My Ugly Veggie Garden

Maybe it is just me, but the other day when some new friends came by and started talking about gardening, I was reluctant to bring them back around the house to show them my vegetable garden. This picture says it all:

Not exactly a veggie gardener's pride and joy -- the transitional ugly garden

We are harvesting and cleaning up summer veggies that were done and transitioning to our fall garden. In other words, I had a very unimpressive, pathetic-looking, veg garden. If you pick the right angle in the height of the summer, I am sure parts of my garden could make Horticulture Magazine or maybe even Gardening How-To Magazine from the National Home Gardening Club. But as plants die back and we taper off watering the melons to get them to sweeten, there is nothing pretty about our garden.

Our melon patch in mid-July on the left vs. late Aug. on the right

It is an Ugly Veg Garden … that only a gardener could love 🙂

Bush Beans in mid-July to the left vs. late Aug. to the right

Once I realized my new friends were true gardeners, we all went back and visited my ugly garden. He confessed that his garden was ugly, too! And think about it. Is an ugly vegetable garden all that bad? Not when you’re harvesting the fruits of your summer labors!

Share your pics and a story about your ugly veg garden and we will add them to our Wall of Ugly Gardens!

P.S.

Just ran across this topical children’s book called The Ugly Vegetables by Grace Lin. We haven’t read it yet, but it’s got several 5-star reviews on Amazon.

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Chook Chronicles – April 16, 2010

Meet "Jeanette", a UFO, garden fertilizer & breakfast provider

It is Day 4 and our twelve chicks (all about 3 wks old) are still kicking – literally. I am slowly becoming more efficient in the cleaning and care, esp. making sure that their water is changed several times a day. Every day of survival is another day of health and another egg factory in the making 🙂  Cleaning their boxes isn’t too big of a chore, and the newspapers go straight in the compost bin!

We all look in on the chicks several times a day, letting them get used to being handled. The 12 are currently split up in 2 groups of 6.

Happy Blondes

Big Bertha & Psychos

In one box are the “blondies” (Buff Orpingtons), and these gals (presumably all gals, but unlikely) seem to be the most sedate and poo-lific. The second box has a mix of Black Sx-links, Rhode Island Reds, and Buff Orpingtons. Unfortunately, this seems to be the psycho group, segregating according to color (what’s up with that?), taunting each other, and seeing who can screech the loudest. The largest are the Black Sx-links, one of which I have called “Big Bertha” of turkey-esque size. Every time you handle her, you’d think she was Marie Antoinette at the guillotine.

We are currently studying various chicken coop plans, including those we found in this book, Chicken Coops, by Judy Pangman. Many people criticized it for lacking real building plans, and perhaps the title is misleading because there are no detailed plans for any of the coops – just pictorial representations and occasionally, dimensions. For us, however, these “concept” plans should be sufficient.

I’m especially excited over the opportunity to use a lot of scrap building materials and “junk” that we’ve accumulated over the years. Rather than haul these to the dump, constructing and interior decorating a chicken house brings me back to my childhood when I’d build houses for my dolls 🙂

We’d love to see a link to your own chicken coop or ones you’ve seen that you really like!

Tweet tweet for now,

Gigi

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What Is Hot Compost?

Maybe it was the temp of 160F or the ammonia gas, but somehow I got the notion that I could cook in the compost bin and had to figure out IF and HOW I could pull it off.

How to get compost pile hot:

A hot compost pile is a delicate balance, and sometimes a freak accident, which is how I got this foolish notion of using it to cook food. It is the combination of ingredients, moisture, mass and air.

• Ingredients: Entire books are written about the ingredients and ratios for compost. For hot composting, it takes lots of finely-chopped greens. I get a garbage can of grass clippings each week when Odilon, our friendly neighborhood gardener, happily disposes of our neighbors’ grass clippings into our compost bin. Grass is a nitrogen-rich “green” ingredient has to be mixed well with compost “browns” like dried leaves, wood chips, straw (preferably chopped). I have gotten very hot compost with materials like straw bedding from sheep, and mushroom compost (which is woodchip mixture used for growing mushrooms). I keep browns on the side and mix in.
• Moisture: A balancing act between too wet and too dry. It should be damp. If you grab a handful, you should be able to squeeze a little water out. Others describe it as a damp wash cloth.
• Mass: A small pile will never be able to get hot. I have gotten hot compost with as little as 2/3 of a cubic yard (3ft x 3ft x 2ft) This is enclosed in a bin which also helps retain the heat.
• Air: Straw and wood chips also help form air pockets and keep the grass from matting up. Then I turn my pile from either twice a week or every other day to get more air mixed back in. To get hot, your compost pile needs a few days to sit and build up heat.

Why to NOT make compost that hot!

While having a compost pile at 160F/71C is good if you want to cook a meal, it is not as good if you want to use it for your garden. Somewhere above 130F you will start to smell ammonia. This is your compost pile releasing nitrogen into the air. But you want nitrogen in your garden, not in your disgusted SO’s nostrils! When I am not cooking dinner, I add dirt to my compost pile which helps absorb the ammonia and regulates the temp down to 120F. In his book “Gardening When It Counts” Steve Solomon has an excellent discussion on composting, and how dirt acts like the cooling rods in a nuclear reactor to control the process. He recommends compost piles to be about 5% dirt, and I probably end up at this amount when I keep adding dirt to cool it down.

What else could you do with compost at 160 degrees?

Beleive it or not, there are REAL trials being run on how to use compost heat being used on a farm. It’s a large PDF file to download, but really worth reading and very educational.

There were many other questions about this video that were asked on Twitter. If you want me to go into more details on other parts of the process, please add a comment and I’ll be happy to answer your questions, including (heaven forbid) post the recipe.

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Companion Planting, Part IV: Putting It All Together

This last section on companion planting (CP) sums up practical ways to cultivate a healthy garden with some “built-in” natural protection.

Intercropping vs. monoculture

By this time, you should be convinced that intercropping to create a diverse vegetable garden “habitat” is most effective to naturally protect your garden from pests, and can potentially enhance the yield of your favorite crops. Monoculture not only makes your valuable veggies more susceptible to pests in one season; sometimes, despite your efforts to work in rich, organic fertilizers, the same family of plants grown in the same area will fail in later seasons.

We learned this the hard way as we were initially concerned about having too many different veggies with too little yields.  As it turned out, yields started falling in later years as our broccoli became more susceptible to pests (BTW – brassica family, unlike tomato plants, generally like to be moved around).  So be daring, be bold, and experiment with different veggies – even those you think you’d never like!

Not a thriving veggie habitat

Intercropping creates a healthy, diverse garden habitat

Exploiting garden warfare

Your lovely spring garden or the woods near your home may look “serene”, but in truth, there’s constant warfare going on at a physical and chemical level.  So why not take advantage of it?

For instance, sunflowers may be great weed deterrents as they were found to be strongly allelopathic to weeds like wild mustard, jimsonweed and ragweed (Ref 1, p. 310).  Or what about selecting a “sacrificial plant or soldier” to protect the more valuable crops?  For instance, kale can be planted at borders of other more valuable cabbage family plants to draw pests away.  Or black nightshade can be used as a decoy plant to attract Colorado potato beetles away from your potato plants.  This may not be the best option for those of you with tiny gardens, but try to think of creative ways – even using containers which can easily be moved around – in deploying “soldiers” to protect your cash crops.

And while we’re on the subject of war, keep in mind that CP is not necessarily a mutually beneficial combination.  Some gardening experts believe that it is almost one-directional, though this can be difficult to ascertain.  For instance, you might consider that if carrots were planted next to peas or tomatoes (as our comparison of CP guides suggest), would yields from peas or tomatoes be greater at the expense of the carrots?

Using ornamentals to attract beneficials and help control pests

Many gardeners certainly deploy ornamentals like nasturtiums and marigolds to protect plants from pests like aphids, detrimental nematodes, white flies, and other pests.  But having herbs and flowering plants (esp. daisy and parsley families) also benefits the vegetable garden by attracting beneficial insects and birds that eat nasty bugs or pollinate plants.

We have had success growing tomatoes and beans with marigolds in containers, but have yet to attribute the yields/health of the plants to the marigolds. Some CP guides will suggest different varieties of marigolds for different pests (African, French and golden marigolds appear to be the best varieties).

Nasturtiums (whose flowers are a mildly peppery but delicious and attractive addition to your salad!) do have to be kept in check as they can take over an entire area, and are an incredible snail magnet on the West Coast.

Recording your own companion planting results

If you’re really intrigued by companion planting and want to put it to work for your garden, then record your observations.  Your best CP guide is your own gardening experience, though keeping in mind that results may not always be reproducible (see Part I).  A simple notebook or spreadsheet works perfectly well (of course, there’s Plangarden, too 🙂 )  Some variables to keep in mind are the yield and planting distance in the control vs. experiment plots.  For the die-hard garden geeks, we refer to Anna Carr’s excellent book (Ref. 1, pp. 332-355) that offers experimental techniques.

Good luck and may the companion forces be with you!

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CP, Part III: Comparison of Companion Planting Guides

Avid gardeners like ourselves have sometimes been stumped by the conflicting information you’ll get from different gardening pros and horticulturists.  Sometimes they’ll even contradict themselves.  Or worse, you’ll set up a companion planting scheme and discover that the insect repellent properties of, e.g. garlic to repel red spider mites from tomatoes, was completely ineffective in your particular garden habitat.

So we created a survey of plant companions from four sources to ascertain which combinations they generally agree/disagree on, with the understanding that observing and documenting our own results is really what matters in the end … though may not always apply every season!

Click here for PDF version of summary tables. © 2009 Plangarden

A PDF of the tables appears on the right.  More details are in the slideshow below this post. 

Here are some useful terms often used in the context of CP: allelopathy and phytotoxins. Allelopathy (allelo– “one another”, and –pathy “disease or suffering” from Greek) refers to how plants find ways to stake out their territory, often by harming nearby neighbors.  They may release phytotoxins (phyto– meaning “pertaining to plants”) which essentially attempt to knock out nearby competitors.   Phytotoxins can sometimes also repel insects and other animals.  

Some notoriously allelopathic plants harmful to the vegetable garden (though may be great at deterring pests which we’ll discuss in Part IV) are the eucalyptus, black walnut, and absinthe wormwood.  Make sure you know what lies just outside your property line if you decide to grow vegetables in that area.

Limited research has gone into subsoil fungal activity and its respective role in companion plants.  Some speculate that both beneficial and harmful compounds may be transmitted through the mycelial network – though it’s impossible for everyday gardeners to ascertain “fungal contributions” to the companion plant ecosystem.

In the end, what we suggest is to “not get overwhelmed” on which combination of plants will produce the ideal garden.  Our “strategies” post offers a starting point in figuring out what to grow.  Perhaps the initial approach in using these tables would be to scan those combinations least likely to yield beneficial results (the red circles), and then move on to the good companion pairings.

Is owning a book on companion planting an absolute must for the gardener?  Personally, we feel that you can get sufficient information to jot down notes from library books or from the Web.  However, if you love to experiment and collect gardening books, then look through the book reviews on Amazon.

In our next post, we’ll cover companion planting as it relates to the contribution of flowers, herbs, and insects to your overall vegetable garden.

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