Why Do We Garden? #2

Gardening is never done, is never complete, is never totally under control.  To garden is to inhabit a world where the need to create order, design, form comes up against the forces of chaos, unpredictability and serendipity.  We have to face the fact that we are attempting to impose our will on a patch of ground - and it will resist.  

This is not because nature is ‘bloody-minded’.   It is more that we are part of a universe that is neither totally orderly nor totally disordered.  In technical terms, the universe and our garden, are “chaotic”.  As we try to impose order, it will inject the unpredictable - not do exactly as it is told.   In this way, gardens are a bit like adolescent children: they naturally resist parental control but will sometimes comply if cajoled, encouraged, nagged or screamed at. 

A gardener has to be an intelligent, loving and firm parent figure to the forces of nature that wish to grow wild and free.  Maybe the gardening personality is one in which the need to to have control is balanced with the need for acceptance.  Maybe the gardener is one who is seeking to come to terms with the universal laws of chaos.  Are you involved in the struggle between order and chaos?

Brewing Bountea - the lazy way

Yes, I have only just got round to brewing my first batch of Bountea! 

 

Being a rather rough-and-ready gardener, I am not too picky about the brewing process.  Sometimes I brew for 24 hours - sometimes I leave it for as long as four days (and pop in a little extra Bioactivator).  Instead of a 4-gallon Brew Kit, I use a large 50-gallon Brewer.  This allows me to make a diluted batch and treat the greenhouses straight from the barrel.

During the Winter, water barrels in the greenhouse provide thermal mass; the one nearest the door now becomes the brewing container.  I simply throw in the diffuser unit, attach the air pump and put in a heater unit if it is cold at night.  Then I add the same ingredients as for a 4 gallon brew: 2 quarts of Humisoil and a cup of Bioactivator.  This makes a rather dilute brew but is easy for me to remember.

Because the temperature is cold, I brew for 48 hours.  I like to see a bit of foam on the top as this tells me the bacterial microbes are reproducing well; this only happens if the brew is warm.  Longer, cooler brews tend not to produce much foam but often have a stronger population of fungal microbes.  Early in the season, I am looking for more bacteria than fungi in the brew as this is what fast-growing, leafy vegetables like.

During the last hour or two of the brewing process I add a cup of M3.  This is particularly important if I want my greens and salads to grow fast and sweet.  Right at the end, I add 1/2 - 1 cup of Root Web (if this is the first brew).  Root Web is amazing.  It not only helps the roots of most vegetables grow stronger and more efficient, it also puts carbon into the soil.  Mycorrhizae capture carbon dioxide from the air and create a stable sticky black carbon chain called glomalin. This is the binding substance of fertile soil.

When my Bountea brewing is done, I fill my watering can and splash it all over the greenhouses and garden.  Even easier, I use a cheap sump pump that I cover with a strainer bag.  This is dumped into the barrel of Bountea  and I hose the beautiful brown stuff wherever I want - can't be easier!

Peas, Carrots and Parsnips

Two feet of snow this week - time to dig another path to the greenhouses! 

March is an important month for sowing cool weather seeds for a mid summer crop, so there is some pressure to get stuff in.  I have a row of early sown peas just coming up, but there can never be too many.  We eat the snow and sugar snaps in salads or straight off the vine.  The pod peas we consider special food as they are less prolific at this altitude.

I plant peas in the cool greenhouse; shading extends their flowering and cropping into late summer.  When the snow melts, I will plant a later crop in the garden beds.  I had sown a January cover crop of rye in the greenhouse and I simply turned the 5" purplish leaves into the soil.  Peas are planted 1/2" deep in three rows about 3" apart every way (I sow each row offset from the others to save room).  I always protect with a floating row cover in case mice and voles eat the tender shoots.

Peas
Mammoth Melting Snow - the earliest, very prolific and hardy and keeps cropping until it gets hot
Cascadia Snap - a small bushy sweet snap that did well last year when planted late and neglected
Sugarsnap Snap - our favorite, with the plump sugary pods that are just wonderful
Mr Big Pea - big pods with lots of peas that have a large pea floury flavor
Mayfair Pea - smaller bushy sweeter variety of pod pea.
I believe all pea vines need to be supported.  The bushy varieties will double their crop if they have something to climb on and will not get so many diseases.  I will talk about support suggestions later.

Peas and carrots are good companions, so I planted rows of carrots between the peas.  The peas shade the carrots a little but will be finished before the carrots are ready to crop.
Carrots
Scarlet Nantes - our favorite, very tasty, especially in the Fall
Red Cored Chantenay - a pretty-looking tasty variety that keeps well over the winter
Atomic Red - did OK last year but not a favorite
St Valery - new this year
Yaya - new this year, love the name!
Danvers Half Long - good reliable variety

Parsnips
I always plant parsnips though they can be tricky to get started; the seeds are very slow to germinate.  Harris Model is a so-so variety but often the only one available.  I found a very nice Biodynamic variety some time ago (forgot the name) and am planting my own seeds from it.  Parsnips are planted like chard and beets - 3 seeds about 3" - 4" apart and then thin out the weaker plants.

What's Happening with John Evans?

My brother John is the brilliant inventor of the Bountea Growing System.  He has an intuitive feel for the needs of the soil and plants -- he just seems to know what they need.   However, like many inventor types, he is most excited and entranced by the next big project, the next gigantic challenge.  The everyday grind of running a small business is not for him - so he helps us with product development but keeps to the background of Organic Bountea.

For the last 2 years John has been on a quest to change agriculture in the Philippines.  It is a developing country with wild weather and wildly 'interesting' people.  It suits John perfectly.  The picture is of John (front, second from right) with his Bantay Bayan partners traveling by bus to a Compost Tea seminar.

I am helping John set up and populate his blog - "John Evans - Quantum Soil."  You can also find the link on this page. Hopefully we can keep it updated and entertaining.

New Bountea Catalog

Our new CATALOG is just printed and should be on the shelves and in your hands in a few weeks.  In the meantime, you can download the pdf.  It includes not only our product information but instructions on how to brew Bountea with in-depth brewing tips, application charts and more.  Please let me know what you think.

Planting Tomato Varieties

I am late planting tomato seeds inside.  Last Friday, I made up another batch of starting mix (coir, Humisoil, sand) with a little SuperStart and added a bit of M3, as tomatoes are heavy feeders.  The 2 1/2" seed containers are a good size and I put one seed in each containers -- about 6 plants of each variety.

Tomatoes are easy to germinate and I always have too many plants for my greenhouses - so I sell, swap or give away the extra.  Here is what I planted this year.

Prudens Purple: our favorite - large, late, heavy cropping, extraordinary vivid taste, deep pink P
Cherokee Purple: great taste, green/purple, medium large F
Aunt Ruby's German Green: new this year P
Glacier: very hardy and early, medium size, OK taste F

Sun Gold: the standard gold cherry, heavy cropping, reliable, sweet F
Gold Nugget: determinate, sweet, gold bush cherry - great for the deck containers P
Black Cherry: new this year P
Martinos Roma: new this year P
Black Plumb: favorite plumb - dark, tasty, good for drying (from a friend)
Orange ?: a variety given by a friend

I also planted some peppers and an eggplant.  I do not do well with them but keep trying different varieties.
Fooled You: new this year P
Klari Baby Cheese: new this year F
Napoleon: new this year P
Swallow Eggplant: new this year F

Do you have some favorite varieties you would like to share?  Please write a comment.

F = Fedco Seeds  P = Pinetree Seeds

Transplanting Onion and Leek Varieties

It snowed deeply last night.  I had to plow our road and dig a path to the greenhouses.  The picture is of our deck.
My first task was to transplant the onion seedlings that were languishing in a seed tray:

Greek Salad: a deep purple pungent onion that keeps well, has great taste but is hard to come by P
Tropea: an Italian thick neck variety - great flavor F
Red Marble: New to me F
Bunching Heshiko: Japanese geen onion type - good flavor P
White Scallions: very hardy and reliable F

Another tray is filled with leeks which I will transplant in a week or so:
Lincoln: the standard variety F
Lancelot: my favorite, non-hardy very long and sweet P
Bleu de Solaize: very hardy, overwinters well F
F = Fedco Seeds  P = Pinetree Seeds

The First Compost Pile of the Season

Saturday was a beautiful Spring day. In a burst of sun-induced energy, Orianne and I plunged into the garden. We stripped off the row covers to see what was alive, dug up the last leeks, cleared away the leaf mulch from the cover crops, tuned over a couple of small beds and made a bin of compost. 

We tend to collect a number of 5-gallon buckets of kitchen waste before I get round to composting them.  The buckets sit on our deck, slowly disintegrating into a stinky rotten mush.  This smelly decomposition is caused by anaerobic microbes that like a sodden acidic environment.  While this muck is not directly good for plants, it is high in nitrogen (the smell is ammonia, NH3) and makes excellent compost when mixed with garden waste.

I got the chipper shredder fired up - it is the secret to making quick compost.  I dumped alternating amounts of wet kitchen waste and dry leaves into the shredder hopper.  The ground mixture spewed straight into the 3' x 3' compost bay.  I turned the mixture, soaked it with plenty of water and covered the pile with a plastic sheet, a layer of carpet and an old comforter.  The next day it was heating nicely.

I managed to get stinking waste all over myself, so I smelled pretty bad afterward -- one of the many joys of composting.  

Any composting tips you would like to share?  Comments?  

Why Do We Garden? #1

Why do we garden? Most gardeners can create a ready list of reasons: to grow food, create beauty, keep fit, be in nature, etc.  These are true -- but they only reflect our surface intentions.  I am interested in the deeper motivations that push normal people to become dedicated or even compulsive gardeners.

To create a garden, to grow and arrange, is as much an inner activity as an outer one. We mold and sculpt the raw material of our gardens into a reflection of our yearnings and desires. Some of these desires are ego-driven. We want to create something extraordinary to command the admiration of the crowd -- even if that crowd is only ourself.

As I garden, I sometimes glimpse a hidden audience who look through my eyes and evaluate what I am doing. This can be helpful; it provides an objective evaluation of what I am trying to achieve.  It can also have the darker aspects of competitive criticism. The inner audience is judging me.  Without noticing, I start to gardening for these phantom others rather than myself. I become more concerned with how things look rather than how they feel.  I forget to ask the plants their opinion.  

Why do you garden?  Please let us know.

Oriental Greens

I love the hardiness, taste and versatility of oriental vegetable. We use them in salads, stir-frys and steamed together. The varieties I planted in October overwintered well in the green house despite -10F temperatures. Here is my list:

Fun Jen Pai Tsai is a loose-leaf light green Chinese cabbage - very hardy and mild tasting P

Tatsoi is a dark green Bok Choi type - good for stir-fries F

Mibuna is a Japanese spear-shaped mustard type green - very hardy E

Mizuma is a Japanese curly-leafed peppery green, less hardy - good for salads E

Chin-chiang Cabbage is is light green Bok Choi that grows tight - best harvested small E

Kojisan is a Komatsuna Japanese loose-leafy green - extremely hardy with large round dark green leaves E

Hon-Tsai Tai is a loose-leaf fast-growing purple green with a very sweet cabbage flavor E

Chinese Spinach is very hardy with spear-shaped leaves and an old-fashioned soapy flavor E

F = Fedco Seeds  P = Pinetree Seeds  E = EvergreenSeeds
My recommendation: Fun Jen Pai Tsai, Kojisan and Hon-Tsai Tai. Plant them now and in the Fall.

The Ecological Approach

Ecological gardening works with nature not against it. It accepts uncertainty and values questions more than answers: How do my actions impact the web of life? Am I forcing the environment to do what I will? How can I respect this ecology and help it create something of benefit to life and me? Am I giving back as much as I take?

These are difficult questions without simple solutions.

There is no avoiding the reality: gardeners mess with nature. It is not natural for me to have a garden in a mountain forest. My greenhouses, mostly made of non-renewable resources, allow me to recreate an ecosystem that is more like zone 6 than zone 3.5. In return, to balance the debt, I build fertile, microbial soil that would take thousands of years to create naturally.

For many years I tried to garden conventionally – and failed. My vegetables were mediocre; 50% of my plants and trees died. Only when I started using Bountea and built a foundation of living soil did my garden thrive. Now my garden ecology is full and rich. Birds flock to eat abundant insects and seeds. Bull snakes hunt the chipmunks (the picture is of one under my deck). The compost pile writhes with immigrant red worms. There is more of everything: bigger healthier cabbages and bigger healthier cabbage worms.

Steps to an Ecology of Gardening

To be an ecological gardener is more an attitude than a program. I try to look and listen to how nature does things and take that as my cue. Here are a few suggestions:

Waste nothing. Everything in nature is recycled and transformed into something useful. I put all organic material (and I mean all) through my shredder to make compost.

Work with the sun. All energy comes from the sun – and it keeps coming. Use natural light whenever possible. Get out in the sunlight. Trap it in a greenhouse and feed it to your plants.

Be generous. Nature is never stingy. It always creates more than it needs – more seeds, more weeds, more insects. I always plant too much. Then I have enough when chaos strikes, and plenty of gifts for friends.

Support diversity. Just look at the natural world -- it is rampant with diverse living organisms. I plant over thirty varieties of vegetables because I love the differences in taste and texture. Even my indoor plants have colonists and companions to keep them company.

Give more than you take. Life is a gift that can never be fully repaid. Add more life to your soil than you take from it. Nurture your plants with love, care, and natural foods.

Include yourself. Nature does not exclude you. You are a living organism and have similar needs for nurturing as your plants. Be your garden – grow yourself.

Planting Fava Beans

Like most gardeners from the UK, I love Broad Beans aka Fava Beans. They are easy to grow, heavy cropping and have a wonderful flavor -- once you get used to the stronger taste. They are great raw straight out of the pod, boiled quickly with a sprig of tarragon and a dab of butter, or cooked and added to salad. For a smoother sophisticated taste, you can strip the skins off once they are cooked -- but I think this is time-consuming and a waste of great nutrition.

Many people believe that favas cause an allergic reaction. This may be true for a tiny percentage of people but it is unheard of in England. Actually they are one of the most ancient foods grown in all countries around the Mediterranean, particularly North Africa. Favas are legumes but not actually beans; they are closer to peas and vetches so they need to do most of their growing in cool weather. When it gets hot, they will often drop their flowers and not set the pods. I always plant lots of favas in late Winter: they are Givers and add Nitrogen to the soil so tomatoes or other Takers can be the next crop.

I planted my favas inside in late January -- the old standby Windsor, a couple of Italian varieties Supersimonia (my favorite) and Violetta and a Japanese variety. The Japanese favas never sprouted but the other varieties grew tall and strong (some of them 2 feet). Even though we are still having snow and hard frosts, I had to get them out into the greenhouses.

I plant them in a double rows 8" apart and 8" spacing. Because it is still so cold and I had not hardened the plants off, I set them quite deeply in my sandy soil, then mulched the plants with 9" of leaves and covered everything with a floating row cover. I have not brewed Bountea yet, so I added a sprinkling of M3 and Root Web when I prepared the soil (I am out of SuperStart or I would have used that!)

Next weekend, I will do another big fava sowing in the cooler greenhouse. I want to see how that Japanese variety do when planted direct in the soil.

Garden Show in Las Vegas

Trapped inside a giant pyramid with no way to get out -- that is my experience of Las Vegas.

Bountea was exhibiting at the Las Vegas International Gardening Expo and I went along to help. The Expo was in the Mandalay Bay next door to my hotel (maybe 10 miles of corridor walking).

I live a sedate life at 7,400 ft in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains -- surrounded by Nature, my garden and plenty of snow. Las Vegas exists is a different universe. My first mistake was to book a room in the Luxor -- the pseudo-Egyptian hotel. All surrounding hotels run together like a giant maze, designed to trap me for eternity, requiring miles of hiking in artificially-lit giant structures. The outside world became a distant memory. On my way out to the airport shuttle, I followed the signs and found myself in a castle dungeon.

I did try to eat the "food" -- but, alas, it was not food. I craved living vegetables, real cups of tea. Thank God it was only 3 days and then home -- not enough time to starve but I could feel scurvy setting in.

The good part: the owner of Wonder Soil (http://www.wondersoil.com), Patti, helped me escape enough to remain sane -- to eat at a wonderful Japanese restaurant and to visit her factory to see the compressed coir wafers being made. Wonder Soil and Bountea are partnering in a new project that will hopefully bring our customers a truly innovative new product. More later.

I write this looking out at the pines, the snow and blue sky. Maybe it was all just a strangely disturbing dream (it seems to have made a real dent in the bank balance).