Organic : Grow Your Own
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These days, no matter where you live, it’s rare that you can draw breath or take a sip or a bite without ingesting some chemical you wish weren’t going into your body. My feeling is that so much that’s harmful is being forced upon us unwittingly, we’d be fools to knowingly add more to the food we grow. That’s why I began gardening organically--that is, without chemicals--out of self-defense.
Slow and steady wins the day with an organic garden, but be prepared to work hard. It starts with double-dug soil.
Unless you’ve inherited an old organic garden or a site where chickens or horses or rabbits were raised, you’ll need to amend the soil with what will end up as humus. Humus is decomposed organic matter that is the quintessential ingredient when soil is called rich. Humus makes clay soils friable and sandy soils moisture-retentive, while promoting the health of microscopic creatures that promote the health of plants.
When starting an organic garden, test the soil with a kit from the nursery. That will give you an idea of what it needs.
For my garden, it began with manure. The soil was virgin decomposed granite. Not a weed grew in it. Every week for a spring, I’d go to the boarding school stables nearby and fill the station wagon with eight garbage bags full of old manure, which I dug into the soil.
Then I found a source of aged rabbit manure--incomparable stuff. My husband and I filled a pickup truck with the manure several times each spring and dug it in. Now, with our constant supply of compost and a few sacks of steer manure, redwood-soil amendment and mulch dug in each year, the soil is luscious.
Mulch is a thick layer you spread around plants when they’re growing to keep down weeds, conserve moisture and add nutrients. Mulch can be compost or ground bark or spoiled straw or the black-and-white pages of newspaper. Dug into the soil at season’s end, mulch adds humus.
Compost, of course, is humus you make yourself. Keep a big cookie jar at the sink, and instead of sending coffee grounds, tea leaves, egg shells and vegetable and fruit grunge from the refrigerator down the disposal, chop them up and drop them into the jar.
Every day or two, take the jar outside and spread the contents on what has become your compost heap--probably somewhere out of sight. Cover it well with earth to keep it from attracting flies and critters. As they become available, add layers of manure (fresh or aged), and everything soft and green from your garden except weeds (they may bear seeds that could produce more weeds).
You can water the heap or not (ideally keep it the consistency of a wrung-out sponge), and turn it or not (exposing materials to air helps them decompose faster). When it’s three to four feet high, start another pile. In a few months, the old one will have sunk into a wealth of rich dark sweet-smelling crumbs.
Spread your compost over the soil as mulch, sift it (with a quarter-inch screen) and use it as a nursery bed for germinating seeds, and mix it into the planting holes of fruiting plants--squashes, tomatoes, peppers and such.
And don’t forget worms. Every spring, buy cartons of small red and big brown worms at a fishing store and, in the evening, sprinkle them over your beds. Earthworms are the ne plus ultra of soil builders.
Although roots of some plants reach down four feet, if you create humus-y well-draining soil in the top 12 inches of your garden, that should be sufficient.
Should you have poor drainage-when you water (if it puddles for half an hour), while you’re waiting for your soil to improve, consider the quick fix of raised beds. Build a box of redwood or cedar that’s at least six inches above the ground. Fill it with a mix of soil and whatever amendments it takes to get good drainage (your county agricultural adviser can help you). If the soil is mounded in the bed, drainage is even better.
Or use containers, the ultimate instant garden. They’re especially useful if you don’t have soil in full sun and you’re ravenous for, say, Hmong bitter orange eggplants. Or if you’d love to grow watercress, sow seeds in a pot and set it on a saucer under a barely dripping faucet in the shade. Everything you want can grow in a container.
Now, while you’re getting the soil ready, plan your garden. Some people are happiest with a traditional patch, everything in rows, off in a corner. Some love the geometry of an Italian garden with brick paths and stately urns. Here in the mountains, ours is a melange of vegetables, herbs, fruits and flowers chockablock in beds around a tiny lawn (my husband’s pride) and up and down the hillside.
To make it easiest on yourself, choose plants that are naturally inclined to grow in your part of the world. Observe nearby plots and read books, gardening magazines and seed catalogues. If you live in the low desert, for example, you’ll grow lettuces that stand up to heat; stifle daydreams of blueberries, and glory in the Temple tangors only you can grow well.
Whatever the plan, create a framework of perennials--easygoing plants that come back every year with little effort on your part. Consider shrubs such as thyme, sage and lavender; vegetables such as rhubarb, asparagus and artichoke; edible flowers such as pinks, hollyhocks and chrysanthemums.
To fill inevitable gaps, rely on unfussy annuals. Calendulas, cosmos, nasturtiums, borage and Johnny-jump-ups will bloom their heads off all season, volunteer year after year, and none of them are much bothered by pests.
Speaking of pests, again, to make it easy, check the pest- and disease-resistance information on seed descriptions. Many heirloom seeds--open-pollinated seeds--have endured because their genes have accumulated experience dealing with adversity. However if truth be told, many won’t produce as vigorously as hybrids (crosses of two open-pollinated cultivars), although it’s a poor trade when pests start showing up. More and more organic gardeners are committed to growing open-pollinated seeds, knowing they are being dropped by seedsmen who make a bigger profit with hybrids.
You see, the seeds from a hybrid snap bean you love won’t reproduce the same bean--you have to buy new seeds. Whereas you can save and grow seeds of open-pollinated crops with the same results generation after generation. Because so many seedsmen are pushing hybrids, every year some of Great Aunt Maude’s mouth-watering fruits and vegetables slip into oblivion.
Helping staunch the flow is the Seed Savers Exchange, a worldwide network devoted to preserving open-pollinated seeds of everything from Amazon custard apples to yskruid (European vegetable, thick leaves with a salty taste) to yellow-orange-red-striped Zebra tomatoes.
When you plan, of course, you’ll set plants that like sun in the sunshine, those that like shade under an overhang or trees, and those that can’t tolerate wind in a sheltered place. Then the only thing that’s critical is water--everyone in a group should want the same amount. However, larger plants can have a basin around them and be given water individually. Unless your garden’s huge, you can also fertilize plants individually. Actually, when the soil in an organic garden is good, you won’t have to do much feeding. There’s a maxim: feed the soil, not the plant.
A fascinating traditional aspect of gardening naturally is companion planting. Just as you’ve had the experience of feeling comfortable with someone from the moment you met them, you’ve also known people you couldn’t bear from the git-go. Why should plants be different? Some seem to prosper in one another’s company, while others cringe when set together. Although the responses of many relationships is anecdotal, there are some scientifically proven good companions, such as tomatoes and marigolds. It’s fun to experiment and see what works for you. And have you heard about the French intensive method? It’s the notion of growing compatible plants ultra close so that when the leaves touch, their canopy discourages weeds and preserves moisture. The method makes maximum use of space. I do it. You’ll quickly learn that you can grow plants a great deal closer than the seed packet advises. The trick is to give the plants great soil and everything else they need, in spades.
At some point in designing your garden, you should decide upon your plan for crop rotation. Rotating your crops through the garden evens out the demands upon the soil and keeps pests and diseases from making themselves a permanent home. It’s an ancient practice, and every authority has a theory on how to do it best. Read and decide for yourself which method you want to use, then keep track of your crops in a notebook.
What to read? Two of my best teachers have been John Seymour’s “The Self-Sufficient Gardener” (out of print, a great pity--if you should find it, grab it) and John Jeavons’ “How to Grow More Vegetables” (10 Speed Press: 1991, $14.95). Sunset’s recent “Illustrated Guide to Organic Gardening” is also good.
Mother Nature has provided us with an army of what are termed “beneficials.” Give them your hospitality. For big and little frogs and to tempt any toad in the vicinity, I’ve sunk an enormous earthenware bowl in the ground and keep it filled with water as a mini-pond. Mixed into the borders and in patches here and there I grow favorite sources of pollen and nectar for the larvae and adults of insects eager to dispatch other insects--the bad guys. There’s Queen Anne’s lace, several sorts of daisies, wild buckwheat, buttercups, goldenrod, asters, strawberries, white clover, wild lettuce (but I don’t let it flower because it crosses with cultivated lettuces, ugh), alfalfa, angelica, morning glories and yarrows.
Many of these plants also appeal to pollinators--the insects that make it possible for us to harvest squashes, pumpkins, melons and cucumbers, and to save seeds of sunflowers and most of the cabbage tribe. Just tonight I discovered a gathering of bumblebees on a stalk of wild lettuce. Nine of them were stock still, sucking its juicy leaves, for a very long time. Suddenly, one by one they lifted up, and groggily flew off.
Cats are often mentioned as beneficials in the organic garden. I regard them as a toss-up. In her salad days, Thistle presented us with a lizard every day in summer, and Teeny knocked down birds’ nests left and right. Now they’re gone, I can’t take a step in the garden without a lizard scooting out from underfoot, and the birds have settled into the trees en masse. Between them and the wondrous dusk-flying bats, they gobble up vast quantities of insects.
The toss-up part about cats is that now we also have rodents cavorting in the garden. Field mice, voles, chipmunks, ground squirrels, and, grrrr, gophers, have demolished several of my baby crops. I wish there weren’t coyotes singing beneath our windows every night so we could have outdoor cats to dispatch the critters. And ducks to eat the slugs. Instead, to protect seedlings, I cover them with tents of half-inch chicken wire until the leaves are large enough to no longer be of interest.
No, organic gardening is not for sissies. Fertilizers, for example, are basic stuff. Meals made of hoof, horn, blood, bone. Manures from everyone from bats to Bossie. Swift-smelling emulsions from the sea such as kelp and fish. Moldy oak leaves. Sooty wood ashes. Ah, but as you sprinkle these beauties over the soil, you feel as though you’re in another century, a time when everyone lived close to the earth, felt at ease with the rhythms of nature.
Finally, if you’re like me, the thing you’ll perceive as you work--outwitting this one, sustaining that one--is that this commitment to gardening organically will carry you joyously to the end of your days. And likely lengthen them. As Shakespeare reminds us, a light heart lives long.
And before you know it, you’ll be recycling (if you aren’t already), scolding people on the street who drop gum wrappers, and telephoning the White House about the environment. Welcome.
Sources: Agricultural adviser: Under county listings in the phone book. Earthworms, beneficial insects, organic fertilizers and pest controls: Gardens Alive!, 5100 Schenley Place, Lawrenceburg, Ind. 47025. Seeds: Seed Savers Exchange, 3076 N. Winn Road, Decorah, Iowa 52101. Books: The Cook’s Bookstore, 8373 W. Third St., Los Angeles, Calif. 90048.