| Within our garden, there are about four beds that we painstakingly dug up, loosened the soil, removed the boulders, and added compost to. Then there are other parts of the yard (the area we call "The Ladybug Patch" as well as a strip in front of the fence along the road) that, well, we just haven't had time or money to put in that much effort. But I planted stuff there anyway. And nature taught me a lesson. FOUR MONTHS after planting beets and chard, the chard is tiny and the beets are the size of baby carrots. Beets don't require much nitrogen and they can grow to maturity in about 2 months, so something is seriously wrong here.
Here's what I did. |
| On the way home from DC, various airport mishaps gave me ample time to curl up with a textbook on agroecology, and it made me think about the Ladybug Patch. This part of the garden is along the driveway, so the edges of it are on an incline - ripe for erosion and water runoff. The soil is a heavy clay so water does not seep in quickly (if at all, since it evaporates faster than it penetrates the soil typically) and that means there's only so much water I can give it at a time unless I want to watch the majority of that water go down the driveway into the gutter. Aside from the obvious water problem, the soil is quite compacted, which means the plants aren't getting water or air. That's a bad thing.
This week I started out by digging a little ditch along the edge of the bed so that the water would collect there instead of running down the driveway and taking our soil with it. Hopefully, next rainy season (and each year thereafter), this will allow a reservoir of water to build up deep in the soil. One thing that worries me is that the ditch (or swale, to use the permaculture term for them) runs downward, along the driveway. Within the ditch, I varied the depth every few inches so that the water would seep in all along the length of the swale and not just at the bottom of the driveway. I also dug ditches perpendicular to the one that borders the driveway about every four feet or so, because I want the water to seep into the soil everywhere, not just nearest to the driveway.
Next, I removed the dead plants and weeds from the first bed - the one I planted back in February that still hasn't managed to grow as much as a beet - and put the dead plant material in my ditch as a mulch. Hopefully when the water runs in there, the mulch will help curb evaporation. I left a few plants in place - the lettuce, cilantro, and arugula that are going to seed, and the thyme and sunflowers that are doing well. I also planted some lambsquarters and amaranth in the bed, hoping that the lambsquarters would become established there as a beneficial and edible weed and that the amaranth would do the job it's supposed to do pumping nutrients out of the deep parts of the soil. Then I broadcast several cover crop seeds - hairy vetch, rye grass, red clover, and buckwheat. And I watered the entire area heavily. I plan to let the cover crops grow for a while and then I will till them in as a green manure. I would have added compost, but we can't produce our own fast enough and I don't want to buy any. The compost I've been buying comes from chicken manure and wood chips, and chickens are fed a drug called Roxarsone which is an arsenical. The last thing my garden needs is extra arsenic. (I am going to send a sample of the chicken manure from my local nursery to a lab for testing to find out if there's arsenic in that.)
I only planted cover crops in the first bed of the Ladybug Patch. The others are already planted with various types of squash, melons, pumpkins, cucumbers, and beans, so I don't want to disturb them. Attempting to grow food crops there may just be an exercise in futility, but I've mixed in a bit of potting soil, worm castings, and ground coconut husk in the first few inches of the soil and then covered much of the area with mulch to help my poor little plants along. Most of them aren't dead and I've even got a little pumpkin about the size of a softball growing, so at least that's a good sign.
As much as I wanted to dive into gardening headfirst, it looks like nature is going to force me to slow down and take my time. |
