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.