Lasagna garden update
July 1, 2008 | 8:47 pm
7/1/08
“Lush” is a good word to describe my lasagna garden. Everything is growing so vigorously that I need to rethink the spacing I used for each plant. This was drawn from Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening” method, which for years I’ve used as a guideline regardless of what type of garden I assemble. The system worked fine until this lasagna garden, now growing out of its britches!
As well, I inadequately planned for mature height of the vegetables, so some are becoming shaded out by others. Oh well, another year of live and learn!
Meanwhile, I’ve already harvested many salads worth of lettuce, and am currently plucking snow peas. Half the broccoli plants are already forming heads. Tomatoes are bushy and have started setting fruit. Celery is burgeoning. Beans, in three different waves, have sprouted faster than ever before, and are doing better than their bretheren planted in different gardens around the yard. Pepper plants are small, but I haven’t grown this variety before so the size could be normal. One is being overwhelmed by a Jerusalem artichoke planted too close.
The only disappointment is carrots, which are always a disappointment. They take so long to germinate that I tend to give up on them and plant something else in the space. If I just turn away and forget about them, they usually produce a crop I can enjoy deep into autumn. This year, those in the lasagna garden are doing better than the ones in a container set on the deck.
Based on these results, I recommend lasagna gardening to anyone!
P.S.: Remember those hay bale tomatoes discussed last week? They’re still scrawny and weak-colored, but they have formed as many baby tomatoes as the lasagna garden plants, both ahead of their equivalents in the Topsy Turvy planter and indoors. Go figure!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Hay bale basics
June 23, 2008 | 9:07 pm
June 24, 2008
This year I’m repeating last year’s experiment: growing tomatoes in hay bales.
Those of you who’ve read the book will recognize this project. For those who haven’t, the idea is that as the hay bale decays, it will feed the plant. It’s a self-contained compost parcel. All you have to do is water. Last year I inserted drip cones into the bales so water went directly to the roots rather than ran off the top of the tightly packed surface. It worked so well, I repeated the setup this year.
Last year, I planted two tomatoes, two zucchinis, and two peppers in three haybales, and got one humongous zucchini plant and one extravagant tomato plant, both of which bore lots of fruit. The zucchini did well right away, but the tomato took a while to settle before taking off. The other plants languished. The hay bales were only half rotted when I tore down the garden in the fall.
This year, I planted just two tomatoes, each in its own bale. They’ve been struggling since day one; now are noticeably yellow, suggesting malnutrition, though they have grown several inches and produced flowers.
It’s a head-scratcher. What’s so different between last year and this?
First, I got the hay bales from different people. I don’t know what kind of hay it was/is, but this year’s bales are looser, seemingly fresher. So perhaps last year’s had started decarying before I got them.
Second, hay bales are actually compressed stacks of sheaves, giving a directional component. Last year, I had to carve holes against the grain to insert my plants; this year, I went with the grain, so the sheaves separated without a fight. This probably changes water retention, and creates a different challenge for the plants’ root systems.
Third, we haven’t had as much rain this year, and last year’s bales sat out in it, plant-less, for several soggy weeks. Another reason to suspect better-rotted bales to start.
This year, not sure what to do about my struggling tomatoes, I worked some pelletized plant food into the bale at the base of the plants then lightly mulched the area. Tomorrow I’ll probably cut off the lower, most severely yellowed leaves. Then I’ll wait. Not much choice, for there’s no book out there devoted to hay bale gardening, nor an experienced guru in the neighborhood. The Internet contains lots of information, but I found it contradictory when I researched the subject in the first place, so tuned it out.
The problem seems obvious: The hay isn’t rotting fast enough to feed the plants adequately. Next year I’ll try to get the bales earlier, or else give the plants a better start by making a bigger hole in the bale and jamming it with soil and compost so the plants have something to draw from during the early phase. Or take some of that Internet advice and soak it with a hose first.
All this negates the original appeal of the system, which was elegant simplicity. I might as well put the plants in a regular garden if the hay bales are just going to serve as large, messy containers!
I’ll let you know how it comes out at the end of the summer.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, Learning something new, Difficulty, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation — Carolyn Haley
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A pause for applause
May 27, 2008 | 8:42 pm
May 27, 2008
A break here from my weekly blog to talk about the book behind it.
“Open Your Heart with Gardens” recently garnered kudos from the publishing industry. The Midwest Book Review, one of the prestigious reviewing organizations, released this commentary:
“Growing your own garden, raising the plants to maturity and then enjoying the spoils of your long, hard, arduous labors can create quite the sense of accomplishment in you — it can almost be explained as enlightening. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is here to help those who seek this sense of accomplishment and enlightenment achieve those very feelings using the hobby of gardening. Promoting tips on how you can benefit from gardens emotionally even if it isn’t your own, the unusual quirks of gardening, and the other benefits the garden can promote for its’ gardeners. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is highly recommended for both self-help and gardening community library collections, and for any amateur gardener hoping to get something intangible yet invaluable out of their gardens.”
Wow! Thanks, guys!
On the heels of this review, the Indie Book Awards announced their 2008 results — and OYHG was a finalist in both the Home/Garden and Nature/Environment categories!
(Fellow Dreamtime authors also fared well: Shawn Rohrbach won the Fitness/Sports/Recreation category, and finaled in Motivational, with “Open Your Heart with Bicycling,” while Janice Phelps Williams also doubled-finaled, in Animals/Pets and Inspiration, with “Open Your Heart with Pets.”)
Per the IBA website (http://www.indiebookawards.com): “The Indie Book Awards was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books in 70 different categories, for the year, and is presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (www.IBPPG.com) in cooperation with Marilyn Allen of Allen O’Shea Literary Agency.
Big score for DreamTime, having 3 of its authors place or win in 5 categories! Remember that DreamTime is only two-and-change years old.
For myself, over on the magazine side: my profile of novelist Archer Mayor will appear in the August issue of The Writer magazine. Mayor is the author of the esteemed Joe Gunther police procedural series set in Vermont. I recommend his books to anyone who enjoys high-quality fiction, especially mysteries with a literary texture.
Next week, back to our regularly scheduled programming.
–Carolyn
Posted by: Uncategorized, Pets, pet books, bicycling books, writing books, Something completely different, Publishing, Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation — Carolyn Haley
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The need to weed
May 20, 2008 | 8:09 am
5/20/08
An English botanist, Sir Edward James Salisbury, wrote in his 1935 book, The Living Garden:
“We can in fact only define a weed . . . in terms of the well-known definition of dirt — as matter out of place. What we call a weed is in fact merely a plant growing where we do not want it.”
Boy, I can relate to that!
In my garden, the most common, prolific, and interfering weeds are beautiful plants that other people seek out and cultivate, such as pink garden phlox; sugar maples, white pines, and poplars; Johnny-jump-ups; lilacs. The most persistent, invidious weed of all is grass!
These infest my yard and garden no matter how harsh the climate. Yes, they are lovely and I feel bad trying to get rid of them. That is, I used to feel bad . . . until I realized that no matter how much I cut, tear, pull, smother, relocate, dig under, give away, or otherwise abuse those plants, they not only bounce back but spread, and continue elbowing out what I want in that space.
Perversely, they refuse to grow in any place I desire to put them. Arrggghhh!
This is one of those paradoxical joys of gardening that forces you into accepting nature’s way and learning compromise. The deal I made with these “weeds” is this: You may grow over here, but not over there. If you show up over there, I will treat you as a weed and remove you. If you contain yourself over here, I will let you flourish.
Thus we remain in never-ending push and shove as I strive to cultivate non-natives like vegetables. I suspect that’s how agriculture began — trying to isolate a food source from the incursion of vigorous spreaders.
After moving to Vermont and experiencing poor results with my gardens, I had to decide whether the cause was me (Black Thumb Woman) or the environment (cold, cloudy, and crummy soil). So I inventoried my yard and looked up which USDA Zone the thrivers fell within. All Zone 3. Aha! On the map, we’re 4 or 5. This explains why my Russian Sages did so poorly (they are now growing tall and lush in my friend’s lasagna garden, Zone 5). Also, the thrivers favor acidic soil. Aha again!
These discoveries have spared me more fruitless experiments. But I still haven’t figured out how to make grass grow from seed where we want it, and how to prevent it from choking out my perennial beds!
If anyone would like to establish an area of brilliant late-summer color, let me know, and I’ll give you LOTS of vivid pink phlox!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Lessons
May 12, 2008 | 7:00 pm
May 13, 2008
Yesterday I learned a very basic lesson about gardening:
Don’t plant seeds on a windy day.
You’d think this would be obvious, along the lines of “Plants will die without water” or “In Vermont, you can still get frost in May.” But you know? I’ve never seen this obvious little item in the myriad gardening books I’ve read or browsed, even though some of them have been at the level of “Open the seed packet . . .”
But when the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and the air temp is mild enough for T-shirts, even with a frisky breeze, well, one’s thoughts turn to planting. And when one is prone toward dreaminess, one tends to miss the obvious now and then.
I had the wit to cup the seeds in my hand against the air current, but not the presence of mind to realize that they weigh 0.00000001 oz. and are in fact designed by nature to convey themselves on the wind, tra la. So during that fragile moment when I plucked the minuscule seed between thumb and forefinger and moved it the few inches between my palm and the soil, whooosh! Away it went. Another one rolled off my fingertip and dropped out of sight outside the planter. A few more blew out of my cupped palm during a gust.
D’uh!!!
Makes me wonder how much seed is lost by farmers and larger-scale gardeners who use a broadcasting method. I have such a small garden that I plant each seed where it’s slated to grow rather than strew now, thin later (a practice encouraged by Mel Bartholomew in his Square Foot Gardening system. It works — unless you’re not paying attention and lose your seeds!).
One of life’s miracles that draws so many people to gardening is the process by which a microdot of matter grows into a flower, or food. Same concept applies to mammals, of course — we all came from a little seed we can’t see. But mammalian micro-matter is usually safe from wind, so take care when you’re planting. Else your zinnias and carrots might end up in somebody else’s yard!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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The joys of Zone 3
April 29, 2008 | 8:44 pm
4/29/08
Spring is such a tease. We just finished what might be a record-breaking stretch of gorgeous weather — two solid weeks of sunny, dry, warm — during which the ground changed from bare to green, the perennials jumped up 6-12 inches, the early flowering shrubs and bulbs came into bloom, the cool-season seeds germinated. This wonderful run ended with a 4″ rainfall, to be followed now by 3 days in the 40s and nights in the 20s.
Arrgggghhhhh!
All the potted plants on the deck have to go back inside. All the tender blossoms and sprouts must be covered. The windows closed again, the furnace reactivated, extra layers of clothing donned. Six months of winter, two weeks off, now back to winter again. (Yes, the word “snow” has snuck back into the forecast as well.)
Arrrggggghhhh!
I’m afraid to look outside tomorrow morning to see what got killed or damaged by the cold. Still, things are better than last year: At this time, we still had snow on the ground (a big nor’easter on the 16th, resulting in 4 days without power) and my first daffodil didn’t bloom until May. Every year contains a setback, which isn’t really a setback because it’s absolutely normal for things to rollercoaster at this time of year. There’s a reason we don’t plant until Memorial Day!
A few days ago, I heard from a friend in Minnesota. Things are further behind up there, and everywhere north of here. Nothing like perspective to stop one from whining!
Gotta keep in mind that crisp weather is best for doing heavy yard work, or lounging around inside with a book. Perhaps update the list and plans for the garden. After all, the dip is only for two days, this time . . . when it ends, things will start growing so fast that I won’t be able to keep up!
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Lasagna — at last!
April 21, 2008 | 9:06 pm
4/22/08
As if to make up for the preceding months, the weather is now bestowing all of its good graces upon us. The corresponding urge to plant, unfortunately, must be suppressed. What’s comfortable and inspiring for humans is not always good for seeds and seedlings. In fact, April is when the subsurface soil is at its coldest temperature of the year.
Nevertheless, peas can be planted “as soon as the soil is workable,” so in they go! I favor snow peas over shell peas, but either type can be the first crop of the season. In this case, they are the groundbreaking crop for my new lasagna garden.
Lasagna gardening is a cultivation method published by Pat Lanza in 1998. It’s basically sheet composting: building soil in layers, reminiscent of preparing lasagna in a baking dish. Instead of layering noodles, tomato sauce, cheese, however, you layer peat moss, lawn clippings, brush, compost, straw — whatever you’ve got lying around. No digging required, you just build your layers on top of the ground, then plant and mulch.
I assembled my first lasagna bed last fall then let it steep over the winter. Here’s how it went together:
*Â I marked out the desired area on the ground (10×4, with actual planting space around 9×3, owing to space taken up by the supports I use, and a border area for companion plants).
* Filled a pail with water and dropped newspapers into it. Laid out the sodden squares atop the soil (in this case, packed sand), several sheets thick. This is to create a smothering barrier beneath the garden, discouraging grass and weeds from poking through.
* Gathered the yard waste I’d compiled around the property over several years. Many wheelbarrow loads.
* Purchased two cubes of peat moss.
* Started layering, using the peat moss as the “noodles” in between layers.
* Topped with leaves raked up from the yard.
* Placed a stake at each corner and ran foot-high chicken wire around the perimeter.
The whole exercise took up a sunny afternoon, at a leisurely pace with many breaks.
Planting peas took about a minute to poke 12 holes into the surface and drop seeds into them. I covered them by scuffing the loose material over the holes, then covered the row with wire mesh to prevent nocturnal feeders from rooting around. Rigged a little trellis for the peas to climb, made from found materials. I will water them lightly once a day until they germinate or the rains return, whichever comes first.
As the spring advances, planting the rest of my vegetables will be just as simple. Judging by other people’s results with this system, I should have a nice crop this year.
We’ll see in a few months!
Carolyin Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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The crocus
April 14, 2008 | 8:26 pm
April 15, 2008
Last week, as the snow receded and the ground emerged, I toured the yard checking on the daffodils’ progress. Mostly they looked like green fingertips protruding through the dirt, a green contrast against the browns, grays, and ochres of the ground litter.
But out of the corner of my eye, I saw something purple. Given the amount of tattered stuff lying around, I figured it was a bit of plastic bag or carton that had blown free months ago while I was hauling out the trash. So I rotated to pick it up — and almost keeled over in astonishment upon realizing it was a blooming crocus!
This shouldn’t be a surprising event. After all, it’s Spring, and crocuses are one of the earliest flowers. However, I didn’t plant any. And they don’t grow wild anywhere near here.
Ten years ago I put crocuses in the garden but they didn’t survive the moles and the cold. I never saw a blossom or a leaf. Where, then, did this thing come from?
Even if some horticultural miracle regenerated one of the original plants, it couldn’t have traveled 25 yards under the ground, including below the driveway, to spring up beneath the lilac bushes. Must have been a seed carried by the wind or a bird. A lucky shot to drop it into the garden where all my early spring bulbs and flowers are clustered!
Given that you can only buy crocuses as corms, I never thought of them in terms of seeds. Yet they make seeds; and, according to Wikipedia: “Some crocuses, especially C. tommasinianus and its selected forms and hybrids (such as ‘Whitewell Purple’ and ‘Ruby Giant’) seed prolifically and are ideal for naturalising.” In that case, the only mystery is, Whose garden donated the seeds?
It must be the lady in the village who planted her entire front lawn in crocuses and miniature tulips. This time of year they are all in bloom — a sight that literally stops traffic. Her lawn-garden is only two miles from here by road, less as the crow flies. So some crow or sparrow or capricious air current must have scooped up one of her seeds and deposited it in my garden. There are no other crocuses I’m aware of in the area.
Surprises like this are what enchant me about gardens. Who knows what dramas are going on under our feet every day? A few inches from this crocus are the daffodils I’ve been fretting over for the same ten years, because they keep dwindling under conditions where they’re supposed to flourish. Somehow, instead, those conditions gave rise to a little plant whose relatives didn’t survive around the corner. (That microclimate thing again!) It reminds me of the pink bleeding hearts that grow through the front wall, rearranging themselves underground to pop out between different rocks each year. Huh? Why do they move? How do they do it? What’s going on down there?
What other surprises will this season bring?
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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Taking down the wreath
April 8, 2008 | 11:33 am
April 8, 2008
When it happens, it happens fast — one day to the next, the season changes. The harbingers that have been trickling in one at a time suddenly achieve critical mass, so that I draw up short and realize: The Season Has Turned. Today, it is spring. HOORAY!
I used to define spring as when the grass turns green and flowers bloom. After ten years in Vermont, however, I consider spring a fleeting transition between winter and summer. “Winter’s back is broken,” my elders used to say, which runs through my mind when the sun becomes strong enough to vaporize the snow and rot the ice, even if the air temperature stays below freezing. But more often and for longer intervals, the temp stays above 32. Dry stream beds on the hillsides start to gurgle, then flood, and the rivers below begin to gallop. The first migratory birds arrive: robins, red-winged blackbirds, the woodcock, the fox sparrow. And the first bulbs protrude through the first patches soil.
Up north (in the real north — Alaska, Yukon, etc., not here in the middle north) they call it “break-up” — a term used to describe the ice letting go, and people going a little crazy. Here it’s similar though less dramatic, and it constitutes a few weeks of messy change. Once it gets underway, I know the time has come to take down my Christmas wreath.
The wreath goes up in November, when the leaves have fallen and the snow begins — and Holiday Season consumes consumers. Some of us display our wreaths for the entire winter, seeing them more as an icon for the cold season than the holidays. I was unaware that this might be a regional custom until a relative visiting from the southwest asked why my wreath was still up in February. She had noticed on her way here that many homes in the area still sported holiday decorations. I had failed to observe this, feeling that it was a perfectly normal practice and as much a part of the scenery as snow and trees.
I keep my holiday wreath up for the winter because, well, why not? It’s the only splashy color in a world of black, white, and neutrals; and winter includes most of the major holidays, of which Christmas is the biggy. Ergo, a Christmas wreath seems the perfect symbol for the whole season. Only when I know for sure that the season has changed do I take it down.
Then it becomes a spring-summer-fall wreath, for I hang it around the fence post near the garden until next year’s wreath comes down to replace it. The balsam circle browns as the rest of the world greens, reminding us of the never-ending cycle.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, spring — Carolyn Haley
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An exercise in microclimates
April 1, 2008 | 8:36 am
4/1/08
Normally I’m a stay-at-home girl, but occasionally I have cause to travel. Over the past week, separate outings took me to the wetlands of Lake Champlain; the banks of major rivers through Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut; up and over Vermont’s Green Mountains and Massachusetts’ Berkshire Hills; and through the rolling terrain of Connecticut to the shore of Long Island Sound.
Less than 300 miles as the crow files. But a textbook illustration of microclimates.
In general, the trend was white in the north to golden brown in the south, as one would expect. However, the graduation was not smooth. With a small rise or dip in altitude, the snow cover appeared or disappeared. Likewise, around a corner or through a ravine, clear land suddenly became snowy, and vice versa. Acres of sunny open fields would contain, inexplicably, a wide patch of white. Waterways flowed clear for part of their course then were frozen over for the next part.
Settled areas held the same pattern. One yard would be starting to green up and featured blooming crocuses; across the street, or maybe even next door, the grass was still sere and snow filled the backyard. In some wet areas, shrubs and trees glowed red, yellow, or green in their terminal branches, getting ready to bud; while other wet areas remained gray and brown, their branches ready to snap at the slightest pressure.
Such pockets of different light and temperature can challenge (or torment!) gardeners. Perhaps the single best investment of time you can make in garden planning is learning the microclimates of your own environment. Most gardening how-to books emphasize soil as the biggest influence on plant quality. I agree with its importance but would put microclimates at the top of the list.
You can have great soil but if there’s not enough sunlight, or if that patch of great soil doesn’t emerge from under the snow cover until 3 weeks after the rest of the yard, or there is too much wind or water, good soil won’t be able to do its job. Besides, you can do a lot to improve soil quality but not so much to change the lay of the land (unless you enjoy working with bulldozers and chain saws!).
Siting a garden in the correct place, and populating it with plants which like that environment, always gets better results than arbitrary planting — and takes a lot less work! So knowing your microclimates will help make gardening a pleasure you’ll return to year after year.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, Overcoming obstacles, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation, growth, spring — Carolyn Haley
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