Plans for a Small Garden

They say that hope springs eternal. They also say that fools never learn. Both adages probably apply as I sit here on a rainy February day and plan out a “postage stamp” garden. The garden will consist of four 3’x12’ beds which I refer to north to south as beds A, B, C and D. If you do the math the entire garden is less than 200 square feet even with a pathway between beds A and B. Any of the beds could be a micro-garden by itself, especially so the north bed A which contains the taller, more vertical and more prolific vegetables. I will describe the vegetables grown in each bed beginning with tomatoes, peppers, zucchinis, cucumbers and pole beans grown in bed A. I have tried this small garden scheme once before and I hope I have learned from the mistakes that I made then. I will report next fall on the quantities that I actually harvest. Feel free to read each of these entries as separate blogs.

T is for Tomato in Bed A

I dig deep holes for tomato plants, about two feet deep. Tomatoes have roots that can go down four feet. One old farmer told me that he dug tomato holes with a posthole digger. My two foot hole means I have some subsoil to dispose of outside the garden. Then I work a couple shovels of inverted rye grass sod into the bottom of the hole and fill it to within six inches of the top with compost mixed with half a cup of organic tomato fertilizer. Judging by the number of tomato plants which volunteer in my fall compost pile, they must really love compost.  This deep compost drought proofs the tomatoes and they should produce until frost.  Next, I take my tomato transplant out of its pot, pinch all the leaves off except for the top three and bury it into the compost up to those top three leaves. Eventually the tomato plant will grow out of this six inch deep hole and I will fill in and hill up the tomato plant which will grow that much more root system from its stem. When I do bury the stem, I will also bury an inverted bottle near the stem for efficient watering of my compost sponge. In the mean time, with the transplant down in the hole, I can cover it with a plastic milk jug at night and cold days and uncover it to daytime sunlight and warmth. My soil is well drained sand so I don’t need to worry about my transplant drowning in a hard rain.

As my tomato grows, I cage it, snip off some of the bottom limbs and suckers to prevent any splash up soil borne diseases and when the soil gets hot, I mulch with straw. Straw mulch moderates soil temperature, prevents soil splash in rains, but does not block the rain from penetrating the soil. I plant an Early Girl variety on one side of bed A and a main season Jet star variety on the other side. Tomatoes love lots of sun and should be planted apart so they don’t shade each other. Indeterminate tomato varieties are very regenerative and easily cloned. To get a late fall harvest of green tomatoes for after frost storage, I pinch off  eight to ten inch suckers  and put them in jars of water until they get some roots and in early July, I can replace worn out zucchini plants with semi-sprawling late tomatoes. These late tomatoes do not shade the caged tomatoes because I let them sprawl over straw mulch and some low structure, like a tomato cage opened and laid on its side.

I pick tomatoes at the first hint of red or when they are full sized and opaque green and then allow them a couple days to finish ripening on a kitchen counter. Do not refrigerate tomatoes or they will get mushy. Much ado is made about vine ripened tomatoes, but I find that if left on the vine when red, you will lose nine out of ten tomatoes to bugs and rot. When they are full sized and green, only the horned tomato worm and the tomato fruit worm seem to bother tomatoes. Horned worms can be handpicked and tomato fruit worm damage can be lessened by not planting near corn. The tomato fruit worm is also the corn ear worm. Mature opaque green tomatoes make excellent mock apple pies and there are a number of recipes for fried green tomatoes which we like as much as sliced red tomato salads and BLT sandwiches. Mature green tomatoes picked just before the first fall frost can be rapped individually in newspaper, laid in cardboard boxes and eaten as they ripen. Tomatoes are very versatile and prolific plants. The two plants and their late season clones in bed A should provide for our needs.

P is for Bell Pepper

Although peppers and tomatoes are relatives in the same botanical family, there are both differences as well similarities in their culturing. Like for tomatoes, I also plant bell peppers in compost amended holes but not so large or deep. I throw a few matchsticks into the compost amended with organic fertilizer because peppers like the sulfur in matches. For both tomatoes and bell peppers, I buy an organic fertilizer composed of dried poultry manure and feathers, bone meal, and potash rock. For the price and convenience, I do not feel it is worth the effort of finding and mixing these individual ingredients. My major contribution is the home-made compost that this bought “tomato fertilizer” with a NPK of 3-3-3 is mixed into.

Like the tomatoes, I plant the peppers as deep as I can, all the way up their stems to their leaves. The deeper planting will protect the roots from summer drought. Peppers like warm soil so I wait until mid May to plant them versus mid April for the tomatoes. Unlike tomatoes, peppers like to be a little crowded so that their foliage shades their stems and roots; for that reason I plant them one foot apart so that the foliage of the mature plants will just touch to shade the ground. Peppers may stop producing in the hottest days of summer, but do not pull the plants because they will produce in abundance again when the weather cools a bit until frost. Green bell peppers will eventually color to red, yellow, orange or whatever if left on the bush long enough. Like tomatoes, we pick ours at the first blush of color and take them into the kitchen to finish ripening. Sliced peppers freeze well and we have them year round to sauté with onions for omelets, pizzas etc. We especially like them in a pepper, rice, tomato and hamburger dish called Texas Hash.

Bell peppers have little insect problems but they are subject to lose from rots. Other mild peppers you might try are banana peppers.

Z is for Zucchini

All of the vegetables in bed A are prolific; just this one bed can produce lots of food for a family. Zucchini are notorious for their abundance so only two plants are necessary. Grated zucchini freezes well and so we use it year round for zucchini bread. Fresh picked it can make zucchini boats (think Stromboli), French fried wedges and numerous other ways.

I plant seeds or transplants about the beginning of May and give them some protection with a plastic milk jug without a cap. I plant over a “honey hole” filled with fertilizer amended compost at natural ground level. The main negative against zucchini is that they are very subject to insects and disease and normally do not make it through July. Mexican bean beetle (looks like a copper colored lady bug with 16 spots), squash bug and squash borer are the main villains. Some sort of row cover protection is needed until the first female flowers appear and even then cover the plants at night. One method is to make four-sided,
 topless, bottomless wooden boxes and staple cheese cloth or row cover cloth on top; another method is to make row cover cloches over wire or sapling arches and held down with boards and rocks. Two scrap boards with aluminum foil stapled to one side placed beside a plant may confuse the squash borer and allow squash bugs a board to hide under until you flip the board and stomp them in the morning. Another solution might be to plant a circle of onion sets in early March around the hill where you want to plant your zucchini in the beginning of May. These scallions could not only repel the bugs and borers but also serve as a support for row cover cloth anchored with stones. All the garden literature says that once a borer is in the vine, it should be slit out and killed and then the zucchini stem and some of the vine should be covered so that the plant may reroot. My feeling is that this advise is a case of too little too late; I prefer to rap a scrap rag or some aluminum foil around the stem and hill up the stem and a little of the foliage with soil as soon as possible to prevent the borer moth from ever laying its eggs. Always destroy any red BB shaped eggs of the squash bugs on the leaves. Neem oil is probably one the oldest and safest insecticides and I might spray this on the stem but not on the flowers as that could kill the bee pollinators.

I have driven my point into the ground about controlling insect pests and disease on squash plants because in my opinion if you can control them you will have a very bountiful harvest. I have seen Mexican bean beetles totally ignore a bush bean patch to eat and kill every zucchini plant that I grew.

Cucumbers and Pole Beans

Along the north side of bed A I dig in three inches of compost amended with a couple metal cans of organic fertilizer and pound in three metal fence post  angled a little to the north to  support a section of fence. Around the beginning of May, I plant pole beans on the north side of the fence about four inches apart and a week or so later I will plant cucumbers on the south side of the leaning fence, i.e. about the same time as I plant the zucchini in front of them. I believe cucumbers can take a little more shade than the other members of the cucurbit family, especially from the afternoon sun. They wilt a lot and most varieties turn bitter if they get too much heat. The zucchini should shade the roots of the cucumbers along with deep straw mulch. The cucumbers will climb up among the pole beans and get a little extra shade from the bean leaves. I will choose a variety of cucumber known for not turning bitter in the heat; keeping them picked daily and picking them before they get large as well as giving them plenty of water will delay or avoid them from turning bitter. Cucumber bitterness attracts the cucumber beetle, so planting non bitter varieties is actually a pest control; because the cucumber beetle infects the plants with disease, non bitter varieties are also disease control. Use row covers to protect cucumbers until female flowers appear.

Some books suggest planting cucumbers among sun flowers, but my experience has been that sunflowers have super root systems which suck up all the ground water. Sunflowers are one tough plant that can outcompete the other vegetables. Cucumbers, tomatoes and zucchini are all mostly water. If I do plant a couple sunflowers, just for beauty’s sake and to attract bee pollinators, (which they do exceedingly well), then those sunflowers will be isolated outside of the garden beds.

Japanese beetles really love pole bean leaves but mostly attack the highest leaves. Japanese beetles drop before they fly so in the early morning you can hold a pan of soapy water beneath an infested leaf and tap the leaf and the beetles will fall into the soapy water. In addition to providing an occasional mess of beans, the pole beans provide the cucumbers with something to climb on. We have a good recipe for freezer pickles that we enjoy year round in addition to summer tomato, onion and cucumber salads. Because the plants in bed A are so prolific and have so many culinary uses, a single 3’x 12’ vegetable plot can provide lots of food.

Carrots and Onions in Bed B

Carrots and onions make good companion plants. The onions need rich, moist soil for their shallow roots; carrots have deep roots which can catch nutrients which leach below onion roots. Onion leaves grow tall and can stand above thick shorter carrot tops which act as a living mulch to shade out weeds among the onions. The onion sets get planted around the beginning of March in 3’ rows about a foot apart so that I can easily drag a sharp hoe down the row to shave out weeds. Around the beginning of April I do a final weeding of the onions and finger poke coated carrot seeds every couple inches down the empty row between the onion rows. Coated carrot seeds are a little more expensive but eliminate the need to thin the carrots later.  I put some wooden slats over the carrot seed and check under the slats and mist the seeds until I see the carrots sprout. When the carrots sprout, I remove the slats and let the carrot tops spread between the onions. Any weeding I need to do, I do with a sharp old butcher knife, my favorite weeding tool.

As a row of scallions are harvested during the summer they can be replaced with more succession carrots, hopefully keeping a steady supply until late fall. Onions and carrots constitute bed B of my postage stamp garden.

Succession Planting Potatoes, Bush Beans and Turnips

Around the middle of March and after I have worked in several inches of compost, I plant a couple rows of Yukon Gold seed potatoes in bed C of my postage stamp garden. I have sprouted these seed potatoes by exposing them to warmth and light for a couple weeks in the house. When the sprouts are half an inch long, the seed potatoes are ready to be planted. Sprouting seed potatoes will mean a couple weeks earlier harvest maturity.  I plant the seed potatoes about 6” deep. If a frost threatens after the potato shoots have broken ground, I hill over them with some soil to protect them. In the past I have used egg sized seed potatoes because I thought that not cutting the potato would reduce the chance of the potatoes rotting in cold soil. Lately I have read that small seed potatoes may carry the genetics for small potatoes and large potatoes cut into pieces may carry the genetics for larger potatoes. This year I am going to plant a row of small and a row of large cut seed potatoes to see if there is a difference in yield. I plant the seed potatoes one foot apart and hill them twice. Yukon Gold potatoes taste great, store well if kept covered with a large towel in a laundry basket and they also produce early. Planted mid March, I expect to harvest them in early June. Remember that you can only do such early plantings if you have well drained sandy soil. If you do not have sandy soil then raised beds may help some to warm and dry your soil.

After I harvest the Yukon Gold early potatoes, I plant fast growing bush beans which can be harvested by the beginning of September. I plant three rows of bush beans in rows about one foot apart so that I can easily drag a sharp hoe from either side of the garden and shave out weeds when they first emerge. Get them small is the secret to weed control. If it doesn’t rain, I water the beans to get them up quickly. When the bean plants are about 10” tall I hill them to bury and kill any in-row weeds. After they are hilled, I can either straw mulch between the rows or plant more beans down the middle of the foot wide gap between the rows to provide living mulch to shade out weeds and increase the bean harvest.

When the bush beans have been pulled up and harvested in early September, I add some organic fertilizer then plant some fast growing turnips to be harvested before the first hard frost in November. These turnips along with carrots or winter radishes can be stored in containers of damp sand in the garage. At some point in winter, the stored Yukon Gold potatoes will be used up and then the turnips and sweet potatoes can be used as substitutes. Sweet potatoes will store until after the next crop of new potatoes come in and they make excellent French fries and hash browns; turnips can replace white potatoes in stews. Cooked turnip greens with onions can be eaten in the fall, allowing green beans frozen in the freezer to stretch through the winter. The seed catalogs claim that some Japanese turnip varieties such as Tokyo Cross are especially quick to mature and milder tasting than the traditional purple top turnips.  Three succession plantings take a lot of nutrients and require amending the soil and weeding between each planting.

A Salad Garden Followed by Sweet Potatoes

The southernmost bed D begins as one row of cabbage transplants planted early in April, one row of leaf lettuce planted at the beginning of March and a row of German Giant radishes planted mid March. By mid May the lettuce and radishes will have been eaten as spring salads and the cabbage row covered with rock anchored floating row cover to protect it from white cabbage butterflies and their offspring.

In mid May in the space vacated by lettuce and radishes, I will plant a row of a dozen Beauregard or Georgia Jet sweet potato slips. The traditional way to plant sweet potato slips is to hoe up a 10” ridge and use a hoe handle to poke holes into the ridge about a foot apart; the slips are put in the holes, the holes are filled with water and smashed down tight around the slip to form a shallow basin. This bowl basin is watered every day for a week until the slip takes root and then it is pretty well left on its own. The slips are kept cultivated and weed free until they begin to vine and spread. The sweet potato is a poor soil crop and probably can get by on what fertility the lettuce and radishes left behind. When the sweet potato plant begins to vine, I put down a newspaper and leaf mulch for the vines to grow over. This mulch is mostly for weed control. I will allow the vines to spread right over the top of the cabbages and reach under when I need one.

As I said planting slips vertically into ridges is standard practice and has its advantages, especially when it comes time to dig sweet potato roots before the first fall frost. But I am tempted to try something different and plant the slips horizontally, in shallow troughs a couple inches deep and running north and south. The slightly raised bed will still run 12’ east and west and the plants will still be about one foot apart in the row but the actual slip will be buried in a shallow north-south trench with only a few leaves showing. This is very similar to the way some gardeners plant tomatoes. Like tomato stems, sweet potato stems have the ability to put down roots from buried horizontal stem. I am experimenting to see if this type of planting will significantly increase root yields.  The seed catalogs claim that both Beauregard and Georgia Jet varieties grow in the north and yield up to 10 pounds per plant. I would be happy to get half of that.

Whatever sweet potatoes I get can be used to replace white potato French fries, baked potatoes and hash browns during the winter and also substitute in recipes for the winter squash and pumpkins which take too much room to grow in a small garden. I have really had good luck storing sweet potatoes all winter in baskets in our cool back room. They are good keepers.

Except for a couple rhubarb plants to make spring pies and a couple chard plants tucked in somewhere for summer greens and a celery substitute, that pretty well describes my small 200 square foot garden plan. It is small enough to work with hand tools but large enough to put a dent in a grocery budget.

Thoughts on Tomato Cages

                Home-made tomato cages usually take one of two forms. Either a little over six feet of four –foot  fencing is rolled into a cylinder  or two four- foot lengths of fence are bent into “L” shapes so that when put together around a tomato plant the two pieces form a cubic cage. The principle advantage of the “L” shapes is that they store in a very small space, one atop the other. I tie my tomato cages with strong twine from any straw bales I open rather than wire them into cage shapes. This allows me to easily open up the cages when the tomato season ends with the first frost of October and use both the cylinders and the “L” shapes as the framework for cool weather cloches for crops like lettuce, kale, radishes or carrots. Another cold weather use for cylinder cages is to open two of them up and retie them together to form a cylinder twice as large as the originals to hold compost rotting over winter or to hold the brown material autumn leaves that are raked in November. Whenever you decide to turn the compost, just pull the fence cylinder off the material and then refill it. These compost cylinders sit right in the garden so the material is handy and available for the next gardening season. A third winter use for tomato cages is to hold down winter mulches, such as those over asparagus, rhubarb, or carrots. Strong winter winds can blow mulches and sheet composting of leaves and straw off of the beds and out of the garden. Just flatten the cylinder cages a little and lay them over the leaf and straw mulches. Next May all the cages can be reformed and retied with a couple short strands of straw bale twine and they are again ready as tomato cages again. In summer, a tomato cage also makes a good structure to allow a hill of three cucumber plants to climb up.

A Third Choice: Trench Planting/Hilling

                Most organic gardening literature encourages using raised beds or double-digging (trenching) or a combination of the two to incorporate organic matter into the soil. I am experimenting with a third method for my well drained, droughty, sandy soil which begins by looking like double-digging and ends up looking like a raised bed but actually is neither and I think better than both. For the first step, I skim off my winter cover crop of ryegrass and put it on the walking path to the south of my east-west running wide-row growing bed. Next I dig out a shovel –wide, shovel- deep furrow and put that top soil in the garden pathway to the north of the bed.  The pathway to the north of the bed is now all top soil and the pathway to the south is all ryegrass sod. Next I invert the cover crop sod, roots to the sky, from the south pathway into the furrow trench and chop it into the subsoil bottom. (To this point, it sounds a lot like the double-digging method.) Then I pull a couple of inches of the top soil  from the pathway to the north of the bed into the furrow and let the whole trench rot and warm up as a stale seed bed and  skim- hoe out any weeds that emerge over  the next couple of weeks.  After a couple weeks I plant vegetable seeds into the furrow and allow the sweet corn or beans or what have you to grow up out of the trench and once they are tall enough I pull in the rest of the top soil from the north pathway and fill the furrow around the plant stem to natural ground level.  As the corn or bush beans or tomatoes etc. continue to grow taller, I hill them up with top soil from both the north and south pathways to the point that the hilled- up vegetable bed looks like a raised bed to the eye but it is not because the seed and its roots are not above the natural level of the ground as with a raised bed, but are deep in the soil on top of an organic water sponge with many inches of soil between them and the hot drying sun. The moisture is down deep and that is where roots are and that is what makes this method different from either double digging or raised beds. Many people probably use this method for growing their white potatoes but I think it can be used with a lot of other vegetable. If you have poorly drained soil, like clay, this furrow planting/hilling method will not work because when it rains you will just end up with a mud puddle. Another advantage to hilling is that three water- catching trenches are formed: both pathways are lowered to form trenches as soil is dragged out of them to hill the vegetables and a third trench appears atop the growing bed itself as it is hilled up, especially if two rows of vegetables are planted in each wide growing bed. This top trench makes it very easy and fast to water two rows of vegetables at once, even with just a watering can. Add a couple inches of temperature- moderating organic mulch on the sides of the hilled vegetables and you have gone a long way toward drought proofing your sandy soil.

Indicators of Going Green and Sustainability

Are there other factors which tend to run concurrent with being green, having a small carbon footprint, and sustainability? Two things I have seen in my life which usually but not always trend with a sustainable life style are frugality or saving money and a reduction of trash and waste.

There is zero waste/trash in nature without mankind. In nature everything has a use, is recycled and is reused. As much as we can emulate nature in this regard, the better. Yet I go by so many residences and see two huge trash cans overflowing with extra filled trash bags beside them on their once a week pickup day. Yes, the having  one trash can just for recyclables pickup is a great improvement if people will use them but still there is way too much non-recyclables going to the landfill or being dumped in the ocean.  Plastics are the worst culprits; they are built into products to last a couple years (planned obsolescence so we must go out and rebuy the product in a couple years) but the same plastics last in the environment for five hundred years. By comparison, even metal cans eventually rust away.

I do not have a trash pickup service but make a trip to a county trash and recyclable center three miles from our home once every month or two. Let me repeat that I take my trash once every couple months. How so? All my yard wastes and garbage and part of our paper products are turned into garden compost or mulch. Since we eat a lot of our own home garden produce, that puts a lot less metal cans, glass jars and plastic containers into our recyclable cans. What plastic containers we do have, like milk jugs etc, I smash flat by stepping on them so that I am not hauling around air. Ditto for the small amount of aluminum cans we generate. It used to be that metal cans had rims on either end and could be opened from either end. I remember my mom cutting the lids out of both ends of metal cans. Then she put the cut lids into the cans and smashed the whole thing flat. If I could do that today I would only need to take in one trash bin of metal cans a year to recycle them. Some plastic containers like butter tubs and quart yogurt containers can be stacked one inside another and so a year’s worth of tubs take up very little space. We use reusable canvas shopping grocery bags and so do not build up those ubiquitous plastic bags. What paper and cardboard that I do not either use as compost or recycle, I burn. I burn only paper, mainly mail and cereal boxes, and never any plastic. I make the fire in a hardware cloth cage so that it gets plenty of air and does not smolder. I never burn on a windy day or during a drought when vegetation is dried out. So I have very little actual trash, mostly just plastic food wrappers and styrofoam  egg cartons. I really should switch back to cardboard egg containers that are compostable; there is always room for improvement.

I think that being frugal is also usually a sign of a lighter carbon footprint. For example in the above paragraph, we have considerably monthly budget savings by not subscribing to a weekly trash pickup service. That is a win win for our pocketbook and the environment. Likewise, if we reduce our monthly natural gas and electricity bills we are saving money at the same time we are burning less fossil fuel. By driving our newer, lower gas mileage car most of the time and using our older less fuel efficient car as a backup vehicle we have saved about $20 dollars a week on gasoline; that is $80 a month that can go toward the loan on the newer vehicle, while lengthening the life of the backup vehicle and again burning less fossil fuel. If what we cook and eat from our organic garden reduces our grocery bill, it also reduces trash waste and the need for food to be shipped from distant growing areas. So in general, saving money by being frugal and creating less trash waste are indicators that we are at the same time living more sustainably.

Deep Fertility in a Medium Sized Garden

I have already discussed a couple methods of increasing the deep fertility and water holding capacity of garden soil i.e. ways of putting organic material into the top foot to eighteen inches of garden top soil. This is especially important in very droughty sandy soil which by itself is both low in fertility and unable to hold hardly any moisture. For the small but productive postage stamp gardens one can enrich the soil with the double digging method also called trenching. I discussed another method of deep furrow planting followed by hilling. For the medium sized garden where double digging would prove too labor intensive one could use the hill method of growing which is probably most similar to the method used by the native Americans to grow their “three sister” crops of corn, beans and squash with only one tool, the stone bladed hoe. First the “hill” doesn’t always have to be an actual mound; it is just a close planting of seeds in a circular area of relatively rich soil. This soil is enriched by “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” The circular area is enriched by pulling the surrounding area topsoil with the hoe and concentrating it in the three foot diameter “hill.”

Better yet this hill could actually be a hole, a honey hole into which the gardener has dumped skimmed off inverted turf, compost, and a cup of organic fertilizer. There is never enough compost and in a medium sized garden and this is one of the best ways to make it stretch. For melons, squash, cucumbers, corn etc. I dig a hole about a foot deep, trying not to bring any subsoil out of the hole. Topsoil is dug out but not subsoil. I then skim off the top inch of winter ryegrass turf surrounding the hole and invert it into the three foot diameter foot hole and dig some of it into the subsoil. Next I pour in a five gallon bucket of compost into the hole and mix it with the topsoil I had dug out earlier and add my store-bought organic fertilizer. My “hill” or “honey hole” is ready for planting. These hills are in a row with four to six feet between each hill. If every year I move my new hill three feet then after three years the entire row if deeply fertilized with a water holding sponge of organic matter. If I have used this method throughout the garden then the entire garden is of good tilth and drought proofed. I also dig similar holes for tomatoes and bell peppers but the holes are deeper (about two feet deep; I wheel barrow the subsoil out of the garden). The honey holes are about two feet wide with two feet in between hills. I like this method because it makes very good use of scarce compost, drought proofs plants, and reduces the amount of hand digging. The results are long lasting.

What the (Frugal) Poor Man Knows

The frugal man knows that his “ fast foods” are soup and salads. Soups are made from vegetables from his garden and cooked in large batches. This is how the frugal made it through the Depression.

The frugal man knows if company comes you add water to the soup.

The frugal know that oatmeal, rice, and barley all soak up a lot of water.

The frugal know for the price of one large soda a bottle of lemon concentrate can be purchased to make a month’s worth of lemonade.

The frugal man knows that with a fifty-cent, day old French bread loaf sliced in half, he can use his own home made salsa sauce and  a little shredded cheese, to quickly bake or microwave his own pizza stromboli.

The frugal man knows that a toasted cheese sandwich fried with butter and dressed with dill pickles, mayonnaise and garden tomato and lettuce is almost as satisfying as a cheeseburger.

The frugal man knows hot buttered toast with fruit jam is similar to a doughnut shop pastry. Likewise, canned biscuit dough baked on a pan with butter, brown sugar and nuts is as good as cinnamon rolls.

A frugal man knows that a box of overripe bananas can be bought for a pittance then peeled and frozen and put into a food processor to make a nutritious smoothie to match any milk shake.

In short, the frugal man knows how to make inexpensive substitutes for overpriced goods.

Natives and Irrigation

What are the plants you should never need to water? The answer is the ones which are growing wild in your neighborhood, the native plants. If they can grow wild in your area then they can grow in your garden without watering. We had a hard drought almost all of last summer. I had expected the melons, especially the watermelons which probably originated in the Kalahari Desert of Africa to handle the drought the best. I also thought the sweet potatoes, a crop that grows in the hot South and has a long tap root to handle drought well. Both the water melons and sweet potatoes did fairly well in the drought but both required some watering. The only plants which required no irrigation at all was the sunflowers whose wild relatives grew along a nearby creek bank.

The same holds true for ornamental plants in the yard, although sunflowers could just as easily be grown as  ornamental plants as in the vegetable garden. We have also started mimosa trees on the property which are beginning to spread like the weeds which many people consider them to be, but are covered with beautiful fragrant flowers all summer long.  The wild Hoosier ditch lilies have covered one of our road banks for years. Neither the mimosas nor the ditch lilies have ever been watered except by rain. So take a good look around your neighborhood to see what is growing wild and then consider if the wild plants has any close relatives which might be grown as vegetables or fruits. Someday we may not have fresh water for our gardens and yards but the natives should continue to survive on natural rainfall. 

Strange Rotation

For the organic gardener, rotating vegetables within a garden is important both to confuse insect pests and to allow plant diseases time to die out due to the absence of their plant family host. In a small garden in which the beds for each vegetable are close together this may be less than totally successful. If you rotate the white potato bed with the zucchini bed, it will not be too great a task for the potato bugs to find the new potato bed three feet from last year’s potato bed. Also the squash bugs and borers will find their way the three feet to the new zucchini bed. One solution would of course be to separate your beds to the four corners of your back yard but that could cause lighting issues and other problems.

An unorthodox solution might be to not have a plant family in the small garden for three years but to have its culinary equivalent in the garden instead. Sweet potatoes, butternut squash and carrots all come from different plant families and are not much bothered by the same insect pests but from a culinary point of view they all cook up to about the same thing. Similarly, French fries can be made from white potatoes, sweet potatoes or zucchini wedges. Zucchini and cucumbers have similar uses and could be alternated even if they both are in the same family. Some salad greens are in the lettuce family, some in the cabbage family and some in the beet family so one might rotate lettuce with kale and then with chard. Cooked greens could be substituted for green beans one year. Green beans and asparagus are also good culinary substitutes for one another.  White potatoes and rutabagas are from different families but both of them cook up to “mashed potatoes” and serve as similar stew ingredients. The bottom line is that if the small, postage stamp gardener can find enough culinary equivalents  then he can starve insect pests out of existence by planting similar tasting vegetables from different plant families on alternating years.

Fruits and Nuts in the Vegetable Garden

I have long felt that a vegetable garden was a better investment of my time and money than an orchard or raising my own meat. Simply consider that for the cost of a single apple tree I can cover the expenses of an entire vegetable garden for a year. For that expense one must wait several years for any return from a fruit tree but only two or three months for a return from the annuals in the garden. Both green tomatoes and zucchinis make excellent mock apple pies. Cherry pies are outshined by strawberry-rhubarb pies. Melons are equal to any peaches in summer and in the fall and winter, sweet potato pies and pumpkin or winter squash pies and puddings are the standard fare.

So fruits are pretty well covered in the garden for pies and jellies without even considering the wide array of bush and bramble fruits grown around a vegetable garden, but what if I want some nuts in my zucchini bread or in my oatmeal raisin cookies? There are three nut substitutes that can be grown in a vegetable garden. The first is peanuts, a legume which also adds nitrogen to the soil. Peanut plants can also add a lot of fodder to the compost heap.  The second nut substitute is sunflower seeds. A row of sunflowers adds a lot of beauty to a vegetable plot. The third nut substitute is the one which I plan to go with this year, “naked” pumpkin seeds. Although all pumpkin seeds can be roasted in the oven, the hulless “naked seed” varieties work best. Just because you grow a vegetable garden does mean that you must deprive yourself of sweets and nuts. 

Can Vegetable Gardening Save Money on your Grocery Bill?

The best answer to that question is, it depends. If you do not change your eating habits and cooking then, no, not much. The average shopper does not spend very much of his grocery budget in the fresh produce aisle and some of the items he does buy there cannot be grown in the vegetable garden, e.g. bananas, pineapple. Furthermore, much of what a gardener can grow in his garden is inexpensive in the produce aisle, e.g. potatoes, onions and carrots. Many prospective gardeners, when they realize what I have just said decide that vegetable gardening just is not worth the trouble; besides, they kind of enjoy shopping anyway.

If however you also change your cooking and eating habits toward a nutritionally healthier vegetable diet, what my family calls “good old Depression food”, making one meal per day a vegetable soup and another a plate lunch with two vegetable sides then you are not so much replacing what you would have bought in the produce aisle as replacing the expensive prepared ready to serve convenience foods from the frozen food aisles, and that is where the real savings on the grocery bill comes in. For this reason I have always said that when it comes to being frugal, cooking is more important than gardening but gardening vegetables causes the necessary change in cooking. If you grow vegetables, then you will find a way to cook and eat them. I have always felt that there were two kinds of chefs. The first buys expensive ingredients from the store to follow a recipe exactly. The second kind looks at what you have available in the fridge, larder, pantry, and root storage and says, “Oh, turnips, turnip greens, onions and butternut squash, yeah, I can make something good out of that.” This is not to say that a lot of time must be given to food preparation if one is to eat frugally. A large pot of potatoes can be boiled once a week and then put into the fridge to be micro waved and eaten throughout the week. A large slow cooker crock pot of soup can cook over night or while one is at work, part of it eaten over several days and part of it frozen to add variety to future menus. Ditto for hashes and goulashes. Red beans and rice with liberal hot sauce is one of my favorite quick micro wave convenience meals. Salads can be pulled from the fridge and ready in seconds. Vegetable gardening teaches us how to eat and cook frugally just in case hard times come knocking. My wife and I currently eat well and healthily on a grocery budget of less than $200 per month and that includes toiletries, laundry soaps and other miscellaneous bought at a grocery store.

Organic Gardening

"I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as the one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden.”
 -  Abraham Cowley

French Eden

                Gardening…cooking…frugality…retirement, I am not truly enough of an expert to write an authoritative book about any of these topics. Well, maybe frugality…I can claim to be a parsimonious tightwad without much danger of hubris. There are many books written on each of these topics by persons far more knowledgeable than me and I will gladly name some of their works throughout my writing. Rather than look at gardening, cooking, frugality and retirement individually, what I hope to accomplish is to join these four topics to each other and demonstrate how they can constitute a holistic lifestyle…a holistic and happy retirement…the “good life.” “Holistic,” now there is a 50-cent word if I ever used one! What it means is that the various symbiotic parts are harmoniously integrated in such a way that the resultant whole is more than the sum of the parts…that somehow it all works together. That is the story of my own retirement; obviously a lot of us retirees want to have a good time in retirement but many of us didn’t get enough saved, so frugality is a fact of life that goes with our retirements. Growing our own food and cooking what we grow, are tied into reducing expenses and frugality. Gardening and cooking give us ways to engage positively with our spouse and pass the day without boredom or expense. You and your spouse are going to spend a lot of time in close proximity in retirement …compatibility of egos is key to a good retirement. “If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.” My advice is to make yourself a humble peeler of vegetables and dish washer when it comes to the kitchen and to stay out of her flower and herb garden. Gardening gives us daily exercise and sunshine and that relates to good health; less expenditure on healthcare saves money and that relates back again to frugality. So I will describe my own retirement and how these four topics have interrelated in my experience. I view the “good life” as a cottage surrounded by gardens and gourmet meals cooked with my wife…a French Eden. 

                When I asked my grandma what life was like during the Great Depression, she answered, “We were poor but we were happy.” Answering the question, is this possible to be both poor and happy, has become my goal. As good paying jobs are taken over by robots, computers, and artificial intelligence, it is likely that the disparity between Haves and Have-nots will increase. As the limited area of agricultural land is ever subdivided amongst an ever larger population and the poor are stacked and layered in decaying cities, it is likely that Thomas Malthus’ prediction of war, famine and disease will occur. It was because of him that economics received it label as “the dismal science.” Can the idle hands and the disenfranchised find happiness and meaning or only mischief and mayhem?

                                                             

Spring garden

 Garden Talk

                 I am a retiree. I live in rural Gibson County, Indiana and I love to organic vegetable garden. My soil is a very sandy, well-drained, early warming soil, even naturally growing prickly pear cacti. Therefore any recommendations I may make, especially with regard to planting and harvesting dates, probably would not apply to gardeners with other soil types, especially those with heavy clay soils which are much slower to heat up in the spring and can be badly damaged by cultivation when cold and muddy. My garden is 50’ x 50’, about 2,000 sq. ft. of vegetables if I subtract out the aisles and walking paths. This garden consists of a dozen 50’ long x3’ wide rows or gardening beds each with a 1’ wide access path. This garden is small enough to fit in the back yard of many suburban and some city lots if that backyard is sunny. It is also small enough that I can garden it using only hand tools, (a rake, hoe and long handled shovel) the secret being I only dig one of the twelve rows per day and not the entire area at one time.  If I were to buy a $600 rear tined tiller to get the job done in one day and then sit in the garage the rest of the year my vegetables would suddenly become too expensive to make any economic sense and I would lose my garden quiet time and morning workout on sunny February and March days.

                 I want to talk about a much smaller 12’x16’ garden, only about one tenth the size of the garden that I usually grow and to use my plan for this “Postage Stamp” garden to illustrate 13 intensive and organic practices to maximize the vegetable output from a small area. I became interested in these small garden techniques last year when I read The Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden by Karen Newcomb.  Such gardens will fit more easily into city-dwellers’ back yards and are more relevant to beginning gardeners whose chances of success will be increased if they start small. Let’s look at some of the advantages of this smaller garden in comparison to my larger garden:  fertilizer and compost can be more concentrated and better increase the soil fertility, one tenth of the city water is needed to irrigate the garden, one tenth of the time and labor are required to keep up the garden and probably most importantly for the beginning gardener, weeds and grasses can be controlled and stopped from overwhelming the garden with just a few minutes of hand weeding and hoeing per evening. Following is a diagram of my postage stamp garden.

                Let me begin by describing the postage stamp garden plan and then enumerating the 13 intensive gardening practices to maximize gardening output which will be illustrated by the garden diagram. The garden consists of three vegetable beds “A, B, C” and a couple rhubarb or pie plants planted off by themselves. Bed A measures 3’x12’ and is made up of prolific plants, some of which are planted vertically in cages, on a fence and up poles. This bed A could be considered a micro garden in itself for those who want to begin with a garden even smaller than the postage stamp garden. The first six produce-maximizing practices will be explained in terms of this bed A.  Bed B is also 3’x 12’ and will be used to grow onions followed by carrots. Bed C is 6’x 12’ (actually two repeating 3’x12’ beds joined together without a separating access path); this bed C is a “potato patch” with white and sweet potatoes growing together.

The 13 garden produce maximizing intensive/organic practices illustrated by the postage stamp garden’s three beds are:

(1) variety selection

(2) prolific plants

(3)vertical gardening

(4)wide rows and raised beds

(5)making prolific plants more prolific

(6)spring-summer-fall succession planting

(7)mulching

(8)companion planting

(9)slow/cool composting, sheet composting, deep mulching

(10) fast/hot composting

(11)cover crops/green manures

(12)pre-planting weed controls

(13) crop rotation.

                Because some of these gardening practices can double and triple garden output per area, a small postage stamp garden can produce a great amount of food in a small space. Now I will illustrate sequentially each of these 13 intensive gardening concepts in the context of these beds A, B, and C.

                The capital letters shown in the diagram of bed A indicate the location of summer vegetables grown in bed A; T stands for tomato, P for bell pepper, C for cucumber, Z for zucchini, W for winter squash and B for pole bean. The red in the diagram shows the vertical structures (wire cages, wire fence, and wooden poles) which some of these vegetables grow on or in.

                Practice#1. One way to double the output of your garden is to find a superior variety particularly adapted to your soil type and climate. When gardeners gather they do not say “I am going to grow tomatoes in my garden.” Gardeners talk in terms of what varieties they consider best and say, “I am going to grow a Celebrity or a Better Boy or Early Girl.” How do we find these superior varieties? One way is to ask a knowledgeable experienced neighbor who is familiar with your particular soil type. Last year I asked the fellow who runs our local recycling center, “What is a good tomato to grow in sandy soil?” He told me to try Pink Girl.  I took his advice and the Pink Girl far out-performed any of my other dozen tomatoes. Another way to find a superior vegetable is to check the seed catalogues for AAS winners (All American Selection winner).  Another way to find a superior vegetable variety is to find out what most of the professional vegetable farmers plant; since this is their livelihood, vegetable farmers have done their homework well when it comes to variety selection. My favorite determinate tomato variety is Celebrity which is an AAS winner and is grown by many farmers in Florida, a state with a lot of sandy soil. Likewise I have read that 80% of all sweet potato farmers once grew Beauregards, a sure sign that Beauregard was the superior variety. If you want to grow the most vegetables from a small area, then continue to research and experiment with varieties.

                The second intensive gardening practice on my list is growing prolific, high-yield plants and this is the case of almost all the plants in bed A of our Postage Stamp Garden. Tomatoes are the favorite and often only garden plant that Americans grow. Part of the reason for the tomato’s popularity has to be that the tomato plant puts out so much fruit for its grower. One grower in Mississippi grew over 200 tomatoes from a single indeterminate vine so it should not be too much to hope for to try to grow 50 or so from a main-season Jet Star or Pink Girl and 30 from determinate Celebrity varieties. Likewise the zucchini, cucumber, bell peppers, and pole beans are all naturally prolific plants grown in the micro garden I am calling bed A. Consider that when you do your weekly grocery shopping in the fresh produce aisle you might grab a couple cucumbers, bell peppers, zucchinis and half a dozen tomatoes for the up-coming week but a single one of those plants in bed A can produce such amounts in a single day. We will need to change our eating habits and eat more vegetables in our diet and store some in our freezer for winter use at the rate that these naturally prolific plants produce.

                The third intensive gardening practice which is illustrated by bed A in our postage stamp garden is vertical gardening. We have tall plants growing on the north side of our garden (where they will not shade out shorter plants); these vining plants grow in cages (tomatoes), up fences or trellises

(cucumbers, winter squashes) and up poles or strings (e.g. green beans). This practice of vertical growing has been compared to skyscrapers in population-dense big cities which take up no more ground area than a one story office but hold a hundred times more offices and people because they rise a hundred floors high over their relatively small ground space. A couple cucumber plants if left to sprawl on the ground might well cover sixteen square feet of space but if grown vertically the same two plants need only one square foot of room for their roots. Likewise a sprawling tomato that might cover nine square feet would only require a couple feet of space if caged and one square foot if staked. The tomatoes would also be much healthier with fewer lost rotten fruits if grown in the air rather than allowed to be in contact with the soil, thus further increasing output from each plant.

                The fourth intensive gardening practice illustrated by the postage stamp garden is wide-row gardening. As a tip of the hat to flower gardeners I refer to the wide rows in my garden as “beds” because flower gardeners have always planted their plants in wide, thickly planted beds (or rows) rather than the narrow straight single-file rows with wide walking paths on either side which are typical of the traditional vegetable garden. The garden literature indicates that this switch from furrow planting to wide-row or bed planting can quadruple output per space in a vegetable garden. Wide-row gardening is often associated with raised bed gardening (which might improve drainage and allow for earlier planting for a gardener with heavy clay soil) but in fact a wide-row practice could just as easily be associated with a trench for the gardener with sandy soil who wishes to get his plant roots closer to soil moisture. So I see no necessary connection between wide-rows and raised beds, the latter of which relates more to soil types and the preferences of particular vegetables, e.g. the preference of sweet potatoes to grow on ridges. Now let me ask a couple relevant questions. When you walk on a path, through a field or woods, how do you know where the path is that you are walking on? Answer, the path soil is bare, devoid of vegetation. Why is the pathway bare? Because the path soil has been compacted by people walking on it. The lesson learned is that compacted, walked-on soil does not grow vegetation or vegetables. Therefore once prepared, never walk on or step foot on your wide row garden beds or your vegetable output will be greatly decreased.

                The fifth gardening practice we are interested in is using techniques which make the naturally prolific plants in bed A even higher yielding. One technique is to pick vegetables immature and often. If a zucchini is allowed to grow to maturity it may grow to 18 inches long and as big around as a baseball bat; likewise a cucumber can grow to 10’ long and two inches in diameter, but such mature fruits signal the plant and roots that they have fulfilled their mission in life and can now stop producing offspring. If the same zucchini and cucumbers were picked at 8 inches or less the plants would continue to produce fruit. If tomatoes are picked when they are large but still pale green and allowed to ripen in the kitchen rather than on the vine they will escape much bug and disease losses since the unripe tomato is a somewhat toxic plant attacked only by the horned tomato worm, a pest which can be controlled by hand picking. Pole beans are more tender and continue to produce longer if picked before the beans show through the pods. Only the butternut winter squash needs to be left on the vine to mature.

               

A second technique for making plants more prolific is pinching or pinch pruning. By pinching off the growth tips of vining plants you basically signal the roots, (the all-important foundation of plants), to stop producing vines and send more energy to producing fruits. Instead of sprawling vines you get cucumbers, winter squash and green beans.  Even some bush plants like bell peppers and basil have growth buds which need to be pinched out when the plant reaches a desired height. When planting a tomato plant, all the leaves are pinched from the stem except the top three.  The stem is then planted horizontally in a shallow trench with only those top few leaves above soil.  The pruned and buried stem now becomes a root producer putting down roots where the leaves once were. In my opinion, the bigger the root system, the better for the plant. Once the tomato plants grow to a couple feet tall small suckers begin to grow in the crotches between the main vine and the off-shooting leaves. These suckers are often pinched  out when only an inch or two long but if allowed to grow to eight or ten inches they can be pinched off, dipped in rooting powder, and placed in a clear glass of water, as you would place a flower in a vase. After a week or two the suckers in the glass will form roots and then can be potted into clay pots of potting soil, kept well watered and allowed to grow into free clones of the original tomato plant. For my tomato clones I plan to clone the Celebrity variety of tomato since it has a determinate stem and will only grow to a couple feet tall. If I plant these Celebrity clones in my bed later they will not shade out the taller cucumbers and pole beans.

                The two zucchini plants in the postage stamp garden will have a great deal of problems being grown organically because of two insect pests, squash bugs and squash borers. Squash bugs are the less serious of the two. Whenever I go to pick zucchinis I always also check the leaves on top and underneath for patches of the red BB-like eggs of the bug and smash them with my fingers or tear off a bit of the leaf and discard it. The real enemy of the zucchini plant is the squash borer which lives in the bottom six inches of the plants stem. Laying a couple foot-long sheets of aluminum foil weighted down with bricks or stones underneath the zucchini plants, confuses the moth which lays the worms and seems to have some effect. Wrapping the stem itself with a nylon stocking or aluminum foil may also help. Farmers used to grow their pumpkins after harvesting wheat in mid-July since borer pressure eases after then. By mid-July I can expect my two zucchini plants to be pretty well ruined by the borers. My guess is by then I really won’t care because I will have so many grated zucchini in the freezer that I won’t need any more. So rather than replace the zucchini with more potted zucchini transplants I  instead will yank them and replace them with four of my Celebrity clones  to assure that I have a good supply of full-sized green tomatoes for fall storage. Tomatoes are not usually thought of as a storage crop like root crops and winter squash are, but they will keep for a couple months after frost if wrapped individually in newspaper and laid one row deep in a cardboard box. There is no need to open all the newspaper wrappings all the time to check if the tomatoes have ripened to red; just gently squeeze each wrapped tomato. If it is hard, it’s green; if it is soft, it is ripe. In my opinion full-sized opaque green tomatoes are greatly under-appreciated and undervalued vegetables.                                                                                                                                             The sixth intensive gardening practice which can be illustrated by bed A is succession gardening. The lettered diagram of bed A shown in my garden plan represents the summer warm weather plants which I intend to grow in that section of the postage stamp garden: tomatoes, cucumbers, etc.

Obviously, more produce can come from this area if I both precede and follow the summer plants with cool weather spring and fall crops; this is what is meant by succession planting. I usually put a 60-day seed-to-maturity limit on my cool weather plants; growing fast maturing crops is a real plus in maximizing produce from a small area. Besides this, slow maturing spring plants would mature in summer heat ruining their quality and fall cool crops planted before Sept. 1^st in my hot sandy soil would have to face drought, heat and heavy insect infestation as tiny emerging plantlets. This is why I do not grow cabbage or rutabaga, although I do make an exception for carrots and baby them through the August heat and drought with daily watering. Mostly I plant lettuce, spinach, white scallions from sets, and radishes around Mar. 1^st and again Sept. 1^st and I plan to have these salad and cooked greens plants harvested within 60 days. In spring I plant German Giant and Icicle radishes but in fall I prefer Green Meat radishes which hold up to cold weather and store well.  I am a coleslaw lover and I use grated radishes for that dish rather than cabbage which is much more difficult to grow organically given the cabbage worms.

                Now I want to switch our attention from garden bed A to bed B which also illustrates the succession planting technique by first growing white and red onions planted as sets March 1^st  and then followed by carrots when the red onions are harvested for drying in early August. The white onions I tend to eat as scallions during the  spring and summer but the red onions cure and store better, lasting at least until late fall scallions arrive. Onions and carrots are the two crops most affected by weed and grass competition and therefore bed B can be used to illustrate intensive organic practice #7 of mulching. Onions are challenged by weed and grass competition because they are grown during the rainy spring season and because they do not put up enough foliage to shade out the weeds; carrots have the problem of being very slow germinators, so weeds and grasses are up and growing before carrots ever break the soil. Recognizing that there will be weed competition problems with onions and carrots I plant both in short three foot long rows spaced about ten inches apart across bed B rather than 12 foot long rows along the length of bed B. These short rows allow me to easily insert a sharp hoe and shave out weeds and grasses between the rows as the young onions or carrots first emerge.  I plant about four fast germinating radishes in each of the carrot rows to mark those rows for hoeing until the carrots eventually emerge. When the foliage of both the carrots and onions becomes too thick to hoe the rows without damaging the crops, I fold newspaper and lay it between the three foot long rows and then top with a couple inches of straw or dried grass clippings to hold the paper in place. In my opinion this thin ply of newsprint underneath effectively doubles the value and depth of the organic mulch holding it in place. This mulch should give sufficient protection to these two weed-prone crops while also holding moisture in the hot sandy soil. Succession planting also plays an important role in weed and grass control. After the onions are pulled but before the carrots and marker radishes are planted, the soil is raked and any weeds are cultivated out before they have a chance to go to seed. Weeds are not nearly the problem as the thousands of seeds they create just as the first generation of garden insect pests do not do near the damage as the hundreds of second generation eggs which they lay. In both cases a gardener needs to get them early and kill them young.  Hoeing, mulching, and raking between succession plantings all accomplish weed and grass control.

               

                Intensive gardening practice #8, companion planting, can be illustrated by bed C where I plan to plant Yukon Gold white potatoes and Beauregard sweet potatoes. I am sticking my neck out here because I have never seen this done by another gardener or read of it in any book. As with many things, it seems to be just a matter of timing. The Yukon Golds have excellent taste, store well, and most importantly in the case of this interplanting or companion planting, Yukon Golds are fast maturing, taking about two and a half months. White potatoes and sweet potatoes are botanically unrelated so the pests of one should not bother the other. I want to plant my Yukons early, between March 15 and April 1. I use small egg-sized seed potatoes rather than cut larger potatoes since this reduces the risk of rot in cool wet soil. Potatoes are damaged by frost so if potato tips are poking through the soil before an expected frost I simply cover them with an inch of soil. When the Yukons grow to a foot tall, they need to be hilled so that only a third of the plant remains exposed. As the plant again grows it is hilled a second time to prevent tubers from being exposed to sunlight and becoming inedible. After the second hilling the ridge is mulched and ignored until the plant dies; death is the sign that the tubers have reached full size and are ready to be eaten as soft skinned or “new potatoes”. The Yukons can then be dug as needed or cured for another month in the soil to develop thicker, tougher skins for storage.  This in-ground curing should be completed by early July.

                When the Yukons have been hilled for the second time, late May or early June, I will incorporate some compost and form another foot tall ridge immediately in front of the two-foot wide Yukon ridge so that the two ridges together are three foot wide. I then will poke-plant and water-in Beauregard slips into the new ridge. Once planted the Beuregards will not begin to spread vines for about a month as they put down deep roots, thus allowing the Yukon vines time to die and tubers to mature.  After that the Beauregard vines can be allowed to spread over the white potato ridges while the Yukons are both harvested as new potatoes and cure underground. The dead Yukon vines can be cut off to better allow the sweet potato vines to spread over the curing Yukon ridge. It will not harm but in fact help the Beauregards if their vines are lifted with a rake handle or broomstick to harvest the Yukon Gold potatoes. The major advantage that I hope to achieve with this interplanting, companion planting is the more efficient utilization of ground space because both white potatoes  and sweet potatoes are ground hogs when planted alone; white potatoes because they need to be hilled and because they require room for good air circulation to keep down blights , whereas the sweet potatoes require a lot of space for their vines to spread out. Planted together I hope that the sweet potato vines will form a low-growing living mulch to shade and cool the curing white potatoes in June and July heat. My wide rows are 12 feet in length and I plan to plant two such rows in bed C. If I plant both types of potatoes about one foot apart in the rows then I should have about 25 plants each of Yukons and Beauregards.  I hope to get three pounds per plant from the Yukons or 75 pounds total and five pounds per plant from the Beauregards for 125 pounds total; the entire bed should yield 200 pounds of spuds.

                I am interested in year-round produce consumption from my postage stamp garden. I imagine a clock where each numeral represents a month not an hour and consider what will be on my plate each month. I do this with a number of different vegetables but the white potato-sweet potato combination is one good example of how I try to push the hand around the year clock. I should have Yukon Golds to eat from June to the end of November.  I will harvest the sweet potatoes for storage in our cool utility room before the first fall frost, around October 15 and eat on them until July of the following year thereby giving me a healthy spud on my plate year-round.

                Another example of this year-round garden eating is the dessert cycle. Most people do not associate vegetable gardens with dessert plates, but they should. The two rhubarb plants begin providing pies and sweet breads for May and June. In July rhubarb stalks can be thin sliced and frozen for pies during winter. From July through the end of September, we make green tomato pies (tastes like apple pie) and in June and July we harvest and grate zucchini for zucchini breads (tastes like cake or brownies). There are a lot of zucchini bread recipes, some with cocoa, some with pineapple, etc., so there is a great deal of variety. Grated zucchini freezes easily for winter uses, including breads for Christmas gifts. In the fall we harvest the sweet potatoes which give us sweet potato pies through the winter, thus completing the year-round cycle of desserts from the postage stamp garden. If you can squeeze in a Waltham Butternut winter squash along the fence in bed A, they will also make excellent winter pies and sweet breads.

                Obviously another way to maximize produce from our postage stamp garden is through enriching the garden soil by incorporating soil amendments. This illustrates the three intensive gardening practices of (9) slow/cool composting (also called sheet composting or deep mulching), (10) hot/fast composting and (11) cover crop/green manure. Slow composting is the no-brainer, cannot -fail method because it is exactly what nature does with a pile or sheet of organic material. There is no need to turn the pile or pay attention to the proportions or timing of organic material added to the pile or sheet. Even a pile of wet leaves will eventually rot into compost but it may take several years. Slow/ cool composting has a number of advantages over hot fast composting. It is less work. Earthworms live in it and are part of the process, even incorporating it into the soil. It is richer in soil nutrients, having twice the nitrogen of hot compost. It shrinks less and adds more organic material to the soil than hot compost. Some gardeners use sheet composting to cover and protect their soil in the winter rather than a cover crop. They rake the deep mulch off in spring to expose their soil to the sun for warming and then plant with little or no cultivation (this is called the “no dig method”). Once the vegetable plants become established, usually by mid- June, then the slow compost is reapplied as a deep mulch to continue composting and conserving soil moisture while shading out weeds. Slow composting or sheet composting definitely has some advantages going for it.

Hot compost pile

        
   Hot or fast composting is more exacting and more work than slow or cool composting, but is finished and ready for use in months or even weeks rather than a year. Hot compost is built in layers, from “brown” or high-carbon materials and “green” or high-nitrogen organic materials stacked in a two browns to one green ratio. That two-to-one ratio is by volume not by weight. Hot compost is built all at one time and not built incrementally by adding materials as they become available as with slow compost.  So I begin with a five foot square, six inch deep layer or brown material, mostly dead leaves with some straw mixed in to keep it fluffy and allow for air circulation. After I wet these browns with a hose, I add a three inch layer of green material, mostly grass clippings, young weeds which have not yet seeded, kitchen garbage, and garden culls and waste.  All green material is not actually the color green as in the case of banana peels, coffee grounds, egg shells or over-ripe tomatoes; the key to green material is its high nitrogen content, not its color. After watering this 3 inch green layer, I add one inch of garden soil to inoculate the pile with the microbes which will do the composting and heating. This layering process is repeated until the pile is four feet tall. Size matters with hot compost; if it is smaller than one cubic yard it will not heat up and if it is larger than five foot wide by five foot tall, it likely will not heat up properly. Although height and width are limited, the hot pile can be windrowed to any length. Making a pile about 10 feet long is a good idea because after about a week  the pile will have shrunk to half its original height and need to be turned to aerate the pile to reenergize the composting microbes in the center core of the pile.  At that time the windrowed “long tail” of the pile can be flipped on top to give the height and depth again necessary for the pile to reheat. An attempt should also be made to get the outside material of the first pile turned into the center of the rebuilt pile.

                Hot compost requires more work than slow compost and cooks off half its nitrogen but it also has its advantages.  Hot compost cooks and kills; heating kills human pathogens, plant diseases, insects and their eggs, and weed seeds. Some mention needs to be made as to what should not go into a compost pile. No meats, bones, fats, oils, inorganic materials, dairy products, breads, cooked meal leftovers, human, cat, dog or hog manures can go into the hot compost pile. So do not empty the kitty litter box or throw diapers on the pile. Most people feel that cow, horse, poultry manures are OK. Others feel that dog food can be used to heat up the pile. Personally I have fears of E-coli, weed seeds, salmonella, and vermin and so I am not big on using any manure. I probably would use rabbit manure but that is about it. I probably do expose myself to a little salmonella risk with composting eggshells but I make sure they get cooked in compost heat. In general I don’t mess with manures in my compost which allows me to skip the pain of either buying or hauling them and I therefore have a closed –loop system where I can get most of my brown and green materials right from my own property. A smashed watermelon rind works as good as a cow pie for heating a compost pile. There is nothing magical which makes the manure that comes from one end of a horse richer in nutrients than the grass that went into the horse’s mouth.

                There is a saying among gardeners that “there is never enough compost.” The reason is that compost shrinks; it shrinks to 10% of the bulk of the original organic material which it incorporated. A five-foot compost pile ends up as six inches of compost. Wouldn’t it be great if there were a soil amendment which expanded incredibly rather than shrank? There is….It is green manure. The amount of roots that green manure grasses can add to the soil as organic material is truly unbelievable. A single three-pound bag of annual rye grass, if planted before October 1, will add more organic material to the soil than a whole pickup truck load of manure. Although it will need to be dug in or otherwise killed in the spring and given time to rot in the soil, it is as nutrient- rich as most manures. The foot of green grass (which we see serving as a winter cover crop to protect against wind and water erosion) is only the tip of the iceberg; the great bulk of organic material is in the dense root systems which  also catch and hold soil nutrients that would otherwise leach below the root-zones of vegetables. Cover crops, catch crops, and green manure are different aspects of the same annual rye grass.

Green and brown compost materials

               

                In the thaws of late winter, once the freeze is out of the soil, I will find a warm day to turn the green manure into the soil and allow a month for it to rot.   While I wait for the green manure to rot underground and before I plant any vegetable seeds, I encourage weed seeds to sprout in the sandy top soil; I actually want a weed patch. This is a sort of weed genocide. Once the weeds are an inch tall I rake them out. I like to do this twice before planting my vegetable seeds. This early weed rakings of weeds goes a long way toward controlling weeds in the garden for the entire season. What would happen if you planted a watermelon seed six inches deep? Nothing…the seed would not have enough energy to get a plant to the surface and would die from lack of sunlight. Likewise when we fight weeds, we only need to kill the weeds in the top inch of soil, the others are too deep to germinate. Early raking accomplishes this. Another weed raking occurs between succession plantings of cool and warm weather crops, killing weeds again before they can go to seed.

                Annual crop rotation allows the soil a rest from crops which feed heavily on a particular nutrient, e.g. salad greens feeding heavily on nitrogen. It also reduces the buildup of garden pests and plant diseases which attack a particular family of vegetables. To accomplish crop rotation in a postage stamp garden I suggest simply shifting the entire garden back and forth, north and south by six foot increments. This can be accomplished by one year building the compost pile on the north end of the garden and the following year on the south end. With a small garden it may be easier to just move the entire garden a bit rather than fool with shifting individual beds.

                Finally, I would like to say a few words about marriage…the marriage of vegetable growing with vegetable cooking. Folks, if you don’t have someone in the family who knows how to cook vegetables you have missed the bus! I thought that I did not like cooked greens until I went to a Chinese restaurant. I thought that I did not like beets until I went to an Amish restaurant. The French and the Italians also know how to cook vegetables…and so does my wife. She goes on line for recipes and reads cook books like I read organic gardening books. Many times I have shown people around my garden; we had an interesting and informative exchange of ideas but I never saw anyone’s eyes light up with surprise.  Then we would proceed into the kitchen to have some cooked vegetables or soup. When the first fork or spoonful went into their mouth, that is when their eyes popped open with surprise; “Wow, this tastes really good!” So don’t just learn how to grow vegetables…learn how to cook them too.

                In discussing these 13 intensive gardening practices to maximize the output from a small garden I have only scratched the surface of each of these practices, usually only giving a paragraph or two to topics which would get an entire chapter in a gardening book. Other practices, such as double digging, I have not discussed at all. I hope I have piqued your interest enough that you will go check out and read some of the gardening books in your library. 635 is the Dewey Decimal number for gardening books. Winter is a good time to read two or three.  MY suggestions are:

The Postage Stamp Vegetable Garden by Karen Newcomb

Maximizing Your Mini Farm: Self-sufficiency on ¼ acre by Brett Markham

Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

How to Grow More Vegetables by John Jevons

The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible by Edward C. Smith

Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza

Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout.

            

                                                                                                                                                                         

Creating Rich Garden Soil

                If we want to do the intensive type gardening described in postage stamp gardening, succession growing two or three crops of vegetables per year, then the soil must be substantially amended before and after each succession planting in order to maintain or improve garden soil fertility and productivity. Obviously soil fertility maintenance is much easier than improving the initial poor soil to get rich garden soil in the first place. In some ways the corn/ soybean/ wheat rotation farmers of our area use is much easier on the soil than the practices organic vegetable gardeners employ. Often vegetable growers “strip mine” their soil using the entire vegetable and all the soil nutrients which the vegetable has taken up and returning nothing of the plant to the soil. This would be the case when we make beet root into pickled beets and also use the greens as cooked greens.  Nothing is returned. The farmer by contrast takes only the grains and returns the vast majority of his plant nutrients in roots, stalk, husks, and cob to the soil…this in addition to soybeans taking nitrogen from the air and infusing it into the soil and the wheat putting down massive root systems. The gardener using intensive postage stamp gardening must compensate for his strip mining of the soil both by amending the soil with organic fertilizers and amending the soil with organic material to enrich the soil and hold soil moisture.

                All bagged fertilizer, organic or chemical, will have on the packaging a series of three numbers, for example “5-10- 11.” The first of these numbers represents the percentage of the contents which is nitrogen, the second number shows the percentage which is phosphorus, and the third number shows the percentage which is potassium; this series is referred to as the NPK numbers based on the letters used to represent each of  these elements in the periodic table of elements. So in our example, if you bought a 100 pound bag of this fertilizer you would get 5 pounds of nitrogen, ten pounds of phosphorus and eleven pounds of potassium. For my garden last year I bought two twenty-pound bags of organic fertilizer from Rural King; one was a bag of bone meal which has a NPK of about 1-10-0 and the second was a bag of balanced NPK, probably about 10-10-10. The 10% nitrogen was a combination of quick release (i.e. more water soluble) blood meal and slow release feather meal. Anything which is pure protein like feathers, hair, wool, hoof or horn meal is going to have a nitrogen content of about 15% and except in the case of blood meal, be slow release.  Sometimes when I go to Fantastic Sam’s, I take along a plastic bag to get my hair clippings to use as long-term, slow release nitrogen for my asparagus patch. The phosphorus content of my bag of fertilizer was mostly bone meal and I believe the potassium was from potassium rich rock powders.                                                                                                                                                               

                 Commercial bagged organic fertilizer runs about twice as expensive as commercial chemical fertilizer but this does not bother my sense of extreme frugality for several reasons.  First, organic fertilizer in most cases is slow- release and lasts a long time, years actually, in the soil compared to the more water- soluble chemical fertilizer which is fast to leach down below root level and into underground well water or wash off into streams. Second the price of organic fertilizer doesn’t bother me for two other reasons: Fathers Day and my birthday. My daughter finds it much easier to get me a $25 gift card from Rural King or Farm Bureau rather than trying to figure out what to buy me at the mall. Besides she knows she will get her money back in tomatoes, asparagus, watermelons, potatoes and sweet potatoes…we both come out better off.  Lastly, it doesn’t bother me that organic fertilizer is more expensive than chemical fertilizer because I can home-manufacture some of my organic fertilizer. Wood ashes from burning downed tree limbs supplies a lot of potassium, calcium and a fair amount of phosphorus and trace minerals.  Wood, ashes unlike most other organic fertilizers, is fairly water- soluble and could leach out. For that reason I put it on my corn and winter squash patch in the spring rather than the fall at the rate of 5 pounds per 100 sq. ft. Wood ash has caustic lye which can affect some plants if put on too heavily but the lye also serves to repel a number of undesirable root worms and plant diseases. It is a good thing but you don’t want too much of a good thing, so about
5 lb. per 33 feet of 3 ft. wide row.  We eat a good amount of eggs and smashed egg shells make another excellent slow- release of nitrogen, calcium and trace minerals that should last for years.  One academic did an experiment watering plants with water that had soaked around egg shells and found that it had better effect than either manure tea or compost tea.

                 So much for organic fertilizers, let’s talk about organic materials. Grass is an organic gardener’s best friend. Grass is an organic gardener’s worst enemy.  It is both enemy and friend for the same reason that is because grasses have unbelievable root systems. Before I sound like I am contradicting myself too much, let me say that I am speaking about two different kinds of grasses. Cool weather grasses, grown in late fall and winter as a cover crop, and then turned under in early spring as green manure are an organic gardener’s best friend. Cereal grasses such as rye, wheat, oats and annual ryegrass have unbelievable root systems which add tremendous amounts of organic material to sand, which allows it to hold water and to clay soil which allows it to drain. These huge root systems catch nutrients in the soil and prevent them from being leached down below the vegetable root system level; for this reason, in addition to being cover crops that protect the garden from wind and rain erosion, and green manures, cereal grasses can also be called catch crops. I have always felt that someone who purchased a 3 lb. bag of inexpensive and readily available annual ryegrass and threw it on the floorboard of their car could put more organic material into their garden than someone who took a pickup truck load of manure to his garden. When you dig in grass green manure in the late winter or early spring, be sure to invert the sod, roots toward the sky, so that it will die and rot. This rotting process takes about a month but I will address that process more later on. Obviously, the huge root systems of warm weather grasses steal all the water and nutrients from your vegetables, as bad as tree roots, and so must be fought with a sharp hoe from when they first sprout. Grass clippings in either the compost or worked into the soil are a mixed bag, both good and bad. Grass does deserve to be called “green manure” since pound for pound grass has about twice the nitrogen and potassium of cow or horse manure. Grass lawn clippings can be used as a one inch deep mulch, added to the compost pile as a nitrogen source or worked directly into the garden soil if they have not been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides and if they are free of weed seeds and most importantly, are free of invasive warm weather grasses such as Bermuda grass, Johnson grass, foxtail, witch grass or crab grass. Crab grass has been my nemesis.  So if you have good clean blue grass clippings use them but be cautious.

                That pretty well covers the subjects of purchased organic fertilizer and green manure cover crops; let’s talk about mulch and compost. Let’s begin by banning the word compost from our vocabulary. Why? Because a lot of your urban neighbors believe compost draws rats, flies and other vermin. So I not only want to talk about making compost but also how to hide it from your neighbors. I suggest that when you talk to urban or suburban neighbors about your garden use the words organic matter and deep organic mulch instead of compost.    We need to understand that all these different names that we give to amending garden soil are basically one and the same thing, i.e. organic material which eventually decomposes to humus. If you lay down an inch or two of organic material such as leaves or straw or dried grass clippings over the garden that is called an “organic mulch”; If you lay down 8 to 12 inches, that can be called a “deep organic mulch.” If you lay down 2 feet of organic material, that is usually referred to as “sheet composting” or cool composting or passive composting. And if you pile organic material 3 to 5 feet deep, that is referred to as a hot or active compost pile. The last one is what most of us including your neighbors consider to be compost but in reality mulch, deep mulch, sheet composting and a hot compost pile are really all a broad spectrum of the same thing , namely organic matter spread out to different depths. In the long run they all bring about the same soil enrichment. Mulch can be made into a compost pile simply by raking it up to a 4 foot depth in one pile and likewise a hot compost pile can be hidden in plain sight by spreading it out to a lesser depth as mulch. Ruth Stout who wrote one of the early classic organic gardening books entitled “How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back” describes her no-dig method of gardening as “deep mulch” throughout the book and only once just happens to mention that her entire garden was actually a compost pile.                           

                If you want to disguise your 2- foot deep sheet compost even more, throw 2 or 3 inches of soil on top of it which will smash it down considerably and plant rye grass or some other green cover crop on top of the soil while your compost works underneath through the winter. Another way to hide compost is to lay it, (especially fall leaves) in your garden aisles and walkways and hold it down with a little soil and straw to prevent it from blowing away. After a year of keeping your shoes from getting muddy and being ground underfoot into smaller particles, these couple inches of walkway top soil can be skimmed off with a sharp shovel and placed on the growing bed as an amendment. Then the whole procedure can be begun again. Try this with dried leaves and dried grass clippings but not wood chips or saw dust because the latter two take too long to rot and would take nitrogen out of the garden bed.

                Compost can be hidden from the neighbors by burying it; this is what is called trench composting. Digging in a green manure crop is really nothing more than trench composting as is the process of double digging which is sometimes referred to as “trenching.” If you are going to bury household garbage do not bury (or use in any form of compost) any meat, bones, grease, dairy products, dog or cat or human manure, bread or dough or pet foods.  Fruit and vegetable peelings, coffee grounds, crushed egg shells, newsprint, paper napkins are all fine to either bury or add to the compost heap. A sprinkling of black or red pepper may deter anything from digging up your compost as will a wide board with a concrete block on it. Finally, a full-fledged five foot tall hot compost pile can be hidden by planting tomatoes in cages on the south side, sunflowers and cucumbers on the east and west sides and either cucumbers or squash on soil on top. With this camouflage of flowers and vegetables, the compost pile can sit and rot all summer and the plants surrounding it will love the leaching nutrients from the pile.

     Here is a picture of my garden taken around Thanksgiving of last year. Can you spot the compost piles? What colors do you see in the picture?  You see brown fenced maple leaves and green rye grass. “Green” and “brown” are the two nick names given to organic materials which go into the process of making compost. Green materials are relatively high in nitrogen and low in carbon. Brown materials are relatively low in nitrogen and high in carbon. As you can see from this picture in November, when spring does arrive I should have plenty of both high nitrogen greens in the form of grass and high carbon brown material in the form of the previous fall’s leaves to make a hot compost pile. My property and the garden  itself are producing the necessary organic materials, no hauling required.  I will simply make a six inch layer of leaves and straw for my brown material, add a three inch layer of pulled green grass, top that with an inch of garden soil, water the pile with a hose and keep repeating the process until the pile is four feet tall by four feet wide. After this initial hot pile in the spring, other piles will continually be made from green weeds which grow in my acre of woods, namely pokeweed, wild mustard, ragweed, stinging nettle, horse weed, and lambs quarters. Weeds are excellent green materials for the hot compost pile, so long as they have not yet formed any seed.  Green organic material supplied by the garden itself include spinach and lettuce which have bolted in early summer heat, corn stalks and water melon rinds which help heat up midsummer piles, and in late fall and early winter there are tomato and sweet potato vines, asparagus ferns, and all the green leaves from my storage winter radishes, turnips etc.   Good compost can be produced from these locally produced greens and brown materials. Often it is just a matter of choice whether organic material is turned under as green manure, used as mulch, or composted.  How these three processes are all inter-related and are really the same thing can be seen in how I care for my melon patch. I dig in the winter cover crop of ryegrass in spring as green manure and plant my watermelons. Mid-summer, I  mulch with wetted newspapers, then top that with several inches of leaves, and then add about an inch of straw on top the leaves because the straw keeps the leaves from blowing away in a strong wind. In fall I rake this summer mulch into windrows (the mulch is brown material) along with the spent melon vines and melon culls that failed to ripen (this is my green material), wet these materials with water and add an inch of soil.  I repeat this process of layering until the windrows or piles are three or four foot high and then let them heat up and compost down to half their original height. At that point I scrape off the outsides of the piles and make those outsides the insides of new piles. The more composted cores of the original piles then become the exterior insulation for the second set of windrows. This process of raking up the summer’s mulch into windrows exposes the garden soil which can then be planted into a winter green manure /cover crop to protect against erosion.  I also seed the compost windrows with rye grass on top of which it grows exceptionally verdant and hides the piles.  In conclusion, rather than thinking of mulch, green manure, and compost as three separate processes, I prefer to consider them all as  being one symbiotic process and one changing into the other. See how all three are really one broad spectrum of the same thing and one integrated system.                                                                                                                                                                

                The easiest method of soil enrichment is the “no dig, deep mulch”  method  which can be as simple and easy as spreading autumn leaves  over the garden and covering with a little soil to keep it from blowing away over winter and then in late spring, raking the leaves into piles and planting directly into the exposed soil. Once the soil has warmed and plants have begun to grow, the leaves can be spread again as mulch. There are several no dig methods which all work if the beds are not compacted by walking on them and if there is considerable earthworm activity (at least 10 worms per square foot of garden) to work on dried leaves, transform the mulch into worm castings and draw the leaf mold down into their tunnels. Earthworms will plow, aerate, work in organic matter and fertilize your garden beds for you.

                The hardest and most physically demanding method of soil enrichment is double digging. Double digging can however work in sync with the easier no-dig method. A gardener might initially prepare and “fluff” a first-time garden area the first year which would then allow him to employ the no-dig method for enrichment for years afterward.  Some gardeners might double-dig a third of their garden every year while others may double dig initially and then never do so again. There are several methods of double-digging or trenching as it is also called. What follows is how I plan to do my beds next year. Across the 3-foot wide face of my garden bed or wide row I will dig a trench 2 feet wide and one shovel deep and place the soil in a pile in front of the row. All the gardening books say that this dug topsoil must be placed in a wheel barrow and moved to the opposite end of the row to fill in the final trench of the double-digging process, but I find this extra work unnecessary.  I simply go down one row in one direction and make a “U-turn” at the end of the first row by trenching in the opposite direction on the next row and end up with my final trench right next to the initial pile of topsoil. After the first trench is dug one shovel deep and the topsoil piled, I then dig and loosen the subsoil another shovel deep but I do not remove the broken up soil from the trench. Instead I add dried autumn leaves to the loosened soil and mix the leaves in to form a long lasting “sponge” to hold water during droughts. This leaf mold sponge will be relatively infertile but that should be OK because 85% of vegetable roots will be in the top foot of the soil and these are the feeder roots.  Only tap roots going down in search of moisture should get into this sponge. Besides, nutrients from the top soil above will leach down into the sponge. After the leaf mold is dug into the topsoil, I will then skim off the green manure turf from the next 2 feet of bed and invert that turf into the trench. Next I skim off the green manure turf from the walking path and invert that into the trench. Next I dig one shovel deep of top soil and place that on top of the turf in the trench.  At this point a second trench has automatically been dug from the filling in of the first trench and I can again loosen the subsoil of the second trench one shovel deep and mix in several inches of dried leaves to continue my underground sponge.  I repeat this process over and over until the entire bed has been trenched then I cover the row with an inch of compost which I work into the top 4 inches of topsoil. At this point I have a well- worked soil with several inches of leaves worked into the bottom 10 inches of subsoil, 5 inches of buried decaying grass turf and 5 inches of compost- enriched topsoil.  I allow these prepared beds to sit for about three weeks to allow the buried turf to decay and to encourage weed and wild grasses to sprout and show their heads so that I can rake them out and have a weed-free top two inches of soil for my vegetable seed. Weed seed deeper than a couple inches will not be able to sprout and reach the surface so I should have a fairly weed free vegetable bed. The leaf mold water sponge should last for years. It is important to remember that this significant garden soil enrichment process was done on the cheap; only about $6 worth of annual ryegrass seed for the green manure crop over a 2500 sq. ft. of garden. There was however considerable physical labor involved so it is only worthwhile for me to trench one third of my garden beds in any one year.  Trenching is worthwhile for establishing rich soil but there are much easier ways to maintain garden fertility, especially if you have earthworms.

                                                                                                                               

   The Storage of Vegetable Garden Produce

End of season harvest

                We do not can vegetables. It seems way too much work. Besides, in case of natural disasters all those Mason jars would end up as broken glass on the pantry floor.  I do believe in metal canned goods and bottled water in a pantry as a store against a natural disaster but those are bought in a grocery store and have nothing to do with storing our garden produce.

                We do freeze a few vegetables, but only those which require very little preparation for freezing. We flash freeze blue berries, strawberries, sliced rhubarb,  lots of green beans, chopped bell peppers, lots of shredded zucchini, a few freezer pickles, but that is about the extent of our frozen garden produce.  Freezing shredded zucchini stores the tremendous output from that plant and allows us to make cake-like zucchini breads throughout the fall and winter. Family and friends seem to love it as gifts and our offering at pot luck meals.  The blue berries, strawberries, and rhubarb also end up making dessert items during the cold weather months. The green beans are our favorite side dish in winter plate lunches and the frozen bell peppers are easily sautéed with onions and incorporated into winter omelets.  In the past we have frozen sweet corn but that entails a lot of work and we just end up putting the corn in soups anyway.  The only vegetable which we keep growing in the garden overwinter is kale which makes either winter salads or sides of cooked greens with chopped onions. 

                By far most of our garden produce keeps naturally either in plastic laundry baskets in our cool utility room, or in leaf and sand filled rubber maid tubs in our unheated garage. In the utility room, the coolest room in our home, we store two to four baskets each of Yukon Gold white potatoes, Beauregard sweet potatoes, Waltham butternut winter squash, and red onions. We also keep a refrigerator crisper full of the red onions where they continue to keep even after the laundry basket of onions in the rear room are used up in January. The rectangular shaped laundry baskets allow for good air flow ventilation through the produce and stack neatly onto shelving without wasting room. We keep the white potato baskets covered with linens to keep them from sprouting or turning green. Neither green potatoes nor potato sprouts are edible. If sprouts do form on the potatoes, break them off and discard or the potatoes will wither. In addition to the aforementioned vegetables, we also like to keep a couple card board boxes with a couple layers each of newsprint- wrapped after-frost green tomatoes. For a couple months in the fall we eat these either as ripened red tomatoes or fried green tomatoes.

                In our unheated garage I put a layer of fall leaves and then a layer of my sandy garden soil and then a layer of carrots, beets, turnips or Green Meat winter radishes and repeat the process until the rubber maid container is full. The carrots keep through the winter under these conditions but not all varieties of winter radishes do. I have had icicle radishes stored this way rot, so I emphasize the variety called Green Meat. I keep some turnips stored in the garage and some in the utility room so that if one basket does not keep the other will. I like to grate the Green Meat winter radishes with the carrots to make winter cole slaws to go with green beans from the freezer and boiled white potatoes or baked sweet potatoes yams.  A lot of winter soups can also be made from this store of natural keeper vegetables. Check your store of keeper vegetables periodically and use any that go bad as fodder for the compost pile. Nothing is wasted.  It feels assuring to know there are hundreds of pounds of food stored in the back room.

Cooking and Recipes:

                Good cooking and good recipes are essential to enjoying garden produce. Here are a few of my wife’s favorites. Many more can be found from the internet.

Desserts:

Rhubarb Blueberry crisp

4-6 servings

Ingredients

·         3 cups chopped fresh or frozen rhubarb

·         2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

·         1/2 cup sugar

·         2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

·         TOPPING:

·         1/2 cup packed brown sugar

·         1/3 cup all-purpose flour

·         1/4 cup cold butter

·         1/2 cup slivered almonds, toasted (Pecans and walnuts can be substituted)

Directions

·         1. In a large bowl, toss rhubarb and blueberries with sugar and flour. Transfer to a greased 2-qt. baking dish.

·         2. In a small bowl, combine brown sugar and flour; cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir nuts.  Sprinkle over fruit.

·         3. Bake at 350° for 1 hour or until bubbly. Serve warm. Yield: 4-6 servings.

Rose’s Zucchini Bread                                                         

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 teaspoons ground cinnamon

3 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

2 ¼ cups white sugar

3 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups grated zucchini

1 cup chopped walnuts (optional- you can leave out nuts or substitute pecans or raisins)

Directions:

1. Grease and flour two 8 by 4 inch loaf pans. (regular size loaf pans)

 (Optional*-After I grease and flour pans, I line bottoms of pans with wax paper.  The bread comes out of the pans easier.

 Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

2. Stir together flour, salt, baking powder, soda, and cinnamon together in a bowl.

3. In another large bowl beat eggs, oil, vanilla, and sugar together.

4. Add dry ingredients to the creamed mixture and beat well.  Stir in zucchini and nuts until well combined.  (Dough will be stiff)

Pour batter into prepared pans.

5. Bake for 40-60 minutes (I usually bake it 60 minutes or until toothpick or butter knife inserted in bread comes out clean)

Cool in pan on rack for 20 minutes.

Remove bread from pan and completely cool loaves before wrapping.

Or eat warm! Enjoy!  

Sweet Green tomato pie

Pie filling:

3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 cups finely chopped green tomatoes (I like to put tomatoes in colander to let any extra juice to drain out)                                    
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
9 inch pie crust

Topping for pie:

Mix until crumbly

1 cup all-purpose flour

½ firm margarine or butter

½ cup packed brown sugar

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.
-In a large bowl, mix together the brown sugar, granulated sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt.

-Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the flour mixture across the bottom of the prepared piecrust.

-Add the tomatoes and lemon juice to the bowl with the remaining flour mixture and toss to coat. Spoon the tomato mixture into the pie shell and sprinkle on topping. ( I crimp strips of foil around the pie crust edges to keep crust from burning)

Bake for 15 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 375 degrees F. Bake until the topping is  golden  brown and the filling is bubbly, 35 to 40 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack for at least 1 hour before serving.

* Cover topping with foil for last 10 minutes to keep topping from getting too brown.

Serve warm or at room temperature.

Butternut squash soup

 

Ingredients

            4-6 cups butternut squash cubed ( 1 large or 2 med. Squash)

• 2 tablespoons butter  (or combination of oil and butter)
• 1 medium butternut squash-peeled, seeded and cubed
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 stalk celery, chopped
• 1 medium carrot, chopped
• 1 (32 fluid ounce) container chicken stock
• Clove of garlic, peeled and sliced thinly
• Pinch of thyme, sage, red pepper flakes (to taste)
• salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Directions

1.       Melt the butter in a large pot, and cook the onion, celery, carrot, garlic, and squash about  5 minutes (careful not to burn garlic because then it will taste bitter).

2.       Add spices.  Pour in enough of the chicken stock to cover vegetables. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, cover pot, and simmer 40 minutes, or until all vegetables are tender.

3.       Transfer the soup to a blender, and blend until smooth. Return to pot, and mix in any remaining stock to attain desired consistency. Season with salt and pepper. 

Curried Carrot, Sweet Potato, and Ginger Soup (5 servings)

·         2 teaspoons canola oil

·         1/2 cup chopped onions

·         3 cups (1/2-inch) cubed peeled sweet potato

·         1 1/2 cups (1/4-inch) sliced peeled carrots

·         1 tablespoon grated ginger

·         2 teaspoons curry powder

·         3 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth

·         1/2 teaspoon salt

-Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat.

-Add onions; saute 3 minutes or until tender.-

 Add potato, carrots, ginger, and curry; cook 2 minutes.

-Add broth; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 25 minutes or until vegetables are tender; stir in salt.

-Pour half of soup in a food processor; pulse until smooth. Repeat procedure with remaining soup.

Zucchini enchiladas

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

 Grease bottom of 9 by 13 inch pan

1 dozen corn tortillas

1 pound lean ground beef

1 onion, minced

3-4 cups grated zucchini

1 small can diced green chilies

2 cups Monterey Jack cheese, shredded

2 ½ cups sauce(2 cans)

-Warm tortillas in microwave or warm on griddle until tortillas are pliable

-Brown ground beef and onion in a large frying pan

-Add zucchini and peppers and sauté about 5 minutes more

- Spoon ground beef mixture into tortillas, roll up, and place in baking pan.

-Pour enchilada sauce over tortillas

-Sprinkle on the cheese and bake 15-20 minutes. (Until heated throughout and cheese melted)

EASIER VERSION**

-Put one layer of tortillas on the bottom of baking pan

-Spread ground beef-zucchini mixture on top of tortillas

-Top with another layer of tortillas

-Pour on sauce and top with cheese

-Bake

* You can also add green peppers or salsa to the ground beef mixture too. Or add a little of the enchilada sauce to the mixture for extra flavor.

Zucchini Boats

Ingredients

·         4 small zucchini

·         2 tsp. olive oil

·         1 small onion, chopped

·         ½  to 1lb ground sausage  (or you can use ground beef)

·         1/4 tsp. salt

·         1 1/4 c. marinara sauce

·         1 c. shredded mozzarella

·         Chopped parsley ,if desired

Directions

1.       Cut zucchini lengthwise in half; scrape out and chop flesh, leaving 1⁄4 inch shell.

2.       In 10-inch skillet, heat olive oil on medium-high. Add chopped zucchini, onion, sausage, and salt. Cook until sausage is done, breaking up with back of spoon.

3.       In 3-quart baking dish, spread marinara sauce; arrange zucchini shells on top, cut sides up. Spoon sausage mixture into shells. Top with shredded mozzarella. Cover with foil; bake in 450°F oven 30 minutes. Uncover; bake 5 minutes. Garnish with parsley. 

German potato salad

Ingredients:

4 medium round red or white potatoes (1 1/3 lb)

3 slices bacon, cut into 1-inch pieces 

1medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup) 

1 tablespoon Gold Medal™ all-purpose flour

1 -2 tablespoon sugar (to taste)

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon celery seed

Dash pepper

½ cup water

¼ cup white or cider vinegar 

Directions:

·         Place potatoes in 3-quart saucepan; add enough water just to cover potatoes. Cover; heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low. Cook covered 30 to 35 minutes or until potatoes are tender; drain. Let stand until cool enough to handle. Cut potatoes into 1/4-inch slices.

·          In 10-inch skillet, cook bacon over medium heat 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until crisp. Remove bacon from skillet with slotted spoon; drain on paper towels.

·          Cook onion in bacon fat in skillet over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until tender. Stir in flour, sugar, salt, celery seed and pepper. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is bubbly; remove from heat.

Sweet potato fries

·         2 large sweet potatoes, peeled, cut into 1x3-inch wedges

·         3 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil

·         1/2 teaspoon sea salt or regular salt to taste 

·         1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

·         1/4 teaspoon paprika

·         1/4 teaspoon garlic powder

Directions

1. Position rack in upper third of oven and preheat oven to 425 degrees F.  Grease foil lined baking sheet.
2. Place sweet potatoes and oil in large bowl, toss lightly. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and paprika.
3. Arrange potatoes in a single layer on prepared baking sheet, being sure not to overcrowd.
4. Bake until tender and golden brown, turning occasionally. Cooking time is 18 to 24 minutes. Cool 5 minutes before serving.

Old-fashioned fried green tomatoes

·         4 large green tomatoes

·         2 eggs

·         1/2 cup milk

·         1 cup all-purpose flour

·         1/2 cup cornmeal

·         Optional spices- garlic powder , paprika, or southwestern spice mix spices to taste

·         ½ -1 teaspoon salt

·         1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

·         vegetable oil for frying

Directions

1. Slice tomatoes 1/2 inch thick. Drain on paper towels .
2. Whisk eggs and milk together in a medium-size bowl.
3.  Scoop flour onto a plate. Mix cornmeal and salt and pepper (and other spices)on another plate.
4. Dip tomatoes into flour to coat. Then dip the tomatoes into milk and egg mixture. Then dip in cornmeal mixture to coat.
5. In a large skillet, pour vegetable oil (enough so that there is 1/2 inch of oil in the pan) and heat over a medium heat. Place tomatoes into the frying pan in batches of 4 or 5, depending on the size of your skillet. Do not crowd the tomatoes, they should not touch each other. When the tomatoes are browned, flip and fry them on the other side. Drain them on paper towels.

Easier Fried green tomatoes

4-6 green tomatoes

Salt and pepper

Cornmeal

Vegetable oil for frying

-Slice tomatoes ¼- ½ inch thick

-Salt and pepper to taste Dip in cormeal

-Fry  in hot oil about 3 minutes or until golden brown on bottom

-Turn and fry other side

-Drain on paper towel