It's too early to plant but never too early to weed. Black Gold Part 3.
Greetings fellow gardeners,
Oh, my goodness it is cold and discouraging for eager vegetable gardeners. Do not despair, the weather will warm up soon. Your cool weather crops will remain dormant and sprint forward when it warms up. Don’t be too eager to run to the store for plants unless you have a place to keep them away from the cold. Remember a lot of those plants have never been outside! You can pick up cool weather vegetables like lettuce and chard and peas. Pansies are also safe and will bloom well for you. Be sure to move your pansies to the shade by the end of June as they do not like heat.
This week I am continuing to clean up around my garden. I am getting rid of burrs and goutweed and garlic mustard which is an ongoing adventure. I cleaned up under all the roses and around the rhubarb. I usually give my roses and rhubarb a blast of compost to start the season. With the cold you still have lots of opportunities to prepare your vegetable garden. I have expanded my area and am digging down to prepare the soil and I moved a fence so that I can have a trellis for my cucumbers. Growing cucumbers up saves so much space. If you have an established garden there are now studies showing that the soil prefers not to be disturbed. You can try an experiment with your soil; dig one area and plant your seeds and plant seeds without digging the soil in another. It will be interesting to see if there are differences.
Spring is starting to add colour to our world. My forsythias are blooming yellow and as soon as the blooms fall the leaves will appear. My bloodroots and marsh marigolds are happy and continuing to expand. A few tulips made it past the squirrels and the daffodils are glorious. If you are walking about in your neighbourhood, see if there are flowers out there that you would like to grow in your own garden. You can get bulbs for tulips and daffodils in the fall.
Along with the lovely flowers, perennial herbs are starting to appear. My lovage is up and starting to grow. It gets to about four or five feet with umbel flowers that attract many pollinators. The scent is delicious. Regular garden sage will make it through the winter if it is in a sheltered area along with lavender, thyme, chives, catnip, and oregano. Try using your herbs more this summer. Many herbs make a tasty tea and they add zip to our cooking. You can dry or freeze most herbs and pesto can be made with herbs other than basil.
Preparation is the word of the week. Get your beds ready and work on removing the more invasive weeds. I shall continue to deal with the teenage mutant ninja chipmunks that are working to destroy all that I do. I have covered my plantings of peas with bird netting and covered every pot with netting and weights to stop the digging. I suspect they are watching me and singing like the gopher in Caddyshack.
Have a great week! Judith.
More composting information from Arlene Rowe follows.
Compost: Black Gold
(Part 3)
In this part, I am going to talk about the basic composting methods available for gardeners.
Composting methods
Most composting methods can be characterized in two groups: compost piles or vermiculture (Worm farms, wormery). Since I have had no experience with vermiculture, I am limiting my discussion to creating compost piles.
Methods for creating compost piles (Simplest to the Cadillac) are:
· Trench
· Tumblers
· Single pile
· California – three bin method
Trench Method
This by far is the easiest method and is best for small gardens. Other than a shovel, you do not need any other equipment or special place for the pile. If you have limited mobility or strength, this method is probably the best choice, since it does not involve turning the compost.
As you can see in the illustration below, it consists of digging a trench in situ and placing your organic material in the trench. A thin layer of soil is placed on top of the organic material after each addition. The idea is to leave the pile decompose over the growing season, and then use it the next year. This is not a good method, if you have dogs loose in your yard!
Tumbler Method
The tumbler method consists of putting organic material in a container that can tumble or be rolled. The advantage of this method is the organic material gets well mixed and hence distributes the bacteria to all of the organic material, besides introducing air to the process. It is definitely the easiest way to mix and aerate a compost pile. However, this method is really limited in capacity since both DIY tumblers and commercially available ones have limited capacity. Go to this website to see a wide range of inventive DIY and commercial tumbler designs.
Single Pile Method
The single bin is the most common method used in urban gardens. Essentially the black compost bins, most people are familiar with, use this composting method; however, you do not need to limit yourself to using these composters. There are many inexpensive, DIY composters designs available on the internet.
The trick for this method is to arrange the layers so you have just the right amount of green (grass, flowers, etc.) and brown (dried leaves, branches, etc.) organic material to maintain the composing process; aeration can be a problem especially if you have a lot of grass clippings. I found the best way to deal with a lot of grass was to add soil to the pile and quickly mix it in the grass to prevent it from matting and promoting anaerobic activity.
There are tools (Lee Valley has one) that allow you to aerate the pile, but my experience is, it is easy to put the tool in, but it takes an appreciable amount of strength to extract the tool. More than once, I have had to dig it out, because it became enmeshed in the pile. Another method is to put perforated PVC pipes in the pile and add material around them.
California Method
The California method is the Cadillac method and is best method if you need large quantities of compost quickly since you can consistently maintain a hot compost. It requires three bins.
The organic material is introduced in the first bin. After a month, the contents of the first bin are forked into the second bin, freeing up the first bin. After another month, the contents of the second bin are forked into the third bin, the first into the second and new material is added to the first. Sometime in late summer or early fall, the third bin is emptied into your garden. The process of moving the contents is repeated. The third bin at this point will winter over and be ready for use in the spring. The first bin will be used to handle all the fall clean up organic material and receive food scraps over the winter - remember the frost will help with decomposition.
This is the method I use, and I produce a full bin twice a year. To really get the full advantage of this method, the bins should be at least 3'x3'x3'.
The disadvantage of this method is that you need strength to turn the compost and lots of space.
This is the end of the theory part of composting. Next part, I shall discuss the practical aspects of composting.
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