Heathcote Botanical Garden recently decided to create a community garden. I was fortunate to be at the first meeting about a year ago, and I was able to get involved with this project at the beginning. This community garden is currently focused on growing for a Sarah’s Kitchen in Port Saint Lucie, and a food pantry in Fort Pierce. It has two garden areas right now, and a 5 bin composting set up as well as a large leaf fence area for any overflow of organic materials we may collect. The Children’s Garden managed by Nan Billings is next to the community garden location in the Botanical garden, and Nan has lent her time and expertise to the community garden project as well as funneling a good deal of the harvest from the Children’s Garden to Sarah’s Kitchen.
Much of the garden is fallow now. We are growing a couple of rows of black eye peas, a row of long beans (on our new fence), some okra, jalapeno peppers, and eggplant. Last fall thru spring we grew broccoli, kohlrabi, carrots, radishes, onions, lettuce, arugula, mustard greens, yu chuy sum, chard, potatoes, beets, bush beans, pole beans, and a few tomatoes.
Although one of the garden areas was tilled when it began last fall we are now practicing the no till style of growing I write about in this blog, and volunteers in this garden learn how to grow the no till way.
Volunteers are welcome at the community garden. It is nice to discover that even hard work is really fun when there is a group of people participating. We have a few hard core volunteers that show up every Monday morning to work in the community garden, and when we have a special project we ask the botanical garden to put out a call and we get a larger group of volunteers, and then we get lots of work done quickly. Most recently we erected a fence around the garden areas. We were able to buy the fencing materials from donations we have received, and when we went to Lowes to buy the fencing supplies Lowes also made a donation to help stretch our dollar value there.
We are always scrounging around to find organic materials for our compost piles, and any leaf, straw or moldy hay donations we can get we are glad for. S&S Takeout in Fort Pierce drops off their kitchen vegetable wastes for our compost piles, so we are constantly working to find more carbonaceous wastes to balance out the nitrogen kick we get from those kitchen wastes.
This community garden project teaches participants how to compost, and how to grow vegetables various ways without turning or tilling the soil. They also learn how and when to plant seeds, and how and when to harvest. We don’t use any synthetic fertilizers or pesticides, or herbicides on the community garden, and we do not grow any GMO crops there. We like to grow heirloom seeds, and if organic seed is available we choose that first. We do depend on donations, so when seed donations come in we use them as long as they are not GMO (genetically modified organisms). The cooperative extension for St. Lucie county donated a great deal of the seed we planted last fall. Other seeds we planted were donated from my seed collections, including the okra, beans, black eye peas and eggplant we are growing this summer.
Although the Botanical Garden is closed on Mondays volunteers to the community garden are welcome. The west gate on Savannah Road is open so that volunteers can drive right in, and there is a great shady oak to park beneath.
This past winter Tami bought fresh vegetables from my garden, and carried a bucket of kitchen garbage to me for my compost every week.
Everything changed when she ate the fresh broccoli I put into her bag. Tami said she didn’t know fresh broccoli wouldn’t stink when cooked. She and her roommate Melody decided it was time to keep their compost at home, and grow some broccoli of their own. They called me in for a consult. First they walked my gardens with me, and took a close look at how I was growing and composting, then I came out to their property and helped them see where potential gardens and compost might be. They had done a pretty good job of determining where their compost should be by themselves, and we talked over possible locations for the garden mounds. I went on my way and they went to work gathering hay, manure, straw, and compost to pile up into Lasagna Mound Gardens.
About 8 weeks later I stopped by for a follow up consult. Their broccoli plants were beginning to get tight in the middle. They had some young tomato plants flowering, and a zucchini plant was aggressively working to swallow the front edge of the garden and the fence they put up. They were getting nice sized zucchini and a yellow squash plant was beginning to fruit as well. Nearly a dozen lettuces were making large heads side by side, and a good number of bean plants were about a week away from flowering.
For a first garden I was extremely impressed at how they had jumped in, worked quickly to form their lasagna garden mounds and were doing a very good job at growing. They had erected a fence and a nice homemade gate for their garden, and put stepping stones in the walkways between their mounds.
Tami and Melody are learning some lessons about plant and insect behavior. Their garden while lovely and productive has some common issues that new gardeners have and some problems also common to new organic gardens or newly organic gardens (for conventional growers who are changing to organic or natural gardening practices).
One real common error a gardener makes, just once… Yeah, I have done this too, is to put too many cucurbits, specifically squash and pumpkin seeds into too little space. Squash plants will overrun the garden. They are that vigorous.
Another issue for newly organic growers is that it may take a few seasons to achieve Balance in the garden. It is good and easy enough to start gardening with the lasagna mounds, and I recommend them as a great start but the balance that we strive for in our growing environments, our little ecosystems, that balance takes a little more time than it takes to build mounds and get them growing. After a few seasons of natural growing, and working on the homestead’s ecosystem, learning when and what to plant, and when to cut things down, and even when or in what sort of weather to expect insect infestations all of that stuff becomes more predictable. The gardener becomes more intuitive, and some problems that new gardens experience don’t reoccur in following seasons as the gardens and their surroundings attract some natural predatory soil organisms, insects, frogs, birds, and reptiles.
Tami and Melody have started a young flock of layer hens. (Their eggs have extraordinary flavor.) They are growing food and they are composting. They have planted some young fruit trees, and they plan to put in more soon. They don’t use synthetic fertilizers or pesticides. They experienced only small insect issues during the winter/spring growing season. In one instance bean plants that were growing beneath their zucchini vine were losing leaves to chewing insects. The beans not covered by the zucchini were not being chewed. So they were able to ascertain that one of their pest problems was relative to the proximity of the two plants (creating too much shade, moisture and good cover for the insects).
As the summer came and the winter/spring vegetables lost their warm dry days and cool dry nights Tami and Melody made a nearly seamless transition to summer vegetables growing okra, long beans and peas. They have had a good bit of stink bug damage on their peas, and mad aphids on their beans. It is a challenge to grow once summer weather is here, and lots of S. Florida gardeners give it up for the summer. Tami and Melody exceeded my expectations for their first year vegetable garden. I am looking forward to seeing how they do next season, which is just about here. First plantings for our fall season can start as early as August.
Eggplant Thriving Now, Saved from The Freeze in January.
Black Eye Pea Plants
Basil
The fall of 2009 was very hot and humid. We didn’t have night time temperatures below 70 degrees f. until it was officially winter time. By the time New Years Eve rolled around we had begun to have extremely cold weather and it continued well into February giving us very few warm days in between cold fronts. We became exhausted experts at covering our cold tender crops. Everywhere you went you saw the towering yard ghosts common on South Florida yards when the temperatures dip into the 30’s.
Those of us vegetable growers who had planted a combination of cold and warm weather plants came out the best. It was a great winter for carrots, radishes, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, onions, collards, lettuce, chard and kale. It was a terrible winter for peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, bananas, pigeon peas, beans, and squash, and in our unusually warm fall weather those warm weather plants had been vigorously growing. I stacked straw up around eggplants to save them, and they spent many days in a row covered in that way before it got warm enough to uncover them. Tomatoes were covered in sheets to the ground, clipped to support frames. Most of mine died even though they were covered. In years past I had hung a drop light into the tent of tomatoes to help warm the air. I didn’t use the drop light trick this year because I had tomatoes growing in three different areas of my yard. The plants on the lowest bit of land under high shade survived the cold. In my newest growing area the tomato plants, and eggplant, although covered to the ground did not survive the freezing temperatures. A tomato plant so small it hadn’t grown through its cage was easily covered with a heavy canvas sack, and I piled straw up around the base of that ghost. That plant survived to become a fruiting giant covering my counter tops with large yellow tomatoes for months.
Conversely, I didn’t have to cover onions, radishes, beets, chard, broccoli, or carrots, and more than one morning I found ice on the broccoli leaves, and those plants easily survived to make loads of broccoli. The carrots I grew in that cold were absolutely the sweetest ever. Their snap was perfect, and their colors were bright and nearly translucent.
In the spring I had three excellent tomato plants that made it through the freeze, and a few more that came up afterward.
Several of the eggplants that I covered up in straw made it through and one is a tremendous plant from which I am getting five to six mature fruits a week now. The straw that covered my plants against those winter days is now mulch at the base of the same plants it sheltered.
Covering and uncovering our gardens was tough. Some days we uncovered our plants just for the daylight, and recovered them before night fall. It was often dusk as I covered my last garden, and I remember having very cold fingers and a very cold nose long before I could go inside and warm up. Most of us S. Florida gardeners are accustomed to having one to three nights during January and February when we might have to cover our plants. There were more than two dozen nights when the temperatures were way too low to hope we could get away without covering. We had 13 nights in a row below 40. This went on for so long that our plants really had a stressful time. Some growers just gave up, and began again in March. Gibbons Organic Farm, a greenhouse grower was forced to irrigate throughout the cold nights to keep the greenhouses above 40 degrees (f), and the flush of nitrogen and new growth in the warmed greenhouses drew aphids like crazy. Ultimately the plants were saved, and Gibbons Farm never came to the market empty handed, but not without some serious setbacks from the aphids. Even their cold weather plants were stressed and aphid stricken from the unusually long succession of cold days and the excess watering.
The conventional farmer at our market lost all of his warm weather crops. He grows under the sky (no green houses) and had far too much in the ground to save, but he was able to stay in the game with his cold weather vegetables, showing up at his booth with broccoli, cauliflower, onions, carrots, radishes, beets, chard, and lettuce.
I remember being really cold and tired from the constant covering and uncovering in really low temperatures, but I also remember when hearing people wishing for the summer to come, being glad for the cold and the gorgeous winter vegetables we were able to grow here effortlessly.
It is summer time, July in South Florida, and the yard ghosts are just a memory. The Passion Fruit has been falling for months, and is about to flower again. We are bringing in the first mangos and pineapples. We are harvesting long beans, eggplant, red amaranth, malabar spinach, and black eye peas, I am watching okra grow up, and the bitter melon is flowering. I am piling up organic wastes for new beds, and throwing carbon wastes to the compost piles which shrink down as fast as I can build them up. Every day in the garden is a hot one, rain is always welcome, and when the wind comes west across the land from the ocean I hold my arms out and try to recall that long ago winter chill as the breeze catches my sleeves.
Not long ago in the article Sustainability: On Local Food and Community I wrote about the value of pursuing local food. There is a very cool new vibe in town that very much supports local family farms. S&S Takeout is a new restaurant in Downtown Fort Pierce that is embracing the concept of local food and that is not all. This restaurant has been put together and is being managed with sustainability in mind. Owners and locavores Gerrie and Adam Biegner are also doing their best to offer great value to their customers. Every day I get an email communication with that day’s menu of fresh culinary creations, and from 4:30pm to 6pm when they close all of the food from the menu that day is blown out at a discount.
On my first visit I came in at closing and surfed what was left for sale in the case. The restaurant is spotless, and although it is small it sports a few small tables, a drink cooler with some very interesting drink choices including locally bottled Natalie’s Orchid Island Lemonade, and an amazing root beer made from green tea and sweetened with cane sugar (now that’s what I’m talking about). and there are also lemon lime and orange flavor versions of green tea soda I haven’t tried yet. There was a sparkling water bottled in recycled glass in the case that has been produced in this country since the 1870’s, as well as a few other bottled drink choices. There were no plastic bottled drinking waters there. You know which ones I am talking about.. they are everywhere, but you won’t find them at S&S Takeout.
Adam and Gerrie are really making some important ecological choices in the administration of their restaurant. One wall of their storefront, graphics donated by Waste Pro, is a recycling station like you might see in one of those high end healthy food grocery stores, and the utensils that come with your responsibly packaged carry out are wooden so entirely degradable. Their drink straws are made of paper, not plastic. I have been throwing all of those into my compost. The least stained forks and spoons I hold out from the compost to use as plant markers for my next garden .
About the compost; Gerrie has been bringing the vegetable peelings, eggshells, and wooden cutlery wastes to Heathcote Botanical Garden’s Community Garden where we grow organic vegetables for one of the Sarah’s Kitchen Soup Kitchens. We compost their kitchen garbage. I pick up a bucket of kitchen wastes for my compost as well.
So how about the food? right? As you might imagine, a restaurant that is meticulous about its carbon footprint is not likely to spare the details when it comes to the cooking. Chef Adam Biegner’s cooking is awesome! The food I tried was absolutely delicious. It was of course very fresh, creatively combined, pleasantly spiced, had great textures and flavors without being too rich. That holds true of the desserts I tried too. I had a big 7 layer dessert bar that was excellent, but the mango cheese cake knocked me out, and the braided mango pie had a light crust that was as good to eat as the Champagne Mango baked inside. I am planning my next visit especially for dessert, and hopefully more of that cheese cake, and that is a big deal because I am not usually a great fan of cheese cake.
Every Saturday I see Gerrie at the Downtown Fort Pierce Farmer’s Market where she buys boxes of locally grown produce from family farms like Gibbons Organic Farm. She uses bison from a bison ranch in Okeechobee, locally grown beef, and pastured pork from a farm in Avon Park. All of these details and more can be found on the S&S Takeout website. I suggest you check it out, and definitely check out their awesome local food. Maybe I will see you there!
After I wrote the article Garden Pests: Nematodes I received a comment from Naomi. She wrote “Wow, mind boggling how many things can go wrong in a vegetable garden!” Her comment made me realize that I did not bring home the point of my article very well. While there are lots of potential problems and pests that can adversely affect your organic vegetable garden, by fostering soil life, diversity and balance in your yard and in your gardens you can help to keep the damage from pests at a manageable level.
There are lots of potential pests and problems for your garden if you do not adequately build and maintain the organic life in your soil and pursue balance for the ecosystem of your yard. Your job as a gardener should be to foster the life of your soil. Use no synthetic fertilizers (salts in synthetic fertilizers burn soil organisms), use no poisons, do not till or turn the soil, and be sure to add lots of organic material, mulching while growing, and composting while fallow, growing mulch or cover crops, adding compost to beds that don’t go fallow often, rotating your crops from season to season, and practicing companion planting in and around your garden.
You must also consider the culture in your yard surrounding the vegetable garden as well. You can not expect balance in your vegetable garden if your yard is out of balance. Create ecosystems that sustain themselves all around your homestead, and not just in your vegetable garden. Leave some wild spaces, let some flowers grow, add a water feature of some sort, and avoid using toxins in your yard at all costs.
This focus on balance works because in a balanced natural setting all living things are consumed by other living things. Making sure your soil is alive and your yard is a diverse ecosystem will not guarantee that pests will never munch or suck on your crops, after all I just got done saying that all living things are consumed by others and that means your plants too, but with balance you will find that your very healthy crops will not attract or succumb to as many pests, and the pests will attract
predators of their own. This is why using pesticides should be the very last thing you want to do in your gardens. It is nearly impossible to kill only the pests that are attacking your crops. Pesticides will destroy the predators that can successfully hunt pests from your gardens, and your balance is sacrificed.
Some of the best pest control I have practiced is done by keeping a sharp eye on my crops. If you take a look at your plants each day it is pretty easy to catch a hatching of caterpillars, or a new crop of aphids.. ants plant aphids, so watch for ants on your bean and pea plants especially at the flowers and new growth areas. I have had luck just flicking ants and squashing aphids, if I am watering I can gently spray them off too. I have a friend who uses soap sprays for aphids, but if the infestation is that bad I usually drop back and consider how important that crop is to me, and whether it is growing in optimum conditions and at the right time in the season. I have cut down aphid infested pea crops before, they make a great green mulch for the garden, and an opening in the garden is an opportunity for the next crop.
The last thing I want you to believe is that there is some evasive and random magic involved in making a successful organic garden. The truth about no till organic gardening in South Florida is that it is the easiest way to succeed at growing quality fresh food for your family. Keep the size of your garden manageable, take good care of the soil so that the plants can take care of themselves, and try to be flexible. If what you are trying to grow isn’t thriving record the failure somewhere for future reference, consider why your crop may have failed, and what might work better in that place and time, and plant something else, or work on soil building there for the future.
Weather is the variable we can’t control, but the vegetables we grow here in South Florida in the winter time are able to thrive in our average winter weather, and can also endure some extremes as long as they are healthy to begin with. Proper soil treatment will even help your plants to better endure weather extremes and the stresses we might exercise on them while protecting them from harsh weather conditions. So keep your soil healthy, add lots of organic material off season and mulch between rows and around plants. Plant the right plants at the proper times in the season, and keep records about the location of your crops in your gardens, and by all means keep it simple, no boggling minds!
I have seen this joke posted on many websites. I have copied and pasted it here because it is so relevant. As far as I can tell the author is unknown.
The Suburbanites
Author unknown
God:
Frank, you know all about gardens and nature. What in the world is going on down there on the planet? What happened to the dandelions, violets, thistle and stuff I started eons ago? I had a perfect, no-maintenance garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honey bees and flocks of songbirds. I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But all see are these green rectangles.
St. Francis:
It’s the tribes that settled there, Lord…The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers “weeds” and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.
God:
Grass? But it’s so boring. It’s not colorful. It doesn’t attract butterflies, birds and bees, only grubs and sod worms. It’s sensitive to temperatures. Do these Suburbanites really want all that grass growing there?
St. Francis:
Apparently so, Lord. They go to great pains to grow it and keep it green. They begin each spring by fertilizing grass and poisoning any other plant that crops up in the lawn.
God:
The spring rains and warm weather probably make grass grow really fast. That must make the Suburbanites happy.
St. Francis:
Apparently not, Lord. As soon as it grows a little, they cut it…s ometimes twice a week.
God:
They cut it? Do they then bail it like hay?
St. Francis:
Not exactly, Lord. Most of them rake it up and put it in bags.
God:
They bag it? Why? Is it a cash crop? Do they sell it?
St. Francis:
No Sir. Just the opposite. They pay to throw it away.
God:
Now let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will grow. And when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?
St. Francis:
Yes, Sir.
God:
These Suburbanites must be relieved in the summer when we cut back on the rain and turn up the heat. That surely slows the growth and saves them a lot of work.
St. Francis:
You aren’t going to believe this Lord. When the grass stops growing so fast, they drag out hoses and pay more money to water it so they can continue to mow it and pay to get rid of it.
God:
What nonsense. At least they kept some of the trees. That was a sheer stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. The trees grow leaves in the spring to provide beauty and shade in the summer. In the autumn they fall to the ground and form a natural blanket to keep moisture in the soil and protect the trees and bushes. Plus, as they rot, the leaves form compost to enhance the soil. It’s a natural circle of life.
St. Francis:
You better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle. As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.
God:
No. What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter and to keep the soil moist and loose?
St. Francis:
After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.
God:
And where do they get this mulch?
St. Francis:
They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.
God:
Enough. I don’t want to think about this anymore. St. Catherine, you’re in charge of the arts. What movie have you scheduled for us tonight?
St. Catherine:
“Dumb and Dumber”, Lord. It’s a real stupid movie about…
God:
Never mind, I think I just heard the whole story from St. Francis.
To get the full impact of the story of my Neighbors’ Fabulous Garden it is necessary to go back in time at least several years.
By the time this story takes place we have been living next door a long time, and are close friends with our neighbors.
We are both intense gardeners. As soon as my husband and I moved in my neighbor was passing through with plant offerings for my new gardens. It was great living next door to a gardener and we both felt the same way about it. Before any thing else we had our gardens in common.
Before settling in Florida our neighbors (JoEllen and Harold) had come from Ohio where they had both grown up on farms and farm land, but by the time we met they had stopped trying to grow their own vegetables here in Florida.
A few years after we moved in Harold and JoEllen started growing food again. In a few more years they had a large full sun garden about 900 square feet (about 275 square meters). They grew some nice food but they were not growing organically. It wasn’t that important to them, so if there were caterpillars on their squash or bean plants they might sprinkle a synthetic pesticide dust on the leaves, and when the plants needed feeding they used use a synthetic plant food, and they didn’t mulch or feed the soil.
Two years ago in the summer before they left town for a vacation Harold turned the bed four times wetting it each time, then he covered it over with a heavy mill clear plastic sheeting. He was solarizing the soil in order to destroy the nematodes that were infesting the roots of their tomato plants. Their plan was to manure the garden when they came home in the fall after solarizing the soil. After six weeks in the sun the plastic had developed many parallel splits, and the splits were beginning to be intersected by new splits and my neighbors were still months from returning. I called them and suggested I remove the plastic for them and they agreed it was a good idea. After picking up the plastic I knew I couldn’t just leave that garden for the weeds to creep in and take over, and it was a slow summer for me so in my spare time I carried over buckets of manure and carbonaceous wastes, like the bunny cage scrapings, old hay, and all of the leaves I scrounged in the neighborhood and leaves I found mulching around their property, and I dumped it all on their garden. When they came home they added another cart of manure, covered it all in a few inches of soil and grew a great garden. They didn’t have to fertilize that year. but they still used the synthetic pesticide powder on the garden against caterpillars.
When their growing season was over they covered it all over with leaves and manure they had been collecting for themselves, and left town. They had collected so many leaves during the growing season that they had enough to leave full the leaf fence going around the garden.
There hadn’t been much rain that summer while they were away, and when they came back in the fall the leaves were not entirely broken down. JoEllen raked that partially decomposed compost up into knee high mounds with slim walkways between and planted into them. They brought in another load of stable scrapings and JoEllen side dressed the mounds as the plants grew. As she began thinning plants she moved them down into the sides of the mounds. She planted her tomatoes into the composted leaves in the leaf fence going around the outside of the garden. Unlike the year before they did not bother to buy any soil to put on top of the compost mounds. They simply dropped their seeds into the mounds of compost.
Last weekend JoEllen harvested buckets of onions. Except for the marigolds that remain they were the last of an exhausting season of growing and harvesting in that garden that included lettuce, tomatoes, (huge) carrots, beans, squash, potatoes, broccoli, Chinese greens, edible flowers, and herbs, and of course those buckets of onions.
It is June, the garden has been covered over with a new crop of leaves. The mounds remain beneath undisturbed, with the marigolds still growing there. Outside of the garden another pile of shreds, leaves, and the remains of a manure pile have been raked into a knee high rectangle that will extend the garden farther out into the field for a strawberry patch or corn. This last season JoEllen bought Thuricide Bt to use against the caterpillars on her plants instead of the synthetic pesticide, and of course she never needed to fertilize the garden. They did not bring in any more manure this summer. The mounds posses all of the microorganisms and invertebrates needed to turn those leaves into compost over the summer without any help from manure. When she returns she will simply rake the pathways up into the mounds and begin again.
Believe it or not this speedy transformation in growing practices didn’t happen because I was pushing for it. It happened because what I was saying about growing in compost made sense, it put them in mind of the year that Harold’s father came to Florida to visit and planted potatoes in old stable wastes (old hay, straw, and composting manure). They remembered it was a potato harvest to end all others. What I was saying to them, and what I was doing in my garden was reminiscent of information they already possessed from an earlier time in their lives. They only needed to be reminded.
What I learned from watching my neighbors’ garden this year was that the mounds of organic materials that you grow into don’t have to be entirely broken down before you plant into them. You may also notice that the mounds you grow into don’t have to be specific materials or specially arranged or measured either. This is also a great example of Direct To Garden Composting rather than building a compost pile and then bringing the compost to the garden.
My neighbors grow in compost not because it is the organic or no till or healthy thing to do. They grow this way because it fosters the most vigorous plant growth and the most flavorful vegetables, in a place that once seemed much less hospitable for growing food.
Here in South Florida an organic no till garden is the easiest way to grow healthy and delicious vegetables for your table.
Legumes are a family of plants that includes beans and peas, peanuts and clovers. The Florida native ground cover Perennial Peanut is a legume. The Pigeon Pea plant, though it is a perennial bush is a true legume, and it shares the characteristic of legumes that makes that plant extremely desirable in the garden. Remember alfalfa hay from The Lasagna Garden Mound recipe? Alfalfa is a legume too. Knowing that helps to explain it’s purpose in the lasagna garden mound it is a hay that is very high in nitrogen. Legumes are nitrogen builders. They are able to take nitrogen from the air and convert it into a usable nitrogen in the soil for themselves, for the organisms in the soil, and for future plants. Their leaves, flowers, roots and fruits are high in nitrogen. Most other families of plants can not fix nitrogen the way that legumes can, Legumes therefore earn the title of soil builders. The soil from which they come is ready for a plant that needs a lot of nitrogen. Most leafy plants like salad greens and cooking and juicing greens are nitrogen consumers, as well as tomatoes, and cucurbits, which are in general heavy feeders. Any plant that makes a green leaf needs nitrogen to do it.
Legumes do this amazing nitrogen fixing job with the help of a common soil bacterium which works with the plant to form nitrogen storage balls on the roots of the plant. These little balls can be observed if you care to dig a plant out of the ground. Digging and pulling should be done gently enough to avoid popping the little balls, or nodes as they are called, off of the root so that you can observe them. These nodes do not look the same as the root knot nematode. These nodes are individual detachable balls on the roots, they do not cause the root to be deformed, rather they help the plant. Your pea and bean plants will still make peas and beans even if this bacterium is not present in the soil, but the storage nodes help to boost production, and they are what makes the legume plant a great soil builder. Without the nodes the legume is still as good for the soil as any plant, but not as good as a legume with the nodes.
We never know if our soil has the nitrogen nodule forming bacterium present until after our legume plants have grown up some, and we can pull a plant out to look at the roots. To tip the odds in our favor seed companies offer a bean and pea inoculant so that you can add this as you are planting the seed. The bacterium present in this inoculant are Rhizobium leguminosarum viceae, and phaseoli and bradyrhizobium biovar sp.
The inoculant I buy comes sealed in a plastic bag. It is a fine dark powder. There are two recommended ways to add this to the seed. Just prior to planting the seed make a slurry of the powder and non-chlorinated water, roll the beans around in it so they are coated and plant them. The other way is to wet the beans and then shake the powder on them or roll them in the powder, and plant them. The way I handle the inoculant is to pour some of the powder out into a wide bowl, like a large butter tub, count out the exact number of beans I am going to plant (if I don’t know this number then I make the planting holes first, count them and then count the beans), drop the beans into the powder then I set my hose on mist and very lightly mist the beans and powder just enough that the powder coats the beans when I shake them around. If I hit it just right the beans don’t get wet, but the powder sticks. Usually the beans get wet, and once you have exposed your beans or peas to water they will change quickly so it is important to handle them as little as possible once they have been wetted and coated, and get them into the ground gently and quickly. Please remember, the inoculant is a bacterium; if you use chlorinated water to wet it you may kill it.
Once your bean or pea plants have given you the harvest you desire cut them down at soil level leaving the roots in the ground and let the leaves and stems fall to the soil as well, they too are packed with nitrogen for your future crops.
If you are growing a crop of peas just for the soil you should cut them down before they make peas. I am planting several types of legumes this summer. I have just cut down my sugar snap peas. I left the roots in the soil and the chopped up plants on the surface. I am following them with a crop of yard long beans. In other beds I am growing black eye peas, mostly for the peas, and peanuts for food also, but when I harvest the plants their leaves stems and roots will stay on the soil.
I got a package of cow peas, and I am growing those as a cover crop and for no other reason than to cover and fix the soil.
It is a good practice to always have some beans and peas growing in every garden each season.
In Illinois at the organic farm that provides organic food for the CSA in which my sister participates, they grow food for a few seasons in one field, and then put that whole area into clover and switch to another area just coming out of clover. Clover is also a Legume.
We can grow quite a few legumes here in the summer, so it is a great off season crop for us. What is so great about South Florida growing is that we have year round warmth, so we can run cover crops or green mulch crops through our entire summer season, put them down to the soil and cover them over for a few weeks in the fall and be ready to grow again in the winter or spring.
Many growers have forgotten about legumes as nitrogen fixers, or have forgotten how to use them to help build garden soil. This is invaluable information that all gardeners should posses, except that it is easier to buy a bag of fertilizer. The bag of fertilizer method is easier for sure, it takes less planning and foresight, but it is more expensive, destructive to soil, and is a potential pollution threat to our water ways. Legumes lock up nitrogen for future use. Plants know how to tease nutrients out of soil, and how to attract and make deals with bacteria, fungi, and protozoa for the nutrients they hold in their bodies. Growing legumes enriches the soil and the microbes in the soil with nitrogen that plants are able to use.
Legumes are also great food for people and great food for chickens. They are a good source of protein and mixed with a grain they make a complete amino acid chain, or complete protein which makes legumes a staple food for vegetarians.
Grow legumes, they are good for you and they are good for soil.
Many consumers and new gardeners are focusing on Organic food and on Organic growing principles for the first time. This is a good start. Unfortunately many growers who are learning about organic principles miss the point and simply switch to organic fertilizers and organic pesticides while adhering to their familiar conventional garden and soil managment practices. While this is a better practice than using synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides it is not the ultimate solution. It is labor and cost intensive, and it will not improve yields or input costs enough to convince a conventional grower that organic growing is better from a strictly financial standpoint.
To grow in an organic manner in such a way as to decrease the cost of your inputs, increase the health and disease resistance in the garden, and increase garden yields a grower must focus on the soil. This focus must be on maintaining optimum populations of the microbes and the invertebrates that are present in healthy soils. This requires that a gardener learns how to grow without plowing, tilling, burning or in any other ways disrupting the life in the soil. For many growers organic and conventional this is a new idea. Many of us have looked forward year after year to turning, or tilling the soil each season, and even between crops throughout the growing season.
Imagine being able to retire your tiller, which also means not buying fuel for tilling. Imagine not bending your back to the arduous task of turning the soil as I did for years, rather turning your back on the shovel and planting into mounds of undisturbed composting soil and imagine that this far easier way of gardening is better for your garden than all of that hard work you have done in the past! It is absolutely so. I have far better results gardening in undisturbed soil from piled on organic mulch and compost than I did when I worked very hard at turning my soil every season.
That we can grow better by working to feed and nurture soil is a concept that I began to understand only recently. I had been hearing about no till growing for years, and I was practicing some of the concepts of no till growing, but because I didn’t understand what the point was I couldn’t quite fathom which practices I needed to use.
The point is that the soil is alive with organisms that team up with plants and in that way help plants to feed themselves. This system that exists naturally is called the Soil Food Web. This means that your job as gardener is to avoid disturbing the soil and the organisms working there. That is no turning or tilling, and all of the feeding you do is soil feeding, not plant feeding. This also guarantees that your plants will be the healthiest, disease resistant plants they can be, and all you do to assure that is to grow the right plant the at the proper time in your growing season, and keep your soil rich with organic matter which is how you feed the soil. Keep lots of leaf mulch (not wood mulch) on the top of the soil, and let leaves and plant wastes fall and stay there. How easy is that?
If you would like to read a fantastic book about the Soil Food Web check out Teaming with Microbes, The Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web, by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis. If knowledge is power then this book is the most powerful tool a gardener can use. The information is easy to digest, and the pictures from the electron microscope are awesome.
This book, Teaming with Microbes feeds my need to understand all of the organisms that exist in healthy soil, and the relationships they have with plants. If you are the least bit curious I am sure you will find it fascinating. It is possible however, to know much less than this book offers and still be an excellent grower. One only needs to know that there is a whole universe of life in healthy soil, and that it should not be disturbed. Organic matter like leaves, grass clippings, straw, hay, compost and composted manure can be regularly piled on top of the garden and grown into year after year. Plants that grow there when done should be cut down and left to lie on the soil and decompose, and the roots should be left in the soil to decompose where they once grew.
I know South Florida growers are gasping at the idea of leaving tomato, squash, or okra roots in the ground knowing that they may be gnarled with root knot nematodes, that are ready to spread themselves throughout the soil. I know how it is, I used to pull finished tomato plants out of the ground and throw them into the quarantine compost. I don’t anymore, and I am no longer concerned with nematodes. That universe of life in the soil is a tremendous cafeteria, and nematodes are on the menu. I still don’t recommend planting tomatoes after tomatoes in the same bed year after year, and I do recommend rotating to crops that are less attractive to nematodes after attractors have grown, but I am not worried about leaving the roots behind to decompose. Those soil organisms need to eat, and in South Florida where the weather is always perfect for decomposition finding enough organic material for the organisms in the soil is the gardener’s full time job!
Plants bring nutrients they get from photosynthesis down into their roots and then leak them into the soil (the leaked nutrient is called exudate) to exchange with soil organisms that then agree to exchange soil bound nutrients and water with those plants for their exudates. Plants do not deplete soil, tilling does. If you have a few weeds in the garden it is not such a bad thing. Some weeds make good companions in the garden. Weeds also exchange their exudates with microbes for soil bound nutrients. Cutting weeds you don’t want in the garden at ground level (leaving the roots behind) adds organic material for the microbes, and is less likely (than pulling weeds) to churn up any new weed seeds from below. If you don’t till up the soil you will have very few weeds growing in your gardens. All of your time can be spent planting, and harvesting, and collecting organic wastes for your compost and your gardens.
A grower who has been practicing plowing or tilling, or has been applying synthetic plant fertilizers and pesticides may have to work to bring the soil food web back to the soil. In such cases it is good to bring in compost, manures, and aerated compost teas to help reintroduce microbes to damaged and barren soil. An organic garden consultant like myself can help you with these repairs. It doesn’t take very long to repair damaged soil, and you don’t have to wait for a full recovery before you start growing food. Remember plants are part of the soil food web and do their part to help to feed the soil organisms.
Now get out there and pile on the organic matter, and let the tiller and the shovel grow cob webs!
The quickest way to get your garden growing in a hurry and without any previous plan is to build a lasagna garden or mound.
I have written the recipe for this in the article The No Dig Garden Box, and I thought since I find myself talking about this garden so frequently and my old article is so far into the past I would repost the recipe for you, and this time in picture form.
The concept of this no dig bed is simple. You don’t till or disturb the soil below, and you create a mound that roughly approximates a balanced pile of stable scrapings. This is a great way to start quickly and these mounds feed the soil below as the growing season progresses attracting beneficial insects and microbes to your growing area, and you won’t have to fertilize the plants growing in these mounds.
Since you don’t ever want to step into your garden mounds make sure that when you plan the bed size you will be able to reach at least halfway across the bed from the edge where you will be working, and that you can get to both sides to work.
My mounds are no more than 4′ wide, and are usually 8′ long so that I don’t have to go far to get to the other side. If I am putting a mound or box up against a fence I make it appropriately narrow because I won’t be able to work that bed from the fence side. I have found that I much prefer growing in mounds over boxes. I like the gently sloping mound sides as a growing place for the plants I thin. This is especially useful for lettuce plants which always need thinning, and seem to like the mound’s sides very much.
The newspaper or cardboard bottom layer is for keeping weeds or grass from coming up through the mound. It will break down quickly along with the other components of the mound, but not before smothering out any grass that is on your planting site.
Remember that there is a difference between straw and hay. Where I say straw I mean straw, where I say hay I mean hay, and although you will pay more for alfalfa hay than for coastal hay it is super high in nitrogen and well worth the cost. You can substitute peanut hay for alfalfa hay if you can find that for less, but it is far less common than alfalfa.
Each layer should be wetted as it is put down to assure that the whole pile is uniformly moist.
The best topping for this mound is homemade compost. The second best is bagged composted cow manure. It is a slower start than compost because it has much less life to it, and so must attract and foster the life that is already in your homemade compost, but it will work, and does for many of my clients who are starting gardening and composting simultaneously.
When pouring or shoveling on the top compost layer some of the compost will fall or slip down the sides. This is desirable, just gently pat the compost onto the sides so that it stays, and pull any that spilled beyond the mound back up into the sides and pat again.
The manure layers can be hot, old, or partially decomposed manure. If I have a choice I put the hottest manure in the lowest position, but I have used hot manure in the top manure layer without trouble in the past.
It is a good idea to mulch the plants growing in this bed using straw or shredded leaves. Mulching will keep the weeds down, and will keep the soil from bouncing up onto plant leaves when it rains. Mulching is also a good idea because it is the continuous addition of organic matter to your soil. Soil should be fed in this way to keep it full of beneficial life and to avoid any need for turning in organic materials or tilling. The only plants I hesitate to mulch are the baby tender leaf greens like lettuce. With those I will pull the mulch back a bit from the plants until they are grown up a bit.
You will find that as the growing season progresses the mound will shrink down until by the season end it is just a few inches higher than ground level. When it is time to finish your growing season simply cut your crops down leaving old stems leaves and roots in and on the ground to continue feeding the soil. If you plan to leave the mound fallow for the summer cover it over with 12 to 18 inches of organic materials like leaves, uncured compost, or stable scrapings and cover that over with straw. Then the next season you can just plant right into that straw.
This lasagna recipe is well known among gardeners. Its balanced parts make growing quickly in a brand new garden an easy feat, but it is not the only way to make a mound in which to grow. It is possible to grow in mounds of old composted manure, or partially composted piles of manure and leaves, or leaves and hay and manure, or mounds of composted wood and leaf remains like what’s at the bottom of a passive compost pile. The mounding simply gets it high and draining well, and it assures that the growing area is deep enough for your crops without having to dig in and disturb the soil below.
Get cooking on your No Dig Lasagna Mound and grow something great to eat.
It is April in the South Florida garden, and the winter vegetables are loosing their shine. It is time to pull out the last of the carrots, and as the broccoli spears get longer and begin flowering it is time to harvest the leaves for the cook pot. The dill is flowering, the cilantro too, and the onions are putting on some serious size. My last crop of lettuce is nearly picking size, and the older crops are all bolting. The peas and tomatoes are ripening fast now, and the eggplant and the peppers are flowering. If you can get some mature plants it may not be too late for some more tomatoes, and it is for sure not too late to put in some Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes. Don’t cut your collards down, they will keep on giving leaves right up until the next planting season.
My mango tree is mad with flowers. Mangos flowering now will begin to have ripe fruit in July. Farmer Jim Gibbons says that in the islands when the mangos flowered this much it meant a rough hurricane season was ahead. I hope the mangos are wrong.
My pineapples are all pregnant with golf ball sized pineapples, the passion vine and the papaya are flowering, and I see loquats ripening in my tree and in trees all over the neighborhood. This is also the opportune time to go into the woods for Green-brier shoots.
This is the right time to be planting your hot weather vegetables. Some of those that will do well in the next few months are yard long pole beans, black eye peas, basil, okra, red amaranth (callaloo), malabar spinach, biter melon, (if you know someone who will eat it), seminole pumpkin (it will take up a lot of space), and sweet potatoes. My chard is still doing real well, and I believe it is not too late to start another crop. If you don’t have pigeon peas this is a great time to find some seeds, or a transplant and get one started. It should get big enough to make peas in time for next winter.
If you can find some decent transplants, peppers and eggplant will probably fruit for you before it gets too hot, and if they don’t and you can keep them through the summer (I have done it) they will be the first to bear in the fall.
We may be near the end of our winter vegetables, but this is not by far the end of eating from the garden in South Florida. Take a breath, and plant those seeds. Here we go again.
In the world of garden manures Rabbit Manure (Bunny Balls) is one of the most fondly regarded. Using livestock manures to help build your soil or compost means not having to spread synthetic fertilizers on your plants. It is a consistent slow release way to improve soil so that plants can develop an interdependence with the soil and feed themselves.
Rabbit manure is a pelleted manure. Livestock manures that come pelleted tend not to burn. Amongst the pelleted non burning manures Bunny Balls are my favorite. They are dry to the touch, nearly odorless, and once on the soil they break down very quickly, and yet they never burn the plants. Rabbit manure is the one manure I am comfortable using as a side dressing directly on the garden while growing. I also use rabbit manure in potted plants. I put it on the soil surface of the potted plant. Rabbit manure tends to break down more slowly on the surface of a potted plant than on the surface of the garden. I don’t have an explanation for that. I also feed Bunny Balls to my garbage eating worms, putting a layer of rabbit manure in each time I put in a layer of garbage. The worms seem to love the Bunny Balls.
My rabbits eat Timothy hay and garden weeds. To see what garden weeds I feed my rabbits you can read my post: Weeds, Food For Rabbits, and the follow up article: More Weeds For Rabbits. I also feed my rabbits radish tops, carrot tops, and an occasional apple, or banana slice, and alfalfa pellets now and then for a treat. They are pretty amazing hay grinders, and once their manure begins to break down you can clearly see the finely ground hay. Rabbits are composters. Hay takes months to break down in my compost pile while the hay the rabbits eat will be composted in their guts in a day or so.
I bring Bunny Balls to the Downtown Fort Pierce Farmer’s Market Saturday mornings. You can find me and my Bunny Balls there every Saturday morning at the Compost Gardener’s Worm Booth. I package the Bunny Balls in repurposed paper boxes for various prices. Cereal boxes, flour bags, pasta boxes and popsicle boxes make great packaging for Bunny Balls. The paper bags and boxes breath so the manure never molds or changes while in the package. They are currently priced at $1, $3, $4, and $5, for various sized boxes.
Another rabbit waste product that I really like using in my garden is the litter from the Bunny Bunker. It is a mixture of hay, pine flakes, and rabbit manure. In the winter it is much heavier on hay because I put a lot of hay in the bunker so that the rabbits can stay warm. In the summer there is more pine flake than hay. Either way it makes an excellent compost additive, and a really good fruit tree mulch. I use it on every fruiting plant and tree I grow. I put it down every few months mulching heavily at the plants’ drip line and a few feet beyond. It keeps weeds out while it is breaking down, and the trees and plants mulched with it do beautifully.
Sometimes time spent in the garden isn’t enough. Sometimes the hard work, or difficulties of weather extremes expected and unexpected, and the effort spent dealing with such difficulties, can be exhausting. Even successes in the garden are exhausting. Once it is harvest time the work can seem endless, and even most bad weather won’t stop the harvest. A grower may need to nourish the inner life, and reseed the creative spirit. Sometimes the cure is spending an hour lost in a good book, the right article or pics in a garden magazine or blog, and for me tonight it was this video. If you think your piece of land is too small to seriously farm, that you have maxed out the potential of your piece of land, you have to see this video. I posted one like it earlier. If you haven’t seen that one I suggest you see it too. Both are wicked inspirational. See Path To Freedom.
The Downtown Fort Pierce Green Market photo by Brian Gilligan
Our Booth @ The Downtown Fort Pierce Farmers' Market
One Saturday morning I was tending my booth at The Downtown Ft. Pierce Green Market, and while I was listening to a woman talk about local food it occurred to me that although we all throw the term local food around a whole lot we don’t spend much time exploring what local actually means and how it impacts our families, our communities, our economy and our ecology.
I think the defining idea for local food is that we should be getting our food from as close to home as we can. Where is the closest locally grown food? Start making circles. The food grown closest to my home is right outside my front door and right outside my back door. We should all start there if we can. The next closest? My next door neighbor. One of your neighbors is probably hiding a lovely vegetable garden in the back yard too.
The next closest food is at the grocery store, right? No, not really. Although shopping there helps to support working people who live in our communities, the meat, dairy and produce in our grocery store come from very far away, and have to be shipped there. Grocery produce, conventional or organic, is never very fresh, and the carbon cost is high. Support your grocery community by buying your staples or paper goods there. Look for fresh food closer, at least until they begin to sell locally grown food in the grocery stores.
The next closest food comes to the Green Market in Downtown Fort Pierce on Saturday mornings. There is a local certified organic farm that sells fresh vegetables at that market. There is also a local hydroponic farmer, and a local conventional farmer, a local pastured poultry rancher, and a natural farmer from Okeechobee. There are several vegetable importers who set up there too, but it is pretty easy to tell the local growers from the importers by the vegetables they have.
Local farms are also a shopping resource in some communities. I know my local poultry producer Crazy Hart Ranch welcomes shopping visits from her customers that can’t or don’t make it to the markets on Saturday. Gibbons Organic Farm also sells from the farm for a few customers each week, and I hear that White Rabbit Farm has a pretty large drop in clientele.
One lady I see shopping at the Green Market belongs to an organic vegetable coop group. The people in her group order from an organic vegetable importer. The community order is trucked in to the home of one group member and from there is distributed to the rest. This is organic but can not be considered local food; it is coming into a distribution center from all over the world. The food is not local, not fresh, does nothing to support the local economy, and the carbon foot print is huge.
Eating locally is not always easy. Although it is not always expensive it can be more expensive than imported food. Partly because we have come to expect to be able to find food at a price that is actually less than what it costs to produce and ship. This is mostly thanks to subsidies the government awards to farms, and most of these subsidies are going to the industrial factory farms that produce the lions share of the food available in the grocery stores rather than to family farms which are only lately inching back from a steep and dangerous decline. Family farms which have been disappearing are re-surging by learning to fill niche markets, and by switching to sustainable farming techniques instead of industrial farming techniques. In a very real way I think our lives depend on the salvation of the family farm, and on the creation of new homestead and urban farming. I think the future of the family farm rests with the will of the consumer. If we support our local family farms by doing our shopping with them we sustain them and we stimulate our local economy in a way that buying shipped in food does not.
The farmer/consumer relationship is desirable. The farmer who knows the people who consume his product is more likely to be in touch with what matters to them, and is more able to provide a satisfying product. A consumer who can have a conversation with the farmer who grows his food is a more informed consumer and tends to have more trust and confidence in that farmer. Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Factory Farms will never seek out a relationship with the consumers they provide. Too many of the day to day occurrences in those operations are appalling and so a culture of closed secrecy is necessary in such places, also there is no farmer in a factory farm, and no rancher in a confined animal feeding operation. Really.
Now before you get mad at the government over the farm subsidy issue it can be said that the government was probably trying to find a way to make food affordable for every citizen, while assisting family farmers in making ends meet, only as more and more family farms failed trying to compete with the factory farms their subsidies were gobbled up by the factory farms making factory farms even more capable of competing family farms right out of the market. Also most of the subsidies the government awards now go to grain producers, so a farmer who grows vegetables, nuts, fruits or livestock is not eligible for subsidies. Food in the grocery store and at fast food restaurants has been pretty inexpensive, but the cost of that affordable but low quality food is showing itself in the form of record numbers of morbidly obese citizens, and is impacting our ecology in ways we can not afford, and lastly in keeping food cheaper than it costs to produce those subsidies have been the killing blow for many multi generational family farms.
In addition to providing local farm, family, and business stimulation, buying locally produced food reduces the carbon footprint of our food. If your food travels 50 miles to the market, and you travel 10 miles to get there and back that is a significant fuel and carbon reduction from the thousands of miles food travels to get to your grocery store shelf. Lots of food is cheaply grown in other nations especially for our grocery stores while the native people in those nations starve. Using resources from other countries to serve our own needs depletes and unbalances the natural resources upon which others rely.
At our house food is considered the most important expense in our budget, and although times are tough it is the one expense we don’t spare. Not only do we find fresh local farm grown food to be far superior in flavor to the ‘fresh’ food we find at the grocery store, we consider this a health issue, and that where we could save on lower cost food we would lose out on health care costs, we also consider that this is a moral imperative; we think that supporting locally grown food systems will lead to solving some of the world’s most pressing problems, and so we make ourselves heard at the cash register.
Now the responsibility lies with us to recognize local food wherever it may be in our communities. Support your local ranchers and farmers lest they disappear forever. Grow food at home, and encourage your neighbors to do the same. The two best ways to encourage your neighbors to grow food is to put your gorgeous vegetable garden in the front yard, and share the harvest. Most people don’t know what fresh food grows like or tastes like anymore. Some never had it before, and the rest forgot.
Eating locally has a benefit that some would call a drawback. Eating locally means eating what is in season in your region.
If you are buying grapes in January they are probably from Chile. Do you know how many miles away Chile is? If you want grapes off season learn to put food by while it is in season. Make preserves, or just freeze a bag or jar of grapes. Frozen grapes are my niece’s favorite summertime snack. When your favorite navel orange or tangelo is at the height of its season peel and freeze some for the summer. Makes sauces or salsas of your tomatoes to freeze, or dehydrate them. Dehydrate pineapples and mangos in the summer for a winter fruit treat. Here in S. Florida there is never a time when there isn’t something delicious growing. Learning to eat in season brings great appreciation for the changes in crops that the seasons bring. By the time my lettuce comes up bitter I am sick of lettuce anyway and am craving okra, bitter melon, mangos, summer beans and peas, and pineapple, and when the cold comes I am ready once again for mustard greens, broccoli, radishes, carrots, and yes, lettuce.
There is one more benefit in finding, buying, growing and sharing local food. It will help you to discover your community.
Spend less time in your car and more time walking/shopping in the market and you too will listen in on and participate in the conversations that connect us with other people. Get to know your local rancher and farmer at the market, find out what the next week’s harvest will bring. Develop a relationship with a small neighborhood grower like me. I am your neighbor, and I am growing amazing fresh food. Why not learn how you can too? Put a vegetable garden and some fruit trees in your front yard, and you will begin to meet your neighbors. Destroy your turf grass and see how interesting the conversation gets!
Join Your Community, Eat Locally Grown Food, Preserve Family Farms.
Most Saturday mornings you can find me in the worm booth at the Fort Pierce Downtown Green Market, but this weekend, February 6 and 7, 2010 you will find me and my associate Pat Brown at the Vero Beach Gardenfest at the Riverside Park. There are excellent plants for sale there as well as garden accouterments for the gardener, and there are food vendors, so you can make this outing a day. If you are a gardener or someone who loves a gardener this show is for you. Admission is free so come out this Saturday 9-5 and Sunday 9-4, and stop by the booth and say hello.
It is winter time, January in South Florida, and a two week cold snap finished off the last of my Bitter Melon or Bitter Gourd plant. I wrote about this crop while I was growing it in the article In The Garden: Growing Bitter Melon.
I want to share what I learned about this crop as well as some harvest pics.
Although bores destroyed all of the cucumbers I planted nearby they left the Biter Gourd crop alone though it is in the same cucurbitaceae family. I think the smell of the Bitter Gourd plant makes it unappealing to insects. This crop lasted for several months and made mad delicious gourds, lots of them. The plants I put under the Avocado tree did not do as well as the crop that grew on the fence. The idea is sound, but the soil beneath the tree is not as good as the soil I made in the mound at the fence.
Stir frying this vegetable until tender enough to eat was taking too long, and so once it was cut into pieces I steamed it for about 8 minutes before tossing it into the skillet with the black bean sauce and oil. Then, since I had water left from the steaming process I used that water in the sauce. I found that the more I ate the Bitter Melon Gourd the more I craved it, and my husband went from being turned off by the flavor of the Biter Melon to enjoying it whenever I cooked it.
I found that it was better for me if the vegetable did not begin to turn orange at all before I harvested it because it kept longer in the refrigerator, but if I harvested when the seeds were ripe the gourd was more tender and cooked faster than if the seeds weren’t yet ripe. So the trick was to harvest when the fruit was ripe but not over ripe. Though I often harvested and ate gourds before the seeds were fully developed.
The variety of Bitter Gourd seed I bought is called Comet. It is a hybrid variety so I did not save any seeds. I bought the seeds from Johnny’s Select Seeds. All of the seeds germinated, and the plants grew quickly and fruited for a long time.
Kitazawa Seed Co. is my Asian vegetable seed hook up. They have a large selection of Bitter Gourd varieties. I am getting some of their Bitter Gourds seeds to plant this summer so that I can get an heirloom variety and save some seeds for the next time around. I am hoping there is such a thing.
I heard from a customer that while he was out shoveling manure off of a pasture (not his own) his children were out there running around barefoot in that pasture. Manure is an excellent garden and compost additive. It will bring biological life, tilth, micro and macro nutrients to your soil. It can also bring bacteria and parasitic organisms from the bodies of the livestock from which it came. I decided I should write some more on handling manure.
Diseases that humans can catch from animals are called Zoonoses.
While only a few diseases can be acquired while handling manure it is wise to handle manure carefully, none of the diseases we can contract from handling manure incautiously are desirable. Composting manure is one of the things we do to render it harmless. High temperatures in the thermophilic stage of composting, invertebrates of the compost pile, and compost organisms work to effectively destroy pathogens in manure.
Some of the safety precautions I use while handling manure include wearing long jeans, washable garden shoes, and gloves that I only use for handling manure. If I am shoveling chicken manure I wear a dust mask too. I don’t harvest vegetables in the same clothes I wore for handling manure, and after the manure handling is done the dirty clothes are removed to the laundry, and I shower. Finally I always thoroughly wash the vegetables I harvest at harvest time, and again before I use them if they have spent more than a day in a bag in the fridge.
I tend to think that this information is well known and common knowledge, and yet I find evidence that this information is anything but obvious. People often equate the idea of natural or organic growing with harmlessness. Though manuring compost and soil can be perfectly safe, and is a safe bet compared with a lifetime of exposure to pesticides, herbicides, and synthetic fertilizers, it can be anything but harmless if underestimated and mishandled.
Healthy livestock are less likely to carry parasites and diseases that might be in their manure, but we aren’t always aware of the health of the livestock when we are clearing off the pasture or barns at a ranch or farm. It is unwise to bet your health on such things. Always using precautions creates healthy manure handling habits, and that is a good thing.
Livestock manure brings good things to our soil so that we can grow great food, but don’t forget what it is. I have been safely handling livestock manures for at least 20 years. I am comfortable with the precautions I take, and I enjoy the benefits of having manure to add to my compost. Can you make compost and great soil without any manure additives? Absolutely. The finest blackest compost I have ever seen is made with just leaves and vegetable wastes from the kitchen.
I have written quite a few articles about making your own compost using your kitchen garbage, manure, leaves and other carbonaceous wastes. In my last article Composted Cow Manure and The Commando Garden I wrote about composted cow manure and how to use it as a stand in when all of your home made compost is gone. I make my own manure compost piles because I acquire great piles of manure and I need to be able to keep it on my property without offending whichever neighbor is down wind. My husband says that makes me a pilot.
My manure composting area was recently cut out of the woods, so when I make a new pile I put down some cardboard to help keep things from growing up into the manure compost piles.
Once the cardboard is down I pile the manure onto it and I cover it over well with straw, water it once and walk away.
The manure begins to break down and change very quickly, and in no time I find earthworms and other compost invertebrates working the manure piles when I dig down into them.
How big the piles are and their dimensions is relative to how much manure I acquire, and how much cardboard I have.
I like the cardboard to stick out a little beyond the pile to keep the grass away. Grass gets very excited when it finds a manure pile and will try to climb it. The cardboard will not last very long beneath the manure, but it breaks down more slowly outside of the pile and so helps keep the grass from coming up the edges.
It is ok to pile the manure very high. My piles are often 10 feet long by 5 feet wide and 3 feet high. I don’t add any carbonaceous wastes except for the cardboard below and the straw above. You can add leaves or old hay, or even sawdust if you want, but if you are getting stable scrapings the carbonaceous wastes are already included in the form of stable bedding like pine flake or straw and feed wastes like hay. I still don’t add carbonaceous wastes to my manure piles even when they are pasture scrapings, and therefore free of carbonaceous wastes because although I am glad that the piles breakdown a bit before I use them I am still using them as manure rather than compost. I either build that manure into my no dig garden, or I add it into my compost piles when they need a green or nitrogen rich ingredient, or I use it to fertilize fruit trees sandwiching it between the old mulch and a new layer of mulch above.
How long it will take for your manure pile to become soil, and worthy of planting into is not so easy to predict. Some of the factors that affect the speed of breakdown are what type of manure you acquired, how old the manure is when you first pile it up, weather conditions around the pile, and how deep the pile is. Cow manure can take a full year of composting before it is mellow enough to grow into, while horse manure will cool off faster. Wet weather will speed the breakdown of the pile. Deeper piles will break down more slowly. Piles of old manure mixed with hot manure will help the hot manure to break down more quickly.
If you are not sure your composted manure is ready to grow into you can test it. Clear off some straw, make a depression and plant some seeds into it. If they sprout and thrive it’s probably ready. If you get yellow colored sprouts the manure compost is still too hot. Remember, the longer a compost pile sits the greater number of beneficial soil organisms it supports. This is called curing. Beneficial soil organisms are absolutely necessary for plant health, so give your composted manure piles lots of time to cure. You might also consider adding your composted manure into your kitchen/yard compost pile.
Composted Cow Manure is an excellent garden amendment. In the garden we focus on the soil a great deal. We work to make great compost, and if it goes in your garden the way it goes in mine you will run out of your home made compost before your compost needs are met. Composted Cow Manure in the bag from the store is a reasonable stand in for home made compost. It usually comes in 40lb bags, and the best price I have found so far is just under $1.70 for a bag. Composted cow manure can take the place of your compost as the top layer of the No Dig Garden Box or Mound.
In a pinch a bag of composted cow manure will make an excellent commando garden too. For instance, say growing season has come, and you haven’t built or planned your permanent garden. Go to the store and get several bags of composted cow manure. Find a sunny place near the the kitchen and proximate to a water source. Lay a bag down on its flat side on the ground. Poke some holes in the bag on the upturned side. Flip that side with the holes over onto the ground, cut a slit long ways down the middle of the now upsided bag surface and plant your seeds or transplants right into it. You will be able to grow there for a season. Just plant your transplants or seeds, water and watch them grow. You won’t need to feed plants growing in composted cow manure either, it is rich enough as it is for a whole season of growing.
My lady friend Celeste did her entire garden bed this way for the first season in her new house. She placed dozens of bags of composted cow manure a few rows wide and several rows long and opened the bags to grow into. She had a great harvest, and in the summer while there visiting I helped her to pull the plastic bags away from beneath the soil, and was thrilled to see many large earthworms blessing her garden. I don’t know if they came from the ground beneath the garden, or from the bags of composted cow manure, how ever they came to be there earthworms are a wonderful sign in the garden.
Tired of bending down to your garden? Put the bag of composted cow manure on a raised surface. If you don’t have a table to spare, wire spools work great, or lay decking boards (2×6 or 2×8) across saw horses and lay the bags up there.
Composted cow manure is no longer manure. It was once, and has composted down so that it is just rich black soil. Composted cow manure is not top soil. Top soil is not the same as composted cow manure, and will not perform even half as well in your garden. I don’t recommend top soil for growing vegetables. Potting soil is for growing plants in pots. Don’t put potting soil on your vegetable garden. If you would like to lighten up the composted cow manure you can use two shovels full of coconut coir per 16 square feet. Don’t forget that if you are planning an organic garden the soil amendments count. Composted cow manure is usually marked organic, and it is, in my opinion, ideal.
Is composted cow manure the perfect compost solution for us year after year? No. Remember, if you would like to reduce your carbon foot print buying bags of composted cow manure is not the way. A great deal of petroleum product was used to make the plastic bags the compost comes in, and there is the cost of shipping it to your store and the cost of the trip you made to get it from the store to your home. It is great in a pinch, but each summer I work to produce enough of my own compost to fulfill the needs of my garden for the next growing season. I hope you will too.
In my next article I will write about how to make your own composted manure for your garden. Stay tuned.
