The Secret to My Organic Garden

“Organic gardening is too labor intensive.” So sayeth the generally ignorant population. This is the standard defense line of traditional chemical gardening (crops grown with the use of treated seeds, artificial fertilizers and toxic pesticides and herbicides). But I would beg to differ.

I’m a fundamentally lazy gardener. I try to grow mostly useful plants, and the few flowers I cultivate are nearly all perennials that can take care of themselves. As much as possible, I try to garden organically. I choose heirloom and/or organic seeds and seedlings and save seeds each year. I use no pesticides and depend on the ladybugs, chickens, bats, and cats to keep the pests under control. Our horses, chickens, and compost provide plenty of fertilizer. But what about the weeds?

My Black Thumb

Just to be sure you aren't under the illusion that my thumb is greener than the next person, I’d like to confess the gardening disasters that have already befallen me (or it might be more appropriate to say the gardening disasters I have already created) this spring. This growing season is shaping up to be my worst ever, unless you include the year I had a sick newborn and planted only potatoes because they would require nothing of me.

The first disaster started back in the fall in our brand new terrace garden. We filled the hillside bed with dirt harvested from our paddock – rich with ten years worth of natural fertilizer.

And then I planted a cover crop of rye grass. The plan (as I understood it from skimming an Organic Gardening article), was that the grass would run its course and die out by spring and then we would knock it down to serve as a natural mulch for our tomatoes. Brilliant! No more purchased mulch, plastic or otherwise, since the last two seasons we’ve gotten the early blight and the late blight. This was to be the year of the tomatoes!

 The grass grew beautifully all winter. The problem is that the northeast has experienced the warmest winter on record (at least my records) and that grass is still growing and growing and is so thick and tall that the kids hide in it for Capture the Flag. Now what? So much for my grand plan.

There is a second part to the tomato disaster. This year I made my own growing medium. I blogged about the beautiful mix I concocted. I started eight different varieties of tomatoes, plus four sweet peppers and four hot peppers in the growing mix.

Wow! The germination rate was through the roof! My growing mix was amazing – every single seed I planted sprouted, plus some appeared to have duplicated themselves because some of the pots had 8 seedlings fighting for light. I patted myself on the back and thinned my seedlings.

A few days later, I noticed there were even more seeds sprouting. The problem was, every single seed that was sprouting was a tomato. Even the peppers. Tomato seedlings have hairy stems – you can’t mistake them for anything but a tomato. How was it all my seeds were tomatoes?

When I checked the buckets of growing mix, yet to be used, there were hundreds of tomatoes sprouting there too. Obviously my compost was full of tomato seeds, and God knows what kind of tomatoes at that. Were they seeds from the organic cherry tomatoes I buy for my oldest to snack on all winter? Were they seeds from the first tomatoes we harvested last year, before we knew we had the blight and happily threw discarded tomato pulp in the compost? Or were they seeds that I had just planted? No way to know.

So here I am with plenty of tomato seedlings, only I’m terrified to plant them for fear of the blight, plus I have no earthly idea what kind of tomatoes they are.

And the disasters just keep coming…..

Since we were having trouble containing the chickens, I decided to sprout my peas before planting them. That bought us a few extra days to secure the chicken fence and clip every wing. The peas were slow to sprout and the day they were ready, I was leaving town for my little brother’s retirement celebration (I’m not that old! He’s an air force pilot who retired after 22 years).

With no time to plant, I thought I would stall them; I put them in the fridge to wait until I got back three days later. I did wonder if this might kill them, but I figured they were peas and the temperature wasn’t freezing so they would survive.

Wrong. Those lovely sprouted peas I planted promptly when I returned produced only 3 viable plants (out of probably 100 seeds). So today I replanted my snap and snow peas and berated myself the entire time.

And the fun continues…

Meanwhile, the lettuce I planted several weeks ago was still not appearing, same for the carrots, spinach, and onions. I figured this was mostly due to my negligent watering habits, but could also be blamed on the fact that the only rain we had in the past two weeks was a huge downpour the day after I planted all those tiny fragile seeds. For a week, I watered diligently. No dice, just a couple onion tips.

Perhaps they washed away. Perhaps they did. When I dug around to add more seeds, I found only a handful of lettuce plants getting started. Ugh. Replanted the lettuce and spinach this morning. The carrots are on their own. I never have good luck with them anyway and I’m going to assume the onion bulbs will get going once the gardener gets her act together and starts watering on a regular basis.

This would all be very depressing, except the great thing about gardening is that seeds are cheap. You can always try again tomorrow. In digging up the OG article that led me to plant the grass, I discovered that you can just knock down or mow the rye grass. I tried tromping it down, but it just bounced right back. I’m thinking we might have to use a scythe, that’ll be fun, won’t it honey?

And the tomatoes. I pulled out everything from eight of the starter pots and put fresh seeds in them, figuring all the volunteers who were going to volunteer had already done so. I’ll use my eight new plants as templates to decipher what is growing in all the other pots.

This is the goal. Someday.

I hope your gardening season is off to a better start than mine. I’ll let you know how the story ends.

NOTE: I'LL BE PRESENTING A WORKSHOP ENTITLED "CLEAN AND GREEN LIVING" AT THE MASON DIXON LIBRARY WEDNESDAY APRIL 18 AT 6:30 PM. WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOU THERE.

Don't Recycle That Newspaper! I've Got a Better Idea!

Once upon a time I was a purest and I thought store-bought mulch was for sissies who weren’t serious about growing organically. Chipped leaves and sticks from my yard were fine for mulch, but as for the rest – I would stay on top of those weeds. [pause for effect....] Then I had kids.

Like so many other things that changed after children like sleep patterns, the cleanliness of my car, and how much time I spend on my hair, I do things differently now. I love mulch and buy it by the pick-up truck load. And every year we buy more. I know this is a terrible thing to confess as one who claims to garden organically.

As my garden has gotten bigger, I’ve learned how to get the most bang for my buck when it comes to mulch. Before any mulch hits the ground, I cover the ground with a layer of newspaper. Our newspaper uses vegetable-based inks, so as it breaks down it won’t harm the soil. And it holds in moisture as well or better than conventional mulch. Here’s the best part about newspaper mulch - it’s free! (well, unless you count the money I spend on my subscription, but I’m a compulsive morning paper person so that would happen even if I didn’t need the paper for mulch!) We stock-pile paper all year long and what isn’t used for starting fires in the fireplace is used for mulch in the spring. We never have enough.

Newspaper alone is a great mulch and if it wouldn’t blow away I’d forget about buying anything else. I’ve heard of hard-core cheap skates who simply weigh down their paper with rocks. I admit to being more than a little vain when it comes to the appearance of my gardens, so that’s just a little too cheesy for me. After the layer of newspaper is thoroughly wetted (sometimes it is necessary to keep a hose handy and sprinkle as you go or the whole process becomes a comedy of errors), I toss out a thin layer of store-bought mulch, just enough to hide the paper and keep it from blowing away.

We do this newspaper/mulch trick around all our fruit trees, blueberry bushes, flower beds, and now our brand new “vineyard” (12 grape vines we’re testing out to see if our south-facing slope will be conducive to grapes). Last year we tested out how well the newspaper/mulch duo worked as compared to the mulch only by papering around half the fruit trees and then (because we had run out of paper) simply mulching around the other half. The paper/mulch half did a better job of keeping the weeds down. The mulch circles around the trees without paper seemed to shrink each week surrendering more and more of their ground to the encroaching grass (thus making it difficult to drive the mower around them without decapitating yourself).

I still don’t do much mulch around the “real” vegetable garden. I’m too worried about what might or might not be in the conventional mulch from the local hardware place. But this year I am going to try the red plastic mulch around my tomatoes. The last two years we were struck with the early blight and then the late blight. So, in the interest of getting no blight, we’re going to mulch our tomatoes. I’m curious to know if the theory that red plastic mulch will make your tomatoes ripen faster is true. Reading a few garden-nerd websites on line, there are a wide varieties of opinions on that, so I’ll have to see for myself. Look for a red-plastic report late this summer. (I know, I know, it’ll be hard to contain yourself!)

Meanwhile, happy mulch season. Maybe it’s time to subscribe.

Note: My husband knew I was musing on mulch and sent me the following article, pointing out that even if we aren't buying it for our gardnes, most of us are eating plenty of mulch!
In case people don’t know it, when they eat low fat foods they are getting their share of mulch…

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703834804576300991196803916.html?mod=WSJ_hps_editorsPicks_2