Easter and spring

Easter, even for us secular folks, means that spring has arrived. Here in the Southeastern U.S., it was a lovely day: warm, sunny, and glorious with spring flowers (wild, ornamental, herbaceous, and otherwise).

My gardening companion filled up the new raised beds with the rich 'created' topsoil this morning, so we're ready to plant next weekend (and build two more new beds!)

Back home in the Piedmont, I tidied the satellite garden, and turned over all of the soil blocks in the main vegetable garden. It's beautiful soil there, but it will either be fallow or filled with marigolds this summer, as an control for the root-knot nematodes that have been a problem in recent seasons (for susceptible cole, pepper, and tomato varieties).

The garlic is looking great in the satellite garden, and the onions are coming along. And the asparagus plants (grown from seed last year) have popped up new foliage, wispy to be sure! The robust asparagus crowns that I planted last week may be better contenders for permanent space, but we'll see.

I've got 3 artichoke plants to put somewhere -- probably in a spot that shallots didn't come up. I can't imagine woodchucks liking artichokes.... do you think?

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Fall vegetable gardening

It was a good day in the garden. Feeling much better today after a nasty bout with H1N1 last week, my gardening companion and I puttered happily doing (relatively) small garden projects. Tiring, of course, and it required a bit of rest on both of our parts, but it was delightful to be outside.

I cleaned up the rest of the satellite (vegetable) garden, and transplanted some asparagus seedlings that I'd grown from seed (a European variety called Precoce d' Argenteuil) which I'd purchased in an enthusiastic buying session last winter. They clearly must have been described in a evocative way. They were nice hefty young seedlings and I tucked them into a bed rich with organic matter.

I covered other beds with nicely decomposed straw, thanks to my hay bale experiment last spring. I didn't actually end up with crops from the hay bales (uh, woodchucks can climb, I guess), but the compost planting holes stimulated decomposition much more rapidly than usual. One of the double bales is still in good shape, so I'm going to leave it for a spring planting experiment. We'll see.

My plan is to plant garlic and shallots in some of the satellite garden beds this fall, but let the others get ready for spring greens. Other garlic cloves will be planted in the main vegetable garden, which I'm planning to cover in spring with a crab/shrimp shell fertilizer product that will encourage chitin-consuming micro-organisms. (The idea is that they will also yum up the root-knot nematode larvae, which have chitin in their composition). Hmm.

But letting the main vegetable garden beds be largely fallow over the summer growing season next year may be the most effective 'rotation' to decrease the populations of nematodes.

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New gardeners & growing your own vegetables

There's such a resurgent interest in growing vegetables here in the U.S.. Hooray! Even non-vegetable gardeners (based on our Garden's volunteer appreciation lunch today) have heard of the Eat the View campaign to encourage transforming part of the White House lawn to an organic vegetable garden.

In Victory Garden days, apparently 41% of the vegetables consumed in the U.S. came from home gardens.

I know from my experiences with my (relatively small) vegetable garden areas that we have vegetables/greens to eat from April to October/November, enough that I don't need to buy much fresh produce at the grocery store during that time. I haven't focused yet at growing enough to can, freeze, or otherwise preserve, but perhaps that's the next step.

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Vegetable garden rotations

A brief mention of rotating vegetables in a talk yesterday morning encouraged a question about how to rotate garden crops -- important for a sustainable (organic) kitchen garden, simple in concept, but sometimes challenging in practice.

The principle is simple: rotate crops that are grown in a single area by plant family. There are a number of plant families represented in common vegetables, but not so many that it's easy to avoid repeat plantings.

Ground rules:

Don't plant tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, or potatoes (tomato family: Solanaceae) in the same area for 3 (preferably four) years, ditto with kale, broccoli, cabbage (mustard family: Brassicaceae). Alternate plantings with lettuce, chicory, marigolds (in the Asteraceae, or daisy family), carrots, parsley, fennel, or dill (in the parsley family: Apiaceae), onions, garlic, and shallots (in the onion family: Alliaceae), beans and peas (in the pea family: Fabaceae), squash and gourds (in the squash family: Cucurbitaceae), or beets, turnip, or chard (in the beet family: Chenopodiaceae). Wheat, rye, barley, and oats aren't commonly grown in home gardens, but make a great cover crop rotation, being in the grass family: Poaceae.

Some plant families are more disease-prone (because we grow them all the time) than others. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, and green beans fall in that category.

It's important not to plant vegetables in the same family year after year because of pest buildup-- soil critters like root-knot nematodes, fungal problems such as fusarium wilt, and presence of larval pests like squash-vine borers LOVE having their hosts there year after year.

I'm learning that lesson first hand.

My main vegetable garden isn't that big. It's basically a long row of five blocks (roughly 5 X 5 ft) loosely adhering to the Square-Foot Gardening principles described by Mel Bartholomew. They're a little bit too big to reach in easily, but simple to dig by hand. Each block is separated by stepping stones and a mulched path, and edged by gray fieldstone.

I like to play around with my beds and mix up different vegetables, herbs, and flowers, and do NOT have a great record-keeping orientation, so after growing tomatoes, peppers, and 'cole' crops in various places in the blocks, I'm starting to see a build-up of soil-based problems for these common species in the main vegetable garden after the 10 or so years I've been gardening there, root-knot nematodes and fusarium wilt (I think) in particular.

The satellite garden, started 3 years ago, provides a more expansive opportunity for rotations and cover crops (very helpful for soil replenishment and dealing with soil difficulties).

So, I'm planning on being much more scrupulous about rotations (I WILL keep a plan of what I planted, I hope), using cover (and trap) crops, and introducing predatory (supposedly) beneficial nematodes, in the coming months.

There are lots of sites that provide useful information about rotations. A quick Google search finds Yankee Gardener, an Iowa State University site, and a Texas A&M site at the top of the heap.

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