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Blanco, Texas : Thyme Traveler : June 2007
Organic Gardening Can Be Easy
June 2, 2007 06:39
One of my favourite parts of organic gardening is that it's so NON technical.
Most people worry too much about controlling every process in their garden, right down to the smallest insect, but really, if you build good soil and use plenty of mulch where you DON"T want things to grow, Nature will take care of almost all the rest of your chores.
We are picking lots of green beans this week, and I just got over being tired of too many snow peas. Baby squash and a couple of ripe tomatoes, blooming marjoram, thyme and oregano (yummiest flowers in the world) plus so
many wildflowers my big potpourri basket is already full, and it's not even summer yet!
This is so thrilling after two years of horrid drought that followed a weird year when it rained 1/4" every day giving us twice our normal rainfall. That's 3 years in a row of bad gardens. Now, except for hunting bugs and weeds, I feel like the hard part of garden work is over for the year (at least until tomato canning time).
Nothing to do but run out there and pick a bit for supper every afternoon. We had baby squash, miniature bell
peppers, and tiny green beans with green onion, parsley, and marjoram blossoms in our omelettes this morning. Mmmmmmm.........
Our picturesque compost bin in the moonlight.
That interesting metal wall is made from a perforated steel rack used to hold cans of motor oil in a mechanic's garage, wired to an old metal bed frame and two wooden pallets.
My husband is so creative with construction salvage!
Mother Earth Living's Five Steps for Simple Compost
Every gardener wants to make great compost, and experience is the best teacher. Just know this - you cannot fail, because compost knows what to do.
Starting a new compost pile can be a fast, easy project. Beginners sometimes feel frustrated as they struggle to learn more about how the process works - an understandable problem since there is a wealth of information available
about composting and not one, absolute "right way" to do it.
As we take a close look at the basic truths of composting, it's obvious that the world of composting is seldom black and white - or shall we say brown and green? At the same time, home composting is much easier than what you might have heard.
Here are five fundamental facts that will guide you through the composting process.
(Read the article - www.blanco-texas.com/mel-compost )
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There's Grass in My Weeds!
June 26, 2007 10:03
To eliminate "Weeds" in your lawn, you must let the grass take over, which means leaving it long, letting it go to seed and choke out the weeds, providing of course that the weeds stay shorter than the grass.
Feeding high nitrogen will help, since the clover is there to fill a need in your soil for more nitrogen, but grass is heavy nitrogen feeder. Try watering with manure tea or spreading rotted manure all over the lawn about an inch
thick, which will give your clover black spot and root rot, killing it and sending it back into the soil to feed the grass while making the grass go crazy with joy.
Your neighbors will complain that you haven't mowed and your lawn stinks and looks horrible, but next year it will get better.
Eliminating weeds is never easy; Mother Nature despises monocrop environments and needs a mix of everything in her life to stay healthy.
But we come along, sign a piece of paper that says this plot is "ours" then declare in our godlike arrogance that this section shall be Lawn and this Garden, which makes all the Native Inhabitants go to war with us over territory rights.
You must take up your Magic Weapon (my preferred method of slaughter is a very sharp hoe) and wade into the fray, lopping heads and slicing bodies of your professed Enemies until you and your Allies rule supreme.
This can take years, perhaps a lifetime of struggle.
No cowering in the air conditioning, no complaining about out of shape muscles, you are the one who declared this war, you must be the one to do the dirty work.
The topic of clover in the grass reminds me how many years it took to kill all the grass in the backyard so we could have weeds, uh, I mean, wild medicinal herbs.
A bit of crab grass creeps along the pathways to show me where we need more mulch, but other than that, the thick, tall, native grass "runway" that formerly occupied the space is now rampant jungle smothered in vines and flowers.
The lower terraces are covered with plenty of grass, because we seeded heavily over the bulldozed septic field, and are not mowing this year to give the tall grasses time to reseed. We'll mow after the seeds fall, then it will be brown and dead in a month, that's the natural colour of lawns in Texas summer - to expect anything else is to waste water arguing with Mother Nature.
Pity that the beautiful prairie verbena and locoweed flowers will be choked out by pasture, but they still have room to grow in the fenced off backyard where the grass has been vanquished.
Now that we have established good soil, and the rock skeleton of the garden has settled into place, the rest of my life will be spent thinning crowded seedlings, spreading mulch, and hunting the wily herb.
Should we have a Recipe Contest using fresh produce? Let's do! I would welcome any suggestions for dealing with heaps of squash, green beans, and tomatoes, please!!!
(email to marcia "at" moment.net)
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