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Organic Gardening
http://www.organicgardening.com/feature/0,7518,s1-2-9-92,00.html GROWING VEGETABLES. Tips on how to grow everything from asparagus to pumpkins organically. http://www.organicgardening.com/subchannel/1,7513,s1-5-16,00.html CREATING RICH, BLACK SOIL Curious about organic gardening? When I got into it around 1980 it was still considered a bit nutsky but was rapidly becoming mainstream. I was fired up by an article about CREATING fertile soil out of subsoil clay so poor that it wouldn’t even grow weeds. I come from a Montana farming family but had never heard of such a thing as creating rich soil. Every year my mother would wander the field next to our house, trying to find fertile soil for our garden. The field had clay soil that was not the greatest, and Mamma despised it. Fate had dealt her a lousy hand fieldwise, she believed, and Daddy agreed. Both came from generations of farming families, but they figured they had to play the hand they were dealt, year after year, give or take a little cow manure. Well, using the article I read about creating fertile soil, I took garden soil that was Virginia red clay, mixed with blue-gray subsoil clay, mixed with rocks, chunks of cement, broken bricks, and pieces of plastic toys, and turned it into rich black earth where plants simply boomed along. That’s a powerful feeling . . . makes you feel a little bit like God! If you’d like to give organic gardening a try – making some plants blissfully happy and making the world a little better place – here’s a good place to begin: http://www.the-organic-gardener.com/ Organic SUMMER MULCHES are key to soil improvement. Plus mulches mean you don’t have to weed – or dig up the soil in the spring. They are actually a form of SHEET COMPOSTING that will do great things for your garden’s fertility while keeping the soil loose and moist. Wait until your soil has warmed up and your vegetables or flowers are a couple of inches in height, then put a 2-inch layer of leaf mulch, straw mulch, or grass clipping mulch (whatever you can find in your area) around your little plants, leaving only their tops peering out. The mulch will keep down the weeds and gradually build up your soil. Herbicide-free grass clippings are great but turn an ugly color in the sun, and I like to top them with nice brown chopped leaf or bark mulch, which your local government may make available for free at its landfill site. Learn more about soil building from these articles:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/library/
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/gl_soil_water_mulch/ NEVER HAVE TO HOE AGAIN. Keep your garden mulched and you’ll never have to hoe it again! Really. The soil will remain soft and loose and get richer and better with each passing year. I’ve done it and it works. This video will help get you started. http://www.ehow.com/video_2754_mulch-garden.html WATCH IT ROT The above items tell how to sheet compost using mulch, my favorite form of composting. And now for the real thing: making compost in a proper compost bin. WATCH IT ROT, “The Compost Website That’s Really Rotten,” claims it has a compost webcam, where you can watch compost composting. Though, as it happens, the cam doesn’t seem to be operational just now. Instead they offer a picture of compost and tell you to “feel free to stare at this picture of compost if you like.” All joking aside, WATCH IT ROT will tell you how to use garden trash to make wonderful, crumbly black soil. And, unlike sheet compost, proper compost that heats up in the middle kills all the weed seeds by the heat of the composting process. |
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