlrabi, lettuce, and beets.
The seeds of any vegetables to be transplanted can be mixed and sown together. Any combination of plants that you see doing well can then be intercropped on a larger scale. Feed the soil beforehand and sow plants as close together as their adult size allows—for radishes, green onions, and carrots, 1 inch; onions, 2 to 3 inches; beets, 3 to 5 inches—on the understanding that you regularly pull the biggest plants to make space for others.
Some plants decidedly retard each other’s well-being, or one grows at the expense of the other. Garden writers differ on what benefits and what impedes. Sometimes, I wonder whether it was an onion that made my beans crumple or whether the soil was deficient.
When at a loss, I put mustard seeds near a plant needing rescuing. Mustard comes up in a week and exudes a gas that keeps pests away. But when the mustard reaches a height of 3 feet, it robs nutrients from the plant it is protecting. Cut it down and spread the leaves and stalks between the vegetables. Such is mustard’s fate. When space allows, let mustard grow to full height—the flowers attract a beneficial insect bonanza.
And if you find all this too confusing, just plant what you want, mix it up thoroughly, and observe what happens. Do this for ten years, and then write the definitive book on companion planting in your region!
IN THE management of water, the home grower has the same problems as the American farmer. Water is not always in abundance. Whether you depend on tanks, a dam, well, or city water, restrictions apply to all if the rains fail.
David Holmgren of Permaculture fame has provided figures showing that every dollar’s worth of conventionally grown fruits and vegetables has needed 27 gallons of water to mature. Every equivalent dollar’s worth of home-grown food uses only 5 gallons.8
For healthy development, vegetables need water regularly. Water restrictions are an advantage because vegetables grow best when hand watered at the roots, rather than with sprinklers. On hot days, when you may have to water seedlings more than once, fill a watering can in the morning to see tender plants through days of 90 to 100 degrees and hot winds. Use shade boxes and cloth—see Hardware in the Food Garden.
While hand watering, note what every plant needs. More mulch here, plant food there, a cloche or a stake. Onions are dying off when tomatoes and carrots need extra water. Hosing lets you discover a big cucumber under the leaves. Douse individual plants after a dust storm to assist leaves in taking up moisture and nutrients from the air. This daily attention to the food plot, whether it is one square or ten, creates a bond between grower and plants that leads to wonderful results.
Consider doing away with sprinklers altogether. Instead, collect crippled umbrellas, beach umbrellas, and shade cloth. Put these around during hot weather to reduce water needs. The old days of letting a sprinkler dump water on a vast area for hours are gone forever. Sprinklers water indiscriminately, and sometimes plants miss out, dying before you notice.
Start small, think hose and watering can. It puts you in control and you get a daily thrill from the plants’ efforts.
You know that too much irrigation can cause salinization by raising the water table. Therefore, deliver water where needed, and no more than needed. Crushed rock increases the water-holding capacity of the soil. Mulch vegetables with compost and/or straw, even those in part shade, and try skipping a watering occasionally.
Although an established garden benefits from reticulated watering systems under mulch, I will have nothing but a hose in the food garden where planting patterns change week to week. I like the interlude in my days, sauntering along, watering, and selecting the next meal.
You need control at the tap: wide open, half open, or drizzling. You also need control at the nozzle: fine spray, wide spray, or a narrow jet to hit one spot or hose off aphids. Select a nozzle that will do a fine mist, as well as a squirt. It’s a myth that spraying plants on hot days causes leaf burn. Rain doesn’t burn plants, does it? Leaf burn results from lack of water at the roots.
It is no longer good advice to say that all vegetables need full sun. Six hours is enough for most. Plant tomatoes and lettuces in part shade, and root crops, beans, and corn in the sun. With increasing temperatures and periods in the 90- to 100- degree range, plus ultraviolet radiation, many plants benefit from filtered light, as do people.
To save water and raise stress-free vegetables, position your food plot:
◆ where the full blast of the afternoon sun is tempered by a tree.
◆ where dappled shade is available part of the day.
◆ where a house or shed will shade it part of the day.
◆ where other structures (water tank, hedge, fence) give protection.
Provide shade by temporary means and observe shade patterns before installing anything permanent, remembering that during winter, plants need more light.
If you are planning to keep your food plot small, rig up a semi-permanent structure to support a shade cloth or deciduous vine to protect in summer, letting light through in winter. But don’t plant a grapevine, as the birds will paint your vegetables white! Passion vines or climbing vegetables can benefit ground dwellers.
Debates whether to water early mornings or evenings pass you by if you are a working person. You are unlikely to do it in the heat of day. In summer, water before breakfast, if possible, as evening moisture attracts snails and slugs.
If your plot is densely planted and mulched, there should be little evaporation after morning waterings. In dense plantings, any evaporation is likely to benefit the plants. Seedlings and young plants need daily watering in hot weather and twice daily when the mercury rises above 95 degrees or during hot winds. If these conditions are predictable, avoid having seedlings at those times.
Impossible to answer. It depends on microclimate, soil, mulch, compost, and the plants. Water must get to the roots, so stick your finger in beside plants to test how deep it goes. Wait a few days to see how plants cope before watering again. Generally spaced-out deep watering is better than daily shallow watering, but many vegetables have shallow roots and grow fast in summer, so water daily then if possible. It takes five minutes to hose a 25-square-yard food plot.
If you are on a water main and don’t have a rainwater tank, consider installing one or several now. They come in a variety of materials, sizes, shapes, and colors to fit every situation, and rainwater is a saving grace for vegetables if your water is brackish, too chlorinated, or contains unwanted growths from the reservoir. By using rainwater on seedlings and young vegetables, more survive than if they have to battle salt, chlorine, or competitive organisms.
Tanks fill up quickly from the average house roof after a few downpours, and even dew raises a tank’s level. Install gutters on your shed to harvest more water. Consider installing gutter guards for cleaner water. Some agencies will even buy surplus rainwater. Contact a water technology shop to work out the logistics for your situation. Ask about water filters, or install a filter pot in the kitchen that prevents bacteria getting to you.
If your garden water supply comes from a well, you would do well to have it tested for salt and safety, as runoff from other properties may affect water quality, and therefore the vegetables you eat.
If the water comes from a dam, you may face periods of brackishness as the water level drops mid-summer, just when you douse vegetables daily.
I have learned which vegetables can survive on brackish water, although none do terribly well. These include:
◆ globe artichoke
◆ cabbage family, including hardier Asian greens
◆ onions, garlic, chives, leeks
◆ chard, perennial spinach
◆ asparagus, lettuce, chicory, endive, salsify, scorzonera
◆ most herbs, especially Artemisia species
◆ gray plants such as succulents and lavender
Drip irrigation under mulch saves water, but is inconvenient in small plots.
Composting toilets need no flushing and will gain in popularity as water bills increase. They provide compost and will become almost maintenance free as technology improves.
Envirocycle systems benefit the surrounding garden where the household water ends up, freeing up water for the food garden if you rely on tanks.
Waterwise planting: Vegetables in densely planted, well-composted, and mulched plots need less water per plant than those standing solitary in bare soil in rows wide apart. Dense plantings don’t wilt easily on hot days as the plants shade each other’s roots, and the compost and mulch hold moisture.
Raised beds and trenches: The method of planting vegetables in raised or hilled-up rows came from England, where it rains a lot, soil seldom dries out, and roots rot. If you expect months of rain, make hilled-up rows.
A wooden pyramid of terraces creates more space for small plants.
But faced with having to grow food in rocky sub-clay in a dry climate, remember the Israeli desert kibbutz where pumpkin seedlings were planted in trenches, the very opposite of a hill. Hack a trench in “concrete” clay, fill it with manure, and compost and plant pumpkins. They will produce beyond expectation.
Is your soil water-retaining, does it drain excessively, or does it not hold water at all? How long between rains? Is your wet season long enough to rot roots?
When living in a hills village where I had to call the landlord to pump water for the tank, I grew vegetables on flat soil, each in its own earth saucer. I watered with cup and bucket each evening, and they did all right. On one square, that takes one minute. Earth saucers work especially in impervious soil.
When the rains stop, the tank gets low, and tender things begin to wilt, have a “bird wash” instead of a shower on days you don’t mix with crowds. Life is a trade-off. During water shortages, you either smell good or you eat well. Those that do both are running taps on both ends.
Let your unique water situation determine whether to hill up, dig a trench, or grow on the flat.
SOME PEOPLE revel in growing a great variety of vegetables and herbs, and I labor under that collector’s instinct myself. I grew sixty varieties of vegetables in a round garden with a diameter of perhaps 10 yards and have quite forgotten what they all were. Two herb gardens grew 165 different herbs, leading quite naturally to a monthly stall at the market to sell the overflow.
Eggplant, bell peppers, chilies, potatoes, and tomatoes are all members of the Solanaceae family. One chili plant can deliver 100 chilies; eggplant and bell pepper plants can produce a dozen or more; potatoes grow ten spuds from every seed potato; and tomatoes go on and on and on. They do this in good soil with compost. But hold back on nitrogen (especially chicken manure), or you get more leaves than fruit. They all love mulch and liquid seaweed showers. A Solanaceae plot must not be used for others of the same family for four to five years to prevent disease from taking hold. You could try growing them together in a plot of their own, then shifting them to another communal plot the next year. Or, grow chilies, bell peppers, and eggplants in large pots, discard soil in another part of the garden, and start next season with fresh soil. That leaves only potatoes and tomatoes to rotate in open ground. Keep a garden record book! And don’t overwater this family.
Practical people look at the size of their household and decide to go for sensible quantities of staple foods and a few good yielders. They will eat well.
Carrots grow close together in deep sandy soil. Carefully pull the biggest to make space for the littlest. Cucumbers and zucchini are such good yielders that, in a small household, you may decide to grow them in alternate years. One plant of each is enough for small families. Plant more if you plan to pickle. These two are not choosey, but compost, manure, and liquid seaweed foster great fruits. Don’t overwater; it produces monsters of watery consistency.
Eggplants produce big yields. Pumpkins are hardening off to the left in the background.
Strawberries are big yielders because they “flush” three times—in spring, summer, and autumn—before falling dormant. They are also gross feeders. Apart from well-prepared soil (dig in horse manure and compost), give them an organic fertilizer. If you make liquid manure or compost tea, they’ll love you. Worm juice and liquid seaweed does them no end of good. Do all of the above, and you’ll have the tastiest strawberries ever. But do protect them totally, if you have wildlife, birdlife, and crawlies in your garden, by growing them in boxes wrapped with netting or stretched over hoops, tight fitting. Shade cloth is excellent to exclude small intruders. Although commercial strawberries are grown in full sun, in the wild, they hug shady hedgerows. I’ve also seen commercially grown strawberries in hilled-up rows covered with black agricultural cloth and a thick layer of wood shavings between the rows to deter the usual intruders. There may be some spraying going on around the edges, but for a small bed, you could avoid that with an impenetrable “fence” of dug-in shade cloth.
The big eaters are the brassica family: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, all kale, and a great many Asian greens. I read somewhere that brussels sprouts grow best in unimproved soil, but have not tried this. It makes sense, because these stems full of sprouts are really setting seed, which plants do when under stress from weather, soil, or both. All brassica produce fantastic leaves, including those that produce edible heads: broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and cauliflower. In fact, the leaves are equally edible, steamed with onion, garlic, a lime leaf, and a few herbs.
Two large green cabbages squeeze into the corner of a square, edged with water bottles, taking up less than one eighth of the space.
Prepare the soil by working in plenty of manure. Chicken and pigeon manure is fine for these plants. Add plenty of compost—homemade or bought. Add an organic fertilizer or B&B. As seedlings grow, keep up weekly liquid seaweed applications, every two weeks when maturing. Maintain mulch and extra liquid manure, compost tea, or worm juice to keep them growing and producing good heads and/or seed. All brassicas are capable of feeding you again and again, so choose half a dozen from season to season, but always include a kale, as it’s a superfood.
IF YOU live on a valley bottom, surrounded by hillsides that for centuries have deposited topsoil and organic matter on your patch, the soil may contain all that your plants need for years to come. Gardens on flat ground may have lost nutrients to huge trees, or may have become deficient due to old age. Certain shrubs survive in impoverished soils, but vegetables don’t. The better you feed your soil, the better fed your vegetables are, and the better fed you are.
Synthetic Fertilizers sold as compounds of NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) also contain salts harmful to soil microbes, depleting the soil, which then needs more fertilizer. Chris Alenson found leafy green vegetables grown with synthetic fertilizers are in danger of having a high nitrate intake. His paper notes that vitamin C reduces in these green leaves as nitrogen increases.9
NPK are only three elements of about fifteen needed for balanced plant health. For reasons of continuous fertility, runoff into waterways, and the high cost of fertilizers, organic growing—using compost and manure—is more sustainable.
Mineral Soil improvers like gypsum break up clay, dolomite adds calcium, granite adds minerals, and volcanic rock dust has it all.
The food requirements of vegetables differ. It is a generally held view that root crops need little food, but that depends on how much nutrition was left by previous crops. At the other end of the scale are the gross feeders. What are gross feeders? Cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and brussels sprouts. Fork in CMC several weeks before planting, spray seedlings with LS, give them side dressings of B&B a week later, top up CM regularly, and apply one or the other of these nutrients every two weeks. Stop applying B&B when plants are well established.
Animal Manure: For health reasons, it is important to compost manure before using it on food crops. Chop it up and mix with other composting materials (see Compost Compositions) or, if you can obtain old dried pats of cow, horse, donkey, camel, or elephant manure, use a shredder or lawnmower to turn it into fine manure dust. Only put manure on a bed you prepare several months before planting, and always cover it with mulch, straw, or compost to assist earthworms in breaking it down.
The major plant foods used when growing organic vegetables are animal manures and compost, as these contain the variety of nutrients plants need to access as they grow. If you can’t use animal manure, remember Scott and Helen Nearing, North America’s gurus of the self-sufficiency movement. They didn’t believe in exploiting animals, so their food production was fed entirely on compost made from everything they weeded, pruned, and swept from their own land. Fortunately, they had tons of deciduous sugar maple leaves. They fed themselves and countless visitors for decades.
On a scale of manures, chicken and pigeon contain the most nitrogen, while pig poo is powerful and provides phosphorus. Sheep manure is an all-rounder. Horse and cow manure contribute potassium—cow is more acidic, so add some lime, while horse manure builds soil. In Australia, you can often buy roadside bags, or ask a farmer whether you may fill a bag or trailer in his paddock. Donkey manure takes time to break down; chop or mow it and dig it in during autumn to soften. When the circus comes to town, people rush the elephant keeper with requests. No doubt big poo is a major soil builder, but, being fresh, it needs composting.
Blood and bone (B&B): This widely used by-product of the meat industry has been observed to keep rabbits at bay when incorporated in seed-bomb trials. A seed bomb is a clay ball packed with selected tree seeds, which is thrown onto bare land at the start of the rainy season to germinate. If rabbits are put off by B&B inside seed balls, they are also likely to object to the stuff lying around their favorite vegetables. This may explain why some gardeners claim there are rabbits in the next paddock, yet they don’t touch their vegetables. If you are plagued by bunnies, try it around seedlings.
Clay has essential locked up nutrients. A bucket of clay, broken up carefully and mixed with gypsum, can be forked through sandy soil.
Dolomite/dolomite lime corrects acidic soils. Use when a plot is cleared for new crops. Provides lime, calcium, and magnesium.
Epsom salts provide magnesium sulphate for prematurely yellow leaves. Apply 1 teaspoon per watering can.
Green manures: Plant barley, buckwheat, fava beans, fenugreek, lupins, red clover, mustard, oats, peas, or other legumes, and dig in before they flower. If you have too many old vegetable seeds, plant some to grow vegetables and rake the excess through a bare plot. When the plants are four to eight weeks old, fork them in, cover with CM, and water. This makes soil structure and attracts earthworms. The patch will be ready for sowing a few weeks later.
Green crops can be sown in the heat of summer, when you can’t plant seedlings, or during winter. Sow a green crop after harvesting a patch, even one quarter of your only square. For the one-square gardener, mustard is quick to grow and the seed widely available. Eat some, dig most in, and let some produce seed.
Gypsum hardpan: Sticky clay or compacted soils can be “opened up” by forking in gypsum, starting in autumn and repeating in spring.
Hay bales: In a garden magazine, I spotted a most delightful photo of two tomato plants growing in a tiny hay bale still in its plastic wrap.10 Make drainage holes in the bale and make holes for plants by taking out some hay and replacing it with soil. Soak plants in weak LS solution before planting. Water the bale thoroughly through the holes before planting. This is an elegant solution for small patios. Experiment with other vegetables in hay bales.
Humus is the soil nature makes unaided. Leave a heap of leaves, twigs, and small branches alone for a year, then lift them up and scoop up the humus underneath.
Iron chelate: Apply when plants have yellow leaves, are stunted, or bear rather small fruit.
Lime supplies calcium to soils. Apply at rainy times to prevent it blowing away. As lime takes away nitrogen from manure in compost when it breaks down, apply three weeks before planting. Alternatively, add B&B three weeks after liming. Plants that don’t like lime are amaranth, eggplant, blueberries, celery, and potatoes.
Liquid manures: Make these from potent herbs, like stinging nettle or comfrey. Chop up plants, steep in plenty of water in a bin, and cover. After ten to fourteen days, stir and apply the liquid around vegetables and seedlings, diluted with water 1:10. Brew up a smellier and even more potent manure by adding a variety of other soft-leaved weeds, such as milk thistle, dock, and dandelion, herbs and plants like borage, fennel, nasturtium, cosmos, and leaves of arum lilies, and succulents. It is best to use rainwater as mains water may contain chlorine, which will attack the bacteria that breaks down the organic matter. If you have no rainwater tank, catch buckets of rainwater for a liquid manure experiment (then install a rainwater tank!). Scoop off a pint of liquid from the bucket per week, pour into an almost full watering can, and sprinkle around vegetables. Add more plants and water to the bin and repeat weekly.
Liquid seaweed (LS): If you won’t have a smelly bin around, the commercial liquid manure of highest value is LS, used so greatly diluted that a container lasts a long time. Seeds, cuttings, and uprooted plants can be soaked in a weak LS solution before planting to encourage root development. Spray any seedlings and young and maturing plants with LS, especially when they meet adverse conditions in soil or weather.
Seaweed is good for all stages of vegetable growth, but it is still necessary to prepare plots with manure, compost, and mulch to create soil. Use LS as the icing on the cake—or the greening on the broccoli. Spray the whole plant, as LS is taken in through the foliage as well. LS improves soil structure and can be used to prevent plant diseases and treat soil where predators lurk, like codling moths under apple, fig, pear, and quince trees. Fresh seaweed put on the garden will contain sea salt.
Lupins are a green crop for poor sandy soils, adding calcium and fixing nitrogen.
Mineral rock dust: Another mineral food for new plots, or to dig in with green crops.
Nitrogen is contained in the NPK synthetic fertilizers that organic gardeners avoid. Nitrogen produces huge leaf growth and has been overused in agriculture, in parks, on golf courses, and in backyards.
In the '80s, the amount of industrially fixed nitrogen applied to global crops was evidently more than all industrial fertilizer spread in the whole of humanity’s history prior to 1980. Moreover, a doubling of transferred nitrogen from the atmosphere takes place due to the way humans treat Planet Earth. When soil saturated with nitrogen goes into the waterways, it takes along calcium, magnesium, and potassium, making soils acidic, killing fish in lakes, and causing toxic blooms.11 Yet nitrogen is a plant food. It occurs in high amounts in poultry manure and B&B, both of which should be used sparingly. If your zucchini leaves are the size of dinner plates and your chard is 3 feet tall, you have used too much.
Organic fertilizers: To maintain the gross feeders of the cabbage family, you may need to sprinkle organic fertilizer pellets once a month for three to four months. There are slow-release fertilizers also.
Potash: Essential for plant growth and development. A small bag goes a long way and results are swift for ailing plants.
Urine: Human urine is a sterile commodity and was once widely used in first aid to treat wounds when water was putrid. It is still used for the fulling of cloth and dying of yarn in cottage industries. Urine contains the growth hormone auxin and comes free. A lidded bucket in the bathroom allows those household members who are purpose-built to aim well into it. Take the bucket to the garden tap and fill it with water. Spread liquid across yet-to-be-planted garden beds and around fruit trees, especially citrus. No smell lingers, and since the stuff is sterile, no dangers to health occur. So cheap.
Wood ash: Add sparingly to acid soil, or spread widely as it contains sodium that affects soil micro-organisms. Don’t disperse it hot from the fireplace. Beets love it. Pear and cherry slugs hate it when applied to the leaves they are devouring. Keep a supply handy in the shed.
Sometimes, it may be possible to plant lime lovers together and lime haters somewhere else, or those that need much nitrogen here and those that prefer poorer soil over there. If you want to grow a variety of vegetables every year, plan your food garden in four plots, however small, and rotate crops seasonally so that root crops follow gross feeders and organic matter lovers take up the soil left by lime lovers, with additions of organic matter. A permanently no-lime corner may support a blueberry bush under-planted with potatoes, eggplant, and the glorious red amaranth, an untried combination. It may not always work, but keep lime haters away from limed plots for two years. A planting notebook comes in handy here. Consult Part Four for more on growing needs (here).
Truly gross feeders are the brassica family, which need manure, compost, and organic fertilizers.
Moderately gross feeders: While they establish themselves, feed eggplants, bell peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, potatoes, pumpkin, chard, spinach, strawberries, sweet corn, tomatoes, and zucchinis as you would brassicas.
Savoy: a “gross feeder”
Extra nitrogen should be worked in well before planting and applied again in small amounts throughout the growing stages for amaranth, eggplant, garlic, chard, and sweet corn.
Low nitrogen suits all root crops, beans, lamb's lettuce, and peas and can either be leftover nitrogen from last season’s crop, or a sparse application.
Lime is required to be worked in three weeks before planting for beans, Florence fennel, garlic, onions, peas, and strawberries. Also use for parsnips, tomatoes, and turnips in acid soil.
No lime for amaranth, eggplants, blueberries, celery, or potatoes.
Organic matter comprises old compost, old manure, lawn clippings, and leaf mulch and benefits beets, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, Florence fennel, gherkin, and zucchini.
WITH TEMPERATURES increasing due to global climate change, and long dry summers with more frequent storms, our vegetables have come a long way since their ancestors grew in sheltered valleys in Asia and Europe, where the best agricultural land was once found. In the 21st century, North America’s agricultural land is suffering from wind and water erosion, acidity, salinization, chemical pollution, and the deadening effects of frequent droughts.
Even though our backyards may not have inherited pollution from agricultural practices, they are still subject to climate changes. Once soil repeatedly dries out, microbiotic life and earthworms disappear, and water is not taken up when applied. Therefore, we mulch.
However, once the heat has gone and rains bring cooler conditions, there is no need for thick mulches. Wet straw can become a hotbed for slugs. So let summer mulch rot away, or fork it in and let the soil air a little, unless your region experiences continuous drought with erosive winds. If weeds come up, pull them for compost or liquid manure. Never let them set seed—keep track of weeds. Mulch again in late winter.
Laying out a no-dig garden on top of lawn. Despite carpet strips and wooden edging, grass roots did invade and sheet-metal strips had to be fitted later to a depth sufficient to keep them out.
Mulches do not have to cost much. Newspaper, cardboard, old clothes, and stones cost nothing. Stones trap moisture when placed around plants, be they lettuce, cabbage, or tree seedlings, but they also attract slugs and snails.
If your soil is rocky, acidic, or unworkable, you may choose to start your 3-foot- square garden from scratch like a no-dig garden, a method developed by gardener Esther Dean.12 Mark a 3-foot square, or build a box with sleepers or planks. Lay down twelve to twenty layers of soaked newspaper with cardboard and old T-shirts as underfelt to prevent persistent weeds breaking through. Make a doorstop sandwich (with thick “slices” of bread) by layering old animal manure, compost, and Lucerne hay. After watering well, make holes in the straw, fill with soil or compost, and plant vegetables. The garden will gradually sink, so keep topping off with CM, hay, or straw. In the first season, plants may not grow fantastically, but the sandwich improves with time.
The most fertile mulches for vegetables are compost, pea straw, or Lucerne hay. The latter is expensive, but gives a new garden a good start. If your climate is severely hot and dry, think in terms of “putting the vegetables to bed.” As soon as plants are above ground, lay sheets of soaked newspaper between them, add wet bags, shirts, or shorts, and top with CM, compost, hay, or straw. After the first watering, watch how long the plants can go without. There is always one plant that is first to look distressed. Keep mulch slightly away from stems and trunks to prevent collar rot.
Black plastic is used for commercial strawberry growing and to suppress weedy lawns. But it cooks the soil and should not stay there long. Weed suppression is its main benefit, and newspaper, cardboard, and telephone books can do that and decay in a timely manner, so that you can mulch and plant on top.
Bracken fern: I wish I still had our forest to pick bunches of bracken. Bracken contains nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Apart from spreading shredded bracken on beds to decay, use ferns as parasols for seedlings.
Cardboard is good for a path between new beds or between straw-filled, no-dig garden plots. If used to suppress lawn or weeds, cover with chipped branches for good looks. Line slatted or wire compost bins with cardboard, pizza boxes, or paper party plates, or use as underfelt in no-dig plots. Only use uncoated cardboard between vegetables.
Clothes can be slow to disintegrate. For that reason, they are best used around the edges of plots for weed suppression or as underfelt for no-dig plots. Half-rotted clothes mulch can still mulch fruit trees.
Grape residue: If you live near a winery, try grape residue from the winemaking process on your plots. Investigate what other free—and safe—residues your neighborhood produces.
Gravel is a marvelous mulch if applied 2 to 3 inches thick. It is mainly used in ornamental gardens around succulents, cacti, and sword-leaved plants, but should you have a supply, try it as a mulch on sturdy vegetables of the cabbage family. Most woody herbs prefer gravelly soil for drainage; just mix gravel with garden soil.
Hay: Legendary tales are told about the effects on a garden of one bale of spoiled hay. Be wary of weed seeds in meadow hay. Great plant food, now sold in handy packs.
Herb stalks: Should you have a flourishing herb plot, do as the Shakers did. They stripped herbs for tea, cooking, and medicine, then spread the stalks as mulch under fruit trees, some acting as a pest repellent. Stalks are best over newly applied compost because they take time to break down as they shade the soil.
Lawn clippings are a quickly decaying mulch, best mixed with coarser materials, such as leaves and broken twigs. Otherwise, apply dried.
Leaves should never be burned, as this causes air pollution and asthma and robs the soil of valuable mulch. First, sweep a layer of leaves under the tree canopy as food, then compost the rest with other organic matter. To make leaf mold for mulch or potting soil, put leaves in a wire cylinder until broken down. Leaves cleared from the gutter in spring are suitably decayed. Sprinkle lime to counteract acidity, and B&B to encourage breakdown.
Mulch blocks are available commercially. Add water to a block to get a wheelbarrow of water-holding mulch to spread around plants.
Newspaper sheets make a weed-suppressing mulch in layers of ten to twelve, but cover this with leaves or straw or you get impervious papier-mâché. Don’t use between small vegetables, which prefer an airier mulch, but use underneath and around the perimeter of plots and under fruit trees.
Oak-leaf mulch or bark repels slugs.
Olive-leaf residue can be used as a mulch should you live near an olive oil press. Ask whether you may have some to experiment with.
Pine needles are a great mulch around strawberries. Remember, the pine tree needs at least a 4-inch layer itself.
Rock, crushed or as rock dust, contains minerals.
Sawdust must be from untreated wood from your own workshop or your own trees. Use only on paths, in the ornamental garden, and sparingly in the compost, balanced out with lime because many woods are acidic.
Shrub foliage: Prune a few branches. Mow or shred them to make a mulch, or separate leaves from twigs and spread crosswise in layers between plants.
Stones: If you are blessed with a million stones on your land, use them. By planting each plant in an earth saucer surrounded with stones and filling the saucer with CMC, you trap moisture and attract good beetles. To keep slugs and snails away, spread coffee grounds around the stones.
Straw: Keep straw away from seedlings and young plants as there can be some harmful fumes during the breaking-down process.
Sugar cane mulch: This evidently excellent mulch may not be available everywhere, but if it is where you are, look out for the organic variety. Available in small bags.
Twigs: If you are strapped for mulching materials but have wattles (acacia) or shrubs, prune twigs and spread crosswise in layers between plants. This provides an airy mulch that, in time, breaks down into compost.
Weed Mats: Buy only the biodegradable type that lets water through and acts as a mild mulch. For a single 3-foot-square vegetable plot, buy 18 inches of the double width. Depending on the spaces needed between vegetables, cut weed mat into strips of 8, 12, or 15 inches. Place strips in a grid across the plot and plant vegetables in the interstices. Once young plants are well above ground, remove strips or cover with CM and water well. Re-use weed mats.
Woodchips: Some electricity utilities and city councils offer free woodchips after pruning roadside trees. Use for paths in the food garden. Pine wood is beloved by strawberries.
At the end of summer, when there is little food about for wildlife, your mulched plots may be dug up at night by unseen creatures—lizards, possums, rats, and early birds—because only there in the moist mulch can they find something to eat. Hence, when planting winter vegetables in autumn, wait to mulch until the days are getting cooler or protect plantings with racks and cages. Mulch again when plants are established and there is plenty of other food for the wildlife.
I’M HAVING you on, am I? Too right I’m not! Pruning growing vegetables of excess foliage and stems promotes better growth of those parts you want to harvest. Pinching out tips does the same.
Beans run out of steam mid-season. Prune off dying sections.
Broccoli produces shoots for months after the head has been harvested. Prune as you pick shoots for the pot, but also prune woody sections and lower leaves to keep this hard-working plant in condition. In our household, broccoli and cabbage leaves are eaten together with kale leaves as a “green slurry” stir-fry with ginger, onion, and garlic. The taste far surpasses the name. If you don’t eat the leaves, strip the ribs for juicing, and feed the leaves to chickens, worms, or the compost.
Cabbage and cauliflower: Near where I live, the growers regularly pull lower leaves off by hand, laying them on the soil as mulch.
Fruit trees: Pruning is discussed in Easy-Care Fruit Trees and Berries.
Pumpkins have non-flowering vines that use food and water; cut them.
Spinach and chard go to seed as they please. If a strong plant has the bolting stem cut out, you can harvest the leaves longer. Or cut off all but the main stem if you want to save seed. Even when slightly bitter, the leaves taste good in a mixed stir-fry.
Zucchini plants produce a jungle of giant leaves to protect their fruit. But enough is enough. Regularly prune lower leaves, making sure the fruit remains protected.
This is done more frequently than pruning.
Pumpkin vines need their tips pinched out or they will go on forever, producing longer runners with more infant pumpkins that won’t have enough “oomph” or time to even get half grown before cold nights finish them off. Calculate when new pumpkins will no longer mature, and cut off the tip above the last viable pumpkin. Do this on all runners. These tender tips of leaves, including tiny pumpkins, can be steamed lightly and served in coconut cream, a favorite meal in Papua New Guinea. I pinch mine in mid-summer, unless spring is cold and summer is late.
Tomatoes bearing heavily can also have their tips pinched, as can eggplants bearing more than half a dozen fruit. Some do it to cucumbers, but I let them ramble, not minding that the fruit gets smaller as the season advances. Pinch wherever you want strong growth.
Whereas I apologize to plants about to be pruned—“This will stop you feeling so exhausted, sweetie”—and it hurts me to pinch out young tips, I draw the line at the thinning of seedlings. My respect for the life force in every seed that has managed to break the surface of the earth is such that, if seedlings must be thinned out, I will transplant them immediately somewhere else. It is a gross waste of seed to sow pumpkins, cucumbers, and corn in threes, then thin out two, only keeping the strongest one. That may be commercially preferable, but the home grower raising vegetables in toilet paper tubes plants each germinated seedling. We don’t need giant sizes, preferring flavor and quality.
Carrots, onions, and beets have to be sown thinly, but excess little ones can also have their time in the sun. In Part Four read under Carrots and other vegetables how to harvest thickly sown vegetables or vigorously germinating ones. Respect for the life that goes on in your food plot could well be registered by the plants and discussed at night! “Food should be produced kindly,” writes food scientist Colin Tudge.13 Although he is referring to animals raised for meat, the same goes for fruit and vegetables. Love is not wasted on them.
CROP ROTATION restores the nutritional balance in the soil and prevents plant diseases from developing, but it cannot restore all nutrients taken from the soil by previous crops. Therefore, soil needs additional nutrients through green crops, compost, manure, and organic fertilizers.
The word has been out a while now that mono-cropping—the growing of one variety on the same soil year after year—leads to root diseases, fatal for root crops, as well as those on big feet like the large brassicas. Mono-cropping is putting all your eggs in one basket and is frequently practiced with vegetables that increase prolifically, delivering the greatest harvest for the least amount of cost and labor. Mono-cropping is performed by poor people who need to feed many mouths for next to nothing.
Such was the case in Ireland where potatoes were the staple food until, in 1845, the Great Potato Famine struck. Cold wet weather gave rise to a fungal disease, and the potatoes rotted. One million people died of starvation and two million migrated, leaving five million to try to survive off the blighted land. In the hills where I live, the growers of an entire valley were prohibited from cultivating onions for five years because of a disease caused by continuous mono-cropping.
In Bali, the hills have been terraced to grow rice for a thousand years. But with a recent surge in population to 3.5 million, in a climate where rice can grow all year, continuous mono-cropping was reducing soil fertility and causing problems requiring chemical spraying. Now, Balinese farmers practice crop rotation with peanuts, corn, sweet potatoes, tapioca, and vegetables after two rice harvests. Their fields are small, and those surrounded by shelter belts of mixed trees and weeds have the best-looking crops.
From a train window, traveling from Hong Kong to Guangzhou, I watched spellbound as we rolled past thousands of market gardens doomed to become concrete jungles during the 21st century. Chinese farmers in Guangdong Province practice the most intensive vegetable culture I’ve ever seen. They have many mouths to feed, but they can grow food all year in a subtropical climate with an annual rainfall of 76 inches. Every bit of arable ground between villages is taken up by straight beds, two arm’s-lengths wide, and divided by narrow paths where people hunch to weed, hoe, or harvest, filling huge reed baskets. Every second or third bed has bamboo lattice running through the center with peas, beans, cucumbers, eggplants, and squash vines shading rows of leafy vegetables underneath. Each bed grows at least half a dozen vegetables, including onions, celery, and broccoli.
Later, I learned that apart from lots of manure and compost made from street sweepings, the only other fertilizer used was nitrogen in the form of ammonia or urea. This went on all the beds, whether they would grow brassicas or root crops, mainly to save time. About five combinations of vegetables inhabited the beds in turn, so crop rotation was assured. Only aquatic vegetables like kangkong, lotus, water bamboo, and water spinach were grown as mono-crops in watery regions.14
Even rotating half a dozen crops is not always enough to keep blights, root disease, and insect infestations at bay. A mixed farming approach is needed, taking into account mini-climate, indigenous pests, and predators.
The home grower can use mixed farming on a small scale and succeed. Make each bed a mix of three to four vegetables with companion herbs and flowering plants. Read about rotating crops in Part Three and Part Four. If you are not following the succession of plots in Part Three, here are some other scenarios for you to try. Sometimes, you will plant mixed vegetables, other times a mono-crop like onions and garlic. But a mono-crop on a 3-foot square causes no problems if followed by mixed species.
Else Jansen's attractive kitchen garden is situated on a slope between a bank and future orchard. It has four mulched plots for crop rotation and citrus trees in tubs.
You might first plant your square in early autumn as a Curry Plot with carrots, cauliflower, daikon, rutabagas, red onions, kale, and herbs.
As you dig up carrots and rutabagas, sprinkle B&B and sow arugula toward a Salad Plot to fit in with onions that sit in the ground till mid-summer. The kale keeps standing a long time. Cultivate around it, sowing red radishes, and when the weather warms up, plant one prolific, staked tomato plant and a rambling cucumber. Rake mixed lettuce seeds in between and there’s your Salad Plot.
When the Salad Plot comes to an end and the onions are drying in the shed, add manure and compost. Plant cauliflowers, broccoli, tatsoi, and bok choy around the edges and fava beans in the center. There’s your Stir-Fry Plot.
It’s spring once more. Eat or freeze any green food left growing. Rake in CMC for pumpkins, squash, zucchini, and melons, or bell peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes.
Add lime in late summer, three weeks before planting onions and garlic. Mulch between rows. Have a quiet winter.
Since it may be a while before the onions and garlic dry off enough to be pulled, now is the time to expand. Dig up another 3-foot square of lawn and plant spring vegetables.
The onions and garlic are harvested; it is mid-summer and hot. Plant a quick green crop like mustard and dig it in before it sets seed.
Time for a nitrogen fix: plant winter peas along the edges of the square with at least four Asian greens taking up the center for a different Stir-Fry Plot.
Give that square plenty of manure, compost, and B&B for an Antioxidants Plot.
Should you find that intricate pattern of mixed vegetables over four years too much to keep track of, consider laying out four strips, each of 18 × 36 inches, or half the size of the square plot. Mark them 1, 2, 3, and 4 with numbers on stakes and keep a notebook. Whether you start in spring/summer or autumn/winter, plant as follows:
Leafy vegetables (chard, bok choy, cabbage).
Any root crop.
Any leguminous crop, beans in spring/summer, peas or fava beans in autumn/winter.
Fruiting crops (cucumbers, pumpkins, melons, zucchinis, and in theory also eggplants, bell peppers, and tomatoes).
Next season, shift these categories up one so that Plot 1 becomes a fruiting crop, Plot 2 a leafy crop, Plot 3 a root crop, and Plot 4 a leguminous crop. Apply manure and other requirements for each crop—see Part Four.
This simple method still assures reasonable crop rotation on the same plot if you are not trying to grow food for all your needs.
In autumn, plant any of the gross feeders from the cabbage family or leafy crops. In spring, plant eggplants, bell peppers, cucurbits, pumpkins, sweet corn, tomatoes.
Plant root crops that can live off the residue of the heavy manuring applied for Season 1. Beets, carrots, onions, rutabagas, and turnips are all good.
Plant peas or beans, depending on the season, or a green crop to dig in.
As a rule of thumb, remember that rotation starts with gross feeders when you lay it on with CMC, CM, OF, and/or B&B, plus a sprinkling of lime. For root crops (except potatoes), also add a sprinkling of lime and top dress with some CMC if soil is poor. Lime again for peas and beans, but hold back on OF and B&B. Then manure all other crops, and lime where soil is acidic. Problem is, potatoes like manure but not lime. When digging in green crops, add a few handfuls of dolomite, gypsum, or rock dust.
In a notebook, draw a plan of your plots on a double page, write the year and season in one corner, and note where vegetables were planted. It’s an easy record to help you plan following seasons. Rotation for a minimum of three or four seasons, and as many as six seasons, avoids troubles.
Now that your first plot is underway, plan to develop another square each year until you have four square plots. This streamlines crop rotation. Simply shift the Salad Plot from Square 1 to Square 2 and so on, until it returns to Square 1 in the fifth season. The other three squares follow a different sequence, or carry a mono- or green crop.
Let the peas and beans family only touch corners with the onion and garlic plot. In winter, this four-square bed might be one square of cabbages—planted as a border or cross—a diagonal half square of chard, a half square of carrots, another of leeks, and a whole square of mixed cauliflower and broccoli, all intermixed with rutabagas, parsley, arugula, marigolds, and borage, and plastic butterflies hovering across the cabbages (see here).
Going into your second winter, there will be a profusion you had not planned. Self-seeded arugula may have to be pruned. Kale seedlings are likely. Give some away, with the recipe for green soup (see here)!
While you eat out a plot as the season advances, start planting suitable vegetables in vacant spaces, so that by mid-spring, you still have some winter crops, interspersed with lettuces, peas, and beets.
Of course, such intensive growing depletes the soil and thus, whenever space becomes available, tip in a bucket of CM before replanting. This almost automatic crop rotation never grows the same crop in the same soil in consecutive years. Together with companion planting, you can see how complex it threatens to become, but that is where green-cropping comes in to give you a break.
Digging crops in is green-cropping
By growing food in rotating beds, a section occasionally becomes vacant to plant a cover or green crop. In autumn going into winter, try barley, buckwheat, oats, peas, or wheat. In summer, try buckwheat, millet, or sorghum. Dig in before they set seed. Buckwheat leaves are a fine vegetable, but some swear by wheatgrass.
Green-crop a dense leafy crop for the sole purpose of fertilizing the soil. Not only does the soil get a rest from producing crops that must grow to maturity as green crops are dug in before flowering, but plants returned to the earth at optimum vigor make the best green manure. Allowing a month to let the crop decay, this plot would have a healthy rest for three months before returning to full production. Seeds of common green crops are obtainable in small to medium quantities.
Buckwheat: Any season. Available from health shops or groceries.
Fenugreek: Autumn and spring (see List of Common Herbs). Enjoy spicy leaves while young, then dig in.
Lupin: Before flowering starts, cover plants entirely with a layer of newspaper and 2 inches of soil or compost.
Millet: Sow in a warm season. From groceries.
Mung beans: Spring and summer. The same beans as used for sprouting. Need warmth to germinate.
Mustard: Any season. Benefits soils harboring nematodes. Available in large bags in Asian and Mediterranean groceries. Sow yellow or black mustard, a handful per square. Grow your own seed.
Oats: Put a handful in a mix of green crops.
Red clover: Widely used by farmers, very nutritious when dug in. Available at farm supply stores.
Soybean: Spring and summer. The world’s most nutritious bean. From health shops and farm supply stores.
Wheat: If organic wheatgrass and wheat juice is so good for people, it must be good for the soil. Mix with other seeds, like mustard and oats.
Peas and fava beans in winter, other beans in summer. These are not dug in, but harvested. Cut plants at soil level, leaving nitrogen-fixing nodules in the ground. Jackie French advises to use wattle foliage (Acacia spp.) and fava bean plants after harvest as a mulch between other crops. Cover the Fava Bean Plot with its own stalks after cutting down the plants, until the leaves become one with the soil. Then carry the stalks to the compost heap.