Mother of Compost

I lied. I stated in an earlier blog that after I dug my early potatoes in June I was going to replant that spud area in bush beans and get a second crop. We had some bush green beans in the freezer and the pole beans were covered with promising blossoms and I had run out of bush bean seed and would have to go into town to buy more etc., etc. so I changed my mind (that sounds much better than plain old “I lied”).

I had not gotten any free composted horse manure this year. As I looked at the empty ground where my potato patch had previously been, I decided that there was a silver lining in this grey cloud of no manure; there was an opportunity to be more self-sufficient and independent of outside help here. My garden now was considerably more fertile than the pure sand I had begun with in the first year of my retirement but still nowhere near what I wanted and needed. What I wanted was enough organic material mixed into the soil to give me a rich foot deep top soil. Yes… this empty potato patch would be where this year I would build the mother of all compost piles. From what grew mostly on my own property I would get the fertility up to a level where it would only need small increments of green manure and cover crops to maintain it in future years.

Compost requires both brown material (high in carbon) and green matter (higher in nitrogen.) For the brown material I had the weathered leaves that fell from my maples last fall. I also had about eight bales of straw that I had set melons on to sell by the roadside last summer and then used as winter insulation behind my north side crawlspace entry and snuggled around some outdoor water spigots to prevent freezing. This combination of brown material I laid about one foot deep over the bare potato patch. As for the green material, a garden, especially a melon field always has culls and bad plants which are a simple wrist pitch away from the compost pile. Cooking from garden produce leaves a lot of rinds, peels and cores; this is always a good addition to the pile. We only eat a small part of a corn plant, so once we had eaten or frozen the sweet corn, the husks, cobs and chopped stalks were all added to the pile. To chop the stalks I laid them all in the same direction on top of the compost pile and then went at them with a sharp hoe. The key word here is “sharp”.

I always let my lawn get a little tall before I take the riding mower to it, partly to save on high- priced gas, mostly because extra work is against my retirement religion, but also so I can get some nitrogen-rich grass clippings to rake up for my vegetable garden. Grass clippings work great as green material to heat up the pile and towards the end of the summer that is where they go. Earlier in the summer I prefer to use them as mulch around heavy feeding and perennial plants which need a mid-summer feeding side-dressing to keep producing, notably rhubarb and asparagus. Grass clippings are my manure substitute and a mulch to keep weeds down. After that purpose is served it can go in the compost pile.

My main source of green material by far was weeds, especially the ragweed (which grows rampant on our property), poke and what I perceived to be thistle plants (although my plant knowledge is so botanically challenged that in truth I cannot tell my thistle from my thassole.) Using young weeds to enrich my vegetable garden felt like a firefighter using back fires to fight fire. All the organic reading material indicates that succulent young weeds are good in the compost. Ragweed is the bane of every nasal allergy sufferer so it felt like I was killing two birds with one stone as I scythed them from our semi-wooded area and hedgerows. Scything was good aerobic exercise and I worked up a good lather when I wasn’t resting in the shade. When I say I composted weeds, I don’t mean any grasses. No crab grass or Johnson grass went into the pile. Those grasses re-root right away whereas the broad leaf weeds are fine as long as they are cut before they have set any seed.

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words so the photo shows the base of my mother of all compost piles where my early potatoes once grew. I will add material to that base the rest of the summer, till it into the soil late in the fall and then sow a green manure crop of ryegrass. Maybe I won’t sneeze quite as much either.

Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Tomatoes

As I indicated in an earlier blog I devoted about one third of my 25’X50’ garden to a combination of corn, bush beans and cantaloupe. About another third of the garden is in potatoes, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. The white potatoes and tomatoes are of the same botanical family and the white potatoes and sweet potatoes have similar fertilization and avoidance of lime needs. Having both the potato and corn areas and the remaining third of everything else the same size makes annual crop rotation on a three year rotation basis somewhat easier. So in this “spud” third of the garden I’ve grown six short north-south rows of Lasoda potatoes, a row of bush beans, three rows of sweet potatoes, and four caged tomato plants with eight small peppers in front of the tomatoes.

The whole area appears to be one mass of greenery without visible aisles; I have an obsession with getting as much produce into as small an area as possible. Actually the harvesting aisles appear and disappear throughout the season. The outside perimeter of the garden serves as four picking aisles for produce which may need daily harvesting. The tomatoes and bell peppers are along the front side so that I can gather them as they ripen from outside the garden. Next year at the back side of the garden perimeter (on the north where they will not shade any other plants) I plan to plant pole beans on perfectly vertical, cut sapling poles and then harvest daily from outside the back of the garden. When the sweet potato slips are first planted before their vines begin to spread there are natural walking aisles between the hilled rows. When the vines begin to spread after about a month the aisles are closed into one mass of vined-bed vegetation. As the white potato vines begin to wither I harvest a north-south row of new potatoes into the east-west bush bean row in the center of the garden and then dig potatoes parallel to the bush beans. As I daily harvest new potatoes I am also opening up a picking row beside the beans. After a couple weeks of picking bush beans I can pull the plants and lay them down as a mulched central garden path for the sweet potato vines to gradually spread into. Meanwhile I will replant the dug potato aisles which I used to get into the beans to a second crop of bush beans and let that aisle close up again. If I use organic mulches of newspaper topped with leaves or straw and then have this close planting of vegetables as a canopy of living mulch to shade out any undesirables I have minimal weed problems, more retention of soil moisture, more total produce etc. So mostly my rows appear and disappear as needed.

One area where I have had a weed and grass problem is in the foot tall chicken wire perimeter fence I use to keep out rabbits. Left uncontrolled these fence row grasses and weeds would set seed which would blow into the garden. We replaced our living room carpet last year so I took the three foot wide strips of old carpet and laid them up against the fence. This killed out everything in short order and then could be dragged to another problem area. The carpet strips were too heavy to be blown away in the storms and smothered everything underneath them.

I have become somewhat disenchanted with black plastic as a mulch since it seems to require drip irrigation beneath and does not allow all the natural rain water to soak down into the plant roots. I like the natural way so this year I dug four bushel basket sized holes and filled them with the best compost and top soil I had. I bought Early Girl® variety tomatoes because I wanted to harvest at the beginning of July not wait until August. I pulled all but the top couple leaves off the plants and planted the roots and stem (which should produce roots once buried) in a shallow trench. Planting more horizontal and closer to the surface hopefully would keep the roots in the warmer topsoil and let them get an earlier start. I put down thick straw mulch from the bales that had protected my house’s north crawlspace during the winter. All the rain we have had has soaked through the straw mulch and into the compost giving me the best looking batch of caged tomatoes I’ve had in my four years of retirement. Today is July 4th and the first tomatoes are turning red. I think black plastic commercial mulch with drip irrigation is good for cantaloupes grown in full sun but I probably will not use it again for tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers or sweet potatoes.

The thing I appreciate most about this potato/tomato section of my garden is quantity. There is just a huge amount of produce beneath those potato and sweet potato vines and tomatoes are always over-producers. They also provide sequential produce; potatoes and tomatoes for the summer and fall, sweet potatoes stored for winter and spring. Both types of potatoes store well. My wife let me know I wasn’t bringing any potatoes into the house for storage until the vines were completely dried up and dead. Until that time the vine is still feeding the growing tubers and they keep just fine in the soil so I only dig them as needed every day or two. With eating from a garden there is not that much variety in produce; you are probably only eating from a dozen or so vegetables. For this reason cooking recipes and varied food preparation is essential to achieving variety. Cooking is my wife’s forte and (I like to think) her hobby. She makes a hash of fried potatoes, green beans, and chopped ham which is great topped with ketchup and served with a side of cucumber and onion slices marinated in sweet vinegar brine. She makes microwaved large new potatoes split open and filled with a mixture of cooked New Zealand spinach, cottage cheese and grated cheddar cheese. (Be sure to poke holes in a spud with a fork before you microwave it.) She makes both great German and terrific American potato salads. She makes delicious oven-baked French fries covered with chipotle seasoning and cayenne pepper. I do believe she could serve potatoes fixed differently every day of the week. In order to eat heavily from a home garden, cooking and a variety of tastes are important.

Still even a plain old meal of fried chicken, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes with black- peppered milk gravy, sliced tomatoes, and green beans cooked with bacon is not all that hard to get down. There were some good meat sales in the stores for the Fourth of July week-end. Because we have been eating vegetables from the garden a lot we could afford to stock our freezer with inexpensive pork loin and chicken. I do love the taste of pulled pork barbecue!

Sweet Corn, Green Beans, Cantaloupes (Squash)

We ate our first sweet corn toward the end of June. I wasn’t sure it was ripe but a coon got in the patch and confirmed to me that it was ready. As I got ready to plant early this spring I had doubts about growing my corn organically again this year. Everyone knows what a heavy nitrogen feeder corn is and I probably only had enough homemade compost made for my tomato holes and the new asparagus trench. I also did not get any horse manure this year so I considered adding some commercial fertilizer but eventually decided to just go pure organic another year and see what happened.

I had a good winter cover crop of rye grass and a lot of time on my hands in early spring. I sharpened a long handled shovel blade with a hand file. I skimmed off rows of rye grass sod, laid the sod to one side, and then dug a trench one-shovel deep laying the soil to the other side of the trench. To the bottom of the trench I added about an inch of old shredded leaves, a good sprinkling of wood ashes from my burn pile pit and chomped it all in with the shovel. In my mind this would form the sponge beneath the corn to prevent all the rain from draining straight through my sand soil. Next I skimmed off the ryegrass along with an inch of top soil from about one foot either side of the trench along with the sod I had laid beside the trench and inverted it all into the trench roots up, grass down. I hoed a furrow into the sod-filled trench and planted. Would that be enough fertility to raise sweet corn? I’d have to wait and see.

When the corn was about a foot tall, I hoed out the weeds and grasses and hilled it a bit. In half the rows I planted a row of bush beans about a foot out from the corn rows. The beans did well without extra fertilization and grew to thigh-high forming a good living shade mulch to keep down weeds. The corn ears and tassels were all well above the bush beans. When the beans were ready for their final harvest I just pulled out the entire plants and then picked the beans off while sitting in a lawn chair in the shade. I don’t like to be bent over a lot. The beans and the corn mature at about the same time; the corn is the heavy feeder and the beans the light feeders. We blanch excess beans and freeze them for later summer eating. Beans can tolerate some shade and the double leaf canopy of beans and corn keep weeds and grasses to a minimum; except for the initial hoeing before I planted the beans no more hoeing was required.

If we harvest corn ears down both sides of the bush bean rows and beans are planted between every alternate row then half the corn rows are available for planting either cantaloupe or butternut squash. The cantaloupe or squash or pumpkins grow undisturbed until the corn and beans are harvested and then spread to take over the entire field. I know butternut squash works well this way and I am trying the cantaloupe this year. So far the cantaloupe vines seem to be enjoying a little shade from the corn and not wilting like they do fully exposed to summer mid-day sun. The fruit may be slower developing and ripening. By the time I planted the cantaloupe seeds between every other corn row I had no compost for them and the rye grass cover crop had been scraped and given to feed the corn. The soil between the corn rows which I was planting to cantaloupe was relatively sterile and I would much prefer to put some manure under each plant but I just did not have it. Cantaloupe and squash benefit from some calcium/lime (as do corn and beans) and also have a strong Potassium need. Wood ash is strong in both of these so I went back to my burn pile where I had been burning branches and brush I had cleared during the winter and spread this ash between the rows. At present the cantaloupe appear to be doing well with only this fertilization.

This combination of bush green beans, sweet corn and squash or cantaloupe takes up about one third of my total garden space at present and I may eventually increase that up to half the garden. This combination seems to be able to be grown totally organically using the method I described and have either similar or complimentary fertilization and sunlight needs. After the cantaloupe (or squash) I can possibly get in a late crop of turnips after everything is harvested by early September. Right now it all looks like one big solid island of green growth with no visible aisles. An isle with no aisles.