Of Dirt and Radishes
Jun 17th, 2011 Posted in Chris and Lise, Garden Blogs | Comments OffWe’ve had our garden plot since 2006 and grown a lot of food in it. But up to now, we’ve not given much back to the earth who made those tasty vegetables a reality. But after a couple disappointing seasons and a sober look at our situation, we realized we needed to revitalize our soil with something more substantial than just organic fertilizer mix. Our dirt needed organic matter, specifically, the kind that you get from decaying plants.
I did a little research and learned that leaf mold is a great source of organic matter for gardens. Fortunately, that’s something we have in abundance at home, so we carted large batches of it over to the garden in tubs and added it everywhere, but especially in all the places where we knew our future crops would want rich soil. That was a good start but I wanted more, and soon I had my sights on the Nature Mill XE Plus Indoor/Outdoor Composter. My father-in-law obligingly bought me one for my birthday and since then, we’ve been able to side dress the more hungry crops with homemade compost. It’s pretty hot, having only seasoned a few weeks, but our plants seem fine and if anything, beefier than usual.
Today, we checked on everything after the rain and were impressed with how much our seedlings and starts have grown. The beet and chard circle in the middle of our space is packed, and although I had thought I was planting sparsely, it looks like at least a few of those borage plants are going to have to go somewhere else… The kale is also performing well, and the tomatoes too. Over in the squash patch, the zucchini are puny but have lots of flowers, whatever that means, and the cucumbers which I planted recently are struggling up at a glacial rate. But I have no doubt they’ll be flourishing soon enough.
Cedar Waxwing - Masked Bandits of the Birds
The surprise for this week was the radishes, which had been producing big bushy tops and puny radishes. I thought the soil was perhaps too fertile and that I might not get much of a crop this year. But today, I noticed a large purple radish bursting out of the soil under a giant leaf top. Hmmmm, I thought — that doesn’t look underdeveloped. So I looked around some more and noticed that I had a few other radish gods going that had come out of nowhere. Across the aisle in the other radish bed, the radishes were large but not huge, and the tops less bodacious than those of the first set. So I’m guessing that the big tops do have overly fertile dirt but nevertheless, they are making big radishes so I can’t complain.
Pest alert: if you’re wondering what got your strawberries, it was the cedar waxwings (a type of bird) who became bold and besotted with them just at the time they reached their peak of perfect ripeness. Alas.
For starters, fertilizer is more than just a chemical emulsion that you apply. Chemical fertilizer may provide a cheap shot of “nutrition” for your plants but it won’t do anything for your soil, except possibly kill it. Real fertilizing is more about the soil itself — creating healhty, living soil full of microorganisms and organic matter. You can’t get that out of a bottle, and that’s why learning about soil amendment and natural plant food is so important. In The Permaculture Way, Graham Bell throws out a variety of ideas, most of them cheap and easy to make use of.
