3 Things Your Garden Needs

(originally posted January, 2010)

Here's our Garden (Edited: this pic is from 2008...as the Gman reminds me)  it performed pretty good for us! But it hasn't been simply a matter of waiting till the right time to plant, then sowing the seeds, standing back and then harvesting. There's more work involved than that!

We've been working towards improving our soil since June 2006, when we moved here. At that time, there was no garden. The dirt was clay. Hard clods of clay. Over time we have managed to improve it a lot!

There are 3 (at least!) things your garden NEEDS to have in order to provide you with healthy food (aside from sunlight - place your garden in an area where it will get at least 6 hours of sunlight a day). Here they are:

Food - Your soil needs to be fed. This should be an ongoing job. Add well composted manure as top dressing while your garden is actively growing. Once you are finished harvesting an area, then pull out the bigger guns.  Add as much manure as you possibly can.

And leaves! Add as many as you can get your hands on. Even if you do not have access to manure, Everyone pretty much has access to leaves! Try and put a nice thick layer of 3 - 4 inches if possible. If you can't get your hands on that many leaves, even 1 inch is better than none. Over Winter, the leaves will break down....turning into....yes, compost!

Sometimes during the growing season, you may find yourself with a bare portion of garden. This happens because maybe you have already harvested that portion with a early finishing veggie. Do NOT leave that soil bare!

We use something quick growing....Buckwheat. It flowers within 5 weeks and while it grows, in completely smothers that bare area, which means that weeds don't stand a chance! If you have chickens or other poultry, you can cut the buckwheat and feed the seeds off to the animals. Turn all the rest of it under, into the soil. Your soil will thank you!

Now, come Fall, when you've basically cleaned out your garden pull out the Fall Rye! We sow Fall Rye in specific areas of the garden that have been harvested and are NOT going to be replanted with anything else that season.

Let that Rye grow..and grow...and grow. Got animals? You can take a cutting off it and feed it off to them. Let the Rye grow again. It will go dormant over winter. Come Early Spring, it starts growing again! In the Spring, we let it grow to maybe one foot high.

But before we sow the Fall Rye into the garden area, we first load up that area with LOTS of manure. Look at this picture. Can you see all the straw and hay in there? That's what came out of mucking stalls for the horses.

Add it all in, don't be afraid! If you can, fence off this area and let the chickens in there for a week. They'll do a great job of cleaning up all the seeds that have..ahem...gone in one end of the horse and out the other.

Water  Well, it goes without saying that your garden needs water. I've read an inch per week, but we water more than that. The Gman has set up sprinklers on timers throughout the garden. These timers are well worth the money and you can get them for about $60. You'll be able to hook up 4 hoses onto the manifolds. Pretty inexpensive for allowing you to do other things rather than watering by hand.

So at our place, they come on automatically early early in the morning. By the time I roll out of bed at 6am, the top half of the garden has already been watered and the bottom half is being watered. After that one stops, the pop ups start watering the strawberry bed and raspberry beds.

If you need to conserve water (and really, who doesn't?) you can use mulch such as straw, leaves, newspapers etc. Lay these down the rows and tuck the mulch up close to the plants. Do this AFTER you have watered well. The mulch will work really well to keep the soil under the plants nice and moist.

Mulching helps with erosion control as well. And once you start working to improve your soil, erosion will become your enemy. Who wants to do all that work and watch hard rain washing you soil away?

Rest   Every garden needs to rest. Since we garden from May - late October, the other months are spent resting.

By the time the snow starts to fall, we have layered on lots of manure, leaves and even some of the finished veggie plants. So we know that over the rest of that Fall and early Spring, the food we have fed the garden will, in turn, help to feed us the following year. And...that's a Good Thing!

Here's a picture of the Garden in early May. the Gman is tilling in the Fall Rye that was planted the previous Fall. Click on the picture and you can see how much the Fall Rye has grown, just since the snow left.

He tills it all under, and it in turn decomposes and helps to nourish the soil. You will find that after just a year of following this routine, your soil will vastly improve. It will be much more friable than it was the year before. But don't stop....keep up this routine for several years and improve your soil so that it is healthy and productive.

Over time, we will find that we no longer need to even till the garden. There are no-till methods out there that you can Google and find out about. We continue to till because we still need to improve the soil. But we look forward to the year when all we have to do is dig a little furrow, drop our seeds in, and relegate the tiller to the shed forever! (Or....until we make a new flower bed!)

So there you have it....your garden needs Food, Water and Rest.....hmmmm, not unlike us humans!

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More Random Pics

This will be the Gman's new Rhubarb bed....just below the greenhouse, this area gets lots of sun. We're toying with the idea of putting a hoophouse here as well.....

A nice healthy strip of fall rye seeded in the main veggie garden. We use this Every Year to increase soil fertility and help stop erosion....

A nice handful of carrots....

A Christmas cactus - I got this from a friend last year during the holidays....this year it's actually blooming. I managed to not kill it!

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Putting the Main Garden to Bed

I should have titled it TRYING Desperately to put the main garden to bed! Cuz there aren't enough hours in our days and not enough energy from me to get the job done.

We picked up a trailerload of horse biscuits the other day from our friends.....the Gman took a section of the garden fence apart and used his machine to lift the trailer into the garden and dump it. Nice - it made the job quite a bit easier!

We gave the cabbage bed a quick hoeing, then I broadcast fall rye on the area. Then we got a really nice thick layer spread out on the cabbage bed.

The cabbages had all been pulled, trimmed of outer leaves and stored in the cold room downstairs. There were a few that little slugs got at, and we are feeding those off to the pigs. So that part of the garden = all done!

Turned my attention to trying to keep digging up potatoes. If I can get out there around mid morning, it has warmed up a bit and the sun is out (altho it's getting pretty cool!). I can then just leave the taters out in the air to dry them a bit, and make it easier to knock the soil off. I think these are Russets in the pic (took this pic a few days ago)

When the afternoon starts coming to an end and the sun just begins to go down, I bring my paper bags down and continue sorting the taters down in the field. No use handling each damn potato anymore than I have to.....sort them into bags for seed or for eating, then bring them up to the house.

I Never Ever leave potatoes out in the garden overnight...wayy too risky that it will get too cold for them. So, I try to do just a couple rows everyday and sooner or later, the job gets done.

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Garden Clean Up

The Broccoli and Cauliflower are finished, the Gman cut the last remaining few this morning. I'll blanch them and put them in the freezer.

Normally, we would give that area of the garden a quick weeding, rake it smooth and plant some other veggie in there, maybe radishes, lettuce, spinach - something fast growing in the hopes of harvesting before Fall weather sets in.

Not this year - we've decided to start putting the garden to bed for the Season once the veggies are out. Things are too "up in the air" for me right now - since I have to wait till end of August to find out what we'll be doing in September. I'd rather have as much of the garden area taken care of for the year "just in case".

If it turns out that I don't need further treatment well then, I guess we go fishing and camping, right????

So the Gman gave it a quick hoeing and raking, and I threw down the fall rye seed....

My container of garden fertility goodness!

I've been seeding this stuff in during the Fall every year since we've lived here - it really does break up the clay soil native to this area.

Once I did that, the Gman raked it in, just to cover and that's that! One small area of garden taken care of!

If we get time, we will shovel a good layer of composted manure over this bed. If it doesn't happen, it's not the end of the world, the important part is done. The fall rye sown here will begin to grow within a couple of weeks, and should get nice and tall before the frost moves in heavy. We'll just leave it alone, and next Spring, it will start to grow again. Then the Gman will rototill it back into the soil, adding lots of goodness and fertility.

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Cleaning Up in the Garden

While the Gman was whipping up his stew yesterday, I went outside to work for a bit. The Homesteader Peas are finished now (sniff, sniff) so I finished ripping down all the vines (they went off to the 3 Little Pigs), took down the netting that had held them up.....

The peas along the fence are Alaskan...these are the ones that I am drying to use in soup over the winter.....they should be finished in the next few weeks I think. To the right, under the row covers, are the green bush beans....I'll have to peek under there later today to see if I will get another picking.






After I got the netting done, folded up and (wow) put away, I started hoeing the area to get the durn weeds out.....















Here's my little container of goodness, it's Fall Rye. I use it every fall and try to cover the entire veggie garden with it. It's a Wonderful green manure! It will start to grow this year, then hibernate over the winter.....come Spring, when the snow melts off the garden, the Rye will have already started to grow.


We'll till it in, wait a week or two, then start planting the veggies. In our clay soil, this Rye has helped incredibly to improve our soil, making it loose and friable......



It's pretty cheap, we get it at the local Farm and Feed....we buy it by the 25 kg sack.


Took a few pics of other stuff too.....some of the zuccini plants are finished (they got pulled and thrown to the Pigs)...but some plants are still sending out nice looking zuccinis!









And the cabbage is still trotting along too....we've got 2 that are pretty durn big! Never did make it to the Fair this year (we had thought of entering some of the veggies, but we were too busy). The Gman wants to make cabbage rolls and of course, we'll have lots of coleslaw for when the parents are here next week. Sphere: Related Content