Those who pursue a different path often meet with skepticism in our society. This is perhaps nowhere quite as true as in the area of agriculture.
Continue reading The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer
You don’t have to read many gardening books or websites to catch on that mulch is highly recommended for all gardens. But knowing that you ought to mulch your garden and deciding what to mulch it with are two different things.
First off, it is important to recognize that everyone’s circumstances are unique. Factors that will affect your choice of a mulch include:
Therefore, it is a good idea to know going in exactly what you are trying to accomplish, whether that is weed control or soil improvement.
Once you have a clear objective for mulching, then it’s time to choose the material, or perhaps several materials for different beds and purposes.
You are ready to weigh the pros and cons of the most common mulch materials.
Straw and hay are not the same. Straw is simply crop stubble, while hay is the entire grass plant, including seed heads. Straw is an effective weed barrier, while hay is primarily a simple mechanism for introducing a host of new weeds to your garden. Make sure you mulch with straw, not hay.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: General-purpose vegetable garden mulching, summer through winter.
Lawn clippings should be used with care. They should be applied only when dry and preferably in conjunction with coarser materials to avoid forming a heavy, moldy, anaerobic mat. Also, if accepting bagged lawn clippings from other people, always check to make sure that they do not use herbicides, as accidental contamination can spell speedy death to your flowers and vegetables.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Mulching summer vegetables with high nitrogen requirements.
LeavesLeaves can improve your soil texture and nutrient profile in an amazingly short amount of time. Unfortunately, they can also be difficult to manage in the garden, as they blow away when dry and form heavy, waterproof mats when wet. Want to avoid some of the problems associated with using leaves as mulch? Shred or partially compost the leaves before applying them. As a final word of warning—do not use walnut leaves, as they are toxic to many plants.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Protecting and enriching vegetable garden soil over the winter.
Pine straw is just pine needles used for mulch.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Mulching acid-loving plants such as blueberries, hydrangeas, or rhododendrons.
There are many varieties of wood mulch to choose from, all with their own unique benefits. Cedar even provides a certain level of protection from insects. Just watch out for toxins—if you purchase your wood mulch, stay away from mulches containing dyes. Also, never use black walnut, as it contains toxins lethal to many garden plants.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Ground cover for perennial beds.
CompostDon’t have your own compost pile? You can purchase bagged compost at garden centers, but commercial compost is typically made with only a couple of ingredients and is thus less balanced than homemade compost.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Feeding garden plants of all types under another mulch material.
Peat moss is harvested from peat bogs. It has some unusual characteristics that can be either good or bad depending on your requirements. For one thing, it can absorb water like a sponge, which improves boggy soil considerably but may allow plants to dry out in hot, droughty weather. For another thing, it makes the soil more acidic, although typically not enough to present a problem.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Improving heavy soils that drain poorly.
If you do plenty of woodworking, sawdust is definitely a mulch you should consider. Just be careful about what sawdust you use—dust from treated lumber can add toxins to your soil.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Mulching acid-loving plants for cheap.
Cardboard is the go-to mulch if you have a serious weed problem—nothing can penetrate it! Keep in mind, though, that cardboard can be a pain to deal with. You will want large sheets to cover as much surface area as possible without leaving cracks for weeds to grow through, and you will want to cover it with straw to keep it in place but out of sight.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Putting the brakes on heavy weed infestations in perennial beds when used in combination with another mulch material.
While many gardeners avoid mulching with newspaper for fear of lead contamination, newspapers phased out lead-based inks long ago. Black-and-white newsprint is perfectly safe for the garden these days; colored inks may still contain some heavy metals. Note that newspaper is prone to blowing around. Cover it with another mulch, such as straw or wood chips, to avoid inadvertently trashing the neighborhood.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Preventing weed growth between rows in a vegetable garden when combined with straw or another mulch material.
A rock mulch is about as permanent as it gets, and it can be very attractive in landscaping. Keep in mind, however, that rock works best with heat-loving plants. It is a popular choice of mulch in cactus gardens.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Around woody perennials or in desert landscaping.
PlasticPlastic mulches come in several different colors. Black plastic is effective at warming the soil. Clear plastic warms the soil even faster, but has the disadvantage of permitting weed growth. Red plastic reflects certain wavelengths of sunlight onto the plants, enhancing the yields of tomatoes and other summer vegetables. Whatever type of plastic you use, remember that rain cannot penetrate to the soil, so you will need to combine the plastic with soaker hoses or a similar form of irrigation.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Warming the soil in the spring, particularly around warm-season vegetables.
Landscape fabric should be covered with another mulch material for both looks and longevity. Keep in mind that some weeds can grow through the fabric.
Pros:
Cons:
Best Application: Around landscaping perennials.
For whatever reason, finding quality potting soil is very difficult anymore. Most brands seem to harbor diseases, weed seeds, and bug eggs. And the nonstandard brands frequently appear to be nothing more than poor-quality topsoil dug up from the “manufacturer’s” backyard!
In light of this dilemma, we currently recommend Black Gold organic potting soil. Not just because it is organic (although that is certainly a plus), but primarily because several years of use have yielded satisfactory results in the form of healthy plants without unexpected weeds or small swarms of gnats flying around the seedlings.
Peat moss and forest humus provide a light, loose texture that works well for starting seedlings indoors. Compost and screened earthworm castings add just a little bit of all-natural nitrogen for a good start (of course, potted plants will still need to be fed periodically).
Shop around a bit before you buy—the prices do fluctuate and sometimes (but not always) a bigger size is a better bargain.
As winter continues to linger, some of you may be taking the opportunity to prune the orchard, including the small fruits, while the plants are dormant.
But before we tell you how to safely chop away at your blackberries, let’s address the different varieties of blackberries. Traditionally, most blackberries have borne fruit on two-year-old canes, called floricanes. Recently, however, some ever-bearing varieties have been developed; these bear fruit on one-year-old canes, or primocanes.
Primocane varieties have the potential to bear two crops—one in the summer from the second-year canes and one in the fall from the first-year canes. This is why they are considered ever-bearing. While this initially sounds like an advantage, fruiting on the first-year canes is typically only beneficial in northerly climates with late springs. Fruit from primocanes gets off to a later start start than fruit from floricanes, enabling it to ripen in the cool fall when moisture is abundant. After harvest, the canes are typically cut to the ground, as northern growers generally do not want to deal with the sparse summer harvest of the second-year canes.
However, primocane blackberries typically suffer in quantity and quality in climates where summer temperatures hit 90°F. Under these conditions, floricanes have the advantage due to their greater heat tolerance. This is probably why K-State blackberry variety recommendation lists typically only include the tried-and-true floricane varieties.
Therefore, we will only address the pruning needs of standard floricane blackberries in this post.
If your blackberry plants are healthy, feel free to compost the pruned material. Just be sure to chop up anything hard or unwieldy to encourage faster composting. But if your blackberries are suffering from any disease issues, you will probably want to burn the pruned-out canes to avoid the spread of disease.
Regularly cleaning your pruning shears is advisable when dealing with diseased plants. Use a solution of 1 part bleach to 10 parts water.
Raspberries and Blackberries
Handy illustrated report from K-State that includes pruning directions.
What color is your garden soil? Does it make a difference?
Yes! Some of the factors that alter the color of soil include:
All of these considerations are very important to the health of your garden plants.
Continue reading Garden Soil Colors and What They Mean
Vermicomposting is the process of creating compost with the aid of earthworms. While all composting relies on microbes to do much of the work, vermicomposting allows worms to come to their assistance.
The worm starts the composting process by ingesting organic matter and breaking it down with digestive enzymes. However, the digestive system of an earthworm is rather inefficient, only absorbing about 5% to 10% of the food the worm eats. This is good news for vermicompost, because the rest of the organic matter, now moistened and considerably broken down, is excreted and offers a rich buffet for hungry microbes.
Note that vermicompost and worm castings are not the the same. Worm castings are simply the excrement of the earthworm. Vermicompost includes worm castings, but also worm bedding, food, and remains in various stages of decomposition, all supporting a vibrant community of microbes.
Vermicompost is typically made in a “worm bin” filled with bedding (usually shredded paper) and organic material for the worms to eat. A suitable worm habitat is further created by keeping the bin dark and moist.
Two worm species are typically used:
The red wiggler is particularly popular because it is easy to care for and produces castings quickly and efficiently.
Of course, you can theoretically dig up any old earthworms in your backyard to populate the worm bin, but there is no guarantee that you will find effective compost-building species this way. A surefire solution is to order red wigglers online.
Finished vermicompost looks very much like high-quality soil, but it is incredibly rich in microbes.
Most kitchen scraps and waste paper products make good worm food. However, you will want to avoid anything that produces a foul odor, especially if your worm bins are indoors. That includes meats, oils, dairy products, onions, garlic, potatoes, and anything in the mustard family, such as broccoli. Also note that worms are not a replacement for the neighborhood recycling facility—they cannot process plastic or aluminum.
Vermicompost is equally suited to trees, vegetables, flowers, and potted plants.
Because vermicompost is made in relatively small quantities, gardeners will want to use it wisely. A good rule of thumb is to use it to fuel rapidly growing plants.
The best place to apply vermicompost is around the drip line of the plant. Imagine a circle on the ground around the plant roughly marking its circumference. This circle is called the drip line because, if you were to spray the plant with water, this is where the water would drip off of the leaves. Many hungry roots are waiting just below the drip line. Spread the vermicompost on top of the soil along the drip line.
So will vermicomposting meet your needs? Likely not if you have a large garden. For a small garden (or for a good hands-on science project), however, it can be a quick way to improve poor soil.
The carbon-to-nitrogen (C:N) ratio is often considered to be of utmost importance in composting, particularly hot composting. If the C:N ratio is too high, the compost will break down extremely slowly. If the ratio is too low, the pile can produce a displeasing smell as excess nitrogen escapes into the atmosphere in the form of ammonia.
While many gardeners probably obsess over C:N more than is strictly necessary (and those who use cold composting methods typically do not need to worry about it at all), attention to the C:N ratio of your compost pile can keep it working smoothly and quickly. And it may be useful for troubleshooting!
Experts disagree on the optimal C:N ratio, but most scientific literature typically recommends something between 25:1 and 30:1. Higher ratios are fine if a slow composting process is acceptable.
Here’s a list of the average C:N ratios of common compost ingredients, pulled from a variety of sources:
Gardeners often simplify matters by thinking in terms of color—materials with a C:N ratio higher than 30:1 are browns, and materials with a ratio lower than 30:1 are greens. (Note that high-nitrogen materials can actually be brown in color and vice versa.) However, a compost pile that has a ratio of 30 parts brown material to 1 part green material actually has a disproportionately high amount of bulky carbon. If you are using browns:greens instead of C:N, you will want to use the ratio 1:1 or even 1:2, both of which take bulk into consideration.
Do the math to see why 1:2 works. Let’s say we’ve chosen to use one part leaves for our brown and two parts fresh grass clippings for greens:
This C:N ratio is slightly on the high side, but with patience should come out just fine. The mathematics will work on any other combinations of ingredients we choose to evaluate.
Also of interest is how the C:N ratio applies to plant residues left on the surface of the ground to protect the soil. The same 25:1–30:1 rule applies. If the ratio is lower, soil microbes will eat up all of the available carbon too quickly and leave the soil bare. If the ratio is higher, the microbes take a long time to eat up the high-carbon materials, leaving a great deal of chunky debris in the soil. Furthermore, the microbes will need to absorb more nitrogen to balance their diet, and this will have to come from the soil—leaving less nitrogen available for growing plants.
The practical implications? Often the best cover crop is a blend of high-carbon grains and high-nitrogen legumes. This mix, highly favored among organic gardeners, works because it keeps the C:N ratio close to optimal.
The C:N ratio will also affect the mulch you use. Wood mulches are attractive in ornamental gardens, but they pull a great deal of nitrogen out of the soil to balance out their high carbon levels—not good for growing sweet corn. For a vegetable garden, something a little closer to the optimal C:N ratio will foster healthier plants.
Are you looking for new ways to improve your garden soil faster? Have you thought about ditching the rototiller?
No-dig gardening, no-till farming’s little brother, offers an exciting way to improve soil with less labor of the back-breaking variety. It also presents a far more natural way to garden—after all, Nature doesn’t own too many rototillers.
Are there pitfalls? The answer is yes. Even so, no-dig gardening may be right for your garden.
Let’s look at the pros and cons to determine the situations where no-dig gardening will be most effective.
Yes, no-dig gardening is a very natural way of building good soil. However, it requires an investment.
These two tips may make the transition easier for you:
Summer can be a tough time to garden. The heat is challenging to many plants. Coupled with dry weather, it pulls the moisture right out of the ground and wilts leaves and stems. Paired with humidity, high temperatures may stress plants and foster fungal diseases.
But never fear! Gardens can continue to be productive in the hot summer months!
Here’s how to keep your plants in peak health despite the heat:
With these tips in mind, your garden can continue to produce bountiful harvests throughout the summer.
Squash bugs can devastate garden cucurbits in an amazingly short amount of time. While they typically leave the melons and cucumbers alone (unless they’re really hungry), the pumpkins and squash of all varieties collapse and die as massive amounts of squash bugs suck their juices. As they feed, the bugs also release bacteria that further weaken the plant. Squash bugs may even ruin squash fruits by poking them full of holes with their needle-like mouths.
One female squash bug can lay up to 40 eggs at a time. Multiply that by the number of female squash bugs in your garden—or not. Crushing the squash bug causes it to release a disagreeably pungent odor. Picking one up will stain your hands an orange-ish color.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, some gardeners report that the squash bugs continue to make themselves a nuisance during the winter months by moving into the house.
The squash bug’s native range extends from the Atlantic to the Rockies and from Canada to South America. For reasons that remain unclear, squash bugs are becoming increasingly prevalent across the entire United States. They can occur anywhere a garden can be found and are now considered a real threat to squash in most states.
Garden sanitation is an essential line of defense against squash bugs. Any dead or diseased plant matter left lying around the garden will attract them, so prune and compost anything that is not green and healthy. Keep the weeds cleaned up, as well. At the end of the season, destroy the old squash plants and let the chickens pick through the soil.
Row covers will physically block squash bugs from plants. However, they must be secured well to prevent access. They will be ineffective if placed on the plants later in the season, as the chances are pretty good that there will be bugs hiding in the soil or mulch.
Growing your squash vines vertically on a trellis helps to some degree, as it provides fewer hiding places for the squash bugs to lurk.
And, of course, remember that bugs are far less likely to infest healthy plants than weak ones. Maintain plant health in your garden through proper watering and soil nutrition.
The most effective method of control on an existing squash bug population is to hand-pick and destroy as many bugs and eggs as possible—every single day. Washing the soil around the plants first will drive the bugs up off the ground into the open where they are more easily discovered.
You can increase your chances of success by combining this technique with the use of diatomaceous earth (DE). A generous coating of DE will kill squash bugs. Sprinkle it liberally on all of the plants and also across the surface of the ground to deter new bugs from moving in. A solution of dishwashing liquid will also work, but has the potential to severely damage the plants if not completely rinsed off the foliage after the bugs have died.
Unfortunately, once an invasion begins, it is very difficult to control, so prevention is the best solution. As long as the cause of the recent national squash bug invasion remains unidentified and unaddressed, however, American gardeners will likely be doing battle every summer.
Dustin-Mizer
A useful tool for applying diatomaceous earth in the garden.
