Month: June 2020

Water

Water is possibly the most critical component in maintaining your garden. You should figure on one inch of water per week. Purchase a simple, inexpensive rain gauge so you will know exactly how much water your garden received after a storm. If you need to water in a dry spell, don’t just spray for a few minutes and call it good. Use your rain gauge to help you figure out when you have applied an inch to all your beds. It takes me about two hours to water all the beds in the yard.

Don’t water too near sunset if the weather is humid. The leaves won’t have time to dry before nightfall, and you don’t want extra water sitting on the leaves all night in extra humid water. Do consider attaching rain barrels to all the downspouts on the house. I have 4-fifty gallon barrels. Also, I have attached downspout diverters so that once the barrels are full, the water will continue on down the downspout.

Weeds

Do not let the weeds get ahead of you. Wait. Let me repeat that. DO NOT LET THE WEEDS GET AHEAD OF YOU. Sorry for shouting, but this point is critical. Weeds take water and nutrients from your plants. Mulch with compostable material (like grass clippings). You can actually use the weeds for mulch as long as they haven’t gone to seed. NEVER let the weeds go to seed. EVER. One year’s seeding is seven years’ weeding. If the weeds have gone to seed, throw them in the trash. Do not compost weeds with seeds unless you know your compost pile generates enough heat to kill the seeds.

Scout your garden regularly, at least twice a week, preferably more frequently. This means you walk through the entire garden, taking notes so that you will be on top of any disease or pest outbreaks. At the first sign of a disease or pest, you will have to spray or in some way go on the attack, and yes, this can be done organically.

Disease and Pest Control

I spray the fruit trees in late winter with a horticultural oil that contains lime for leaf curl and the raspberries at the same time with the same spray for cane blight and spur blight. A few weeks later, the fruit trees get sprayed with dormant oil for scale and other insects, to suffocate them before them emerge.

Because of the humidity in the Northeast, our gardens are subject to a variety of fungal diseases, so the solanaceae (tomatoes and potatoes) get sprayed with copper sulfate as soon as they are about six inches tall, even before there is any sign of disease, and the spraying continues every seven to ten days all season (more if it rains). I rotate Neem oil with the copper sulfate so the copper doesn’t build up in the soil.

Green Cure (potassium bicarbonate) is applied at the first sign of disease. The Swiss chard and the beets get sprayed with Green Cure for cercospora, and the brassicas (cabbage and broccoli) will need Neem oil or pyrethrin regularly, at least once a week, for cabbage worms.

Physical Control

Spraying isn’t the only way to control problems; physical means also work well, although these may be a bit time consuming. You can put row covers over the brassicas to prevent the butterflies from reaching the plants, for example. I go through the yellow summer squash (crook necked squash) once the plants have reached full size and hand pick the squash bug eggs. These are coppery colored ovals about the size of a carrot seed and are attached in small clusters to the underside of the leaves, which are large, quite large indeed. The underside of EACH leaf needs to be examined on EVERY plant at least twice a week. If I find a cluster of eggs, I carefully cut the cluster out of the leaf and throw the eggs in the garbage.

I also hand pick Japanese beetles from the raspberries and drop them into a quart plastic container with cotton balls soaked with rubbing alcohol in the bottom, then put the lid on, although since I gave the lawn an organic treatment for grubs two years in a row several years ago, there haven’t been very many Japanese beetles at all. Potato bugs, cucumber beetles, and cabbage worms get squashed between my fingers. Yes, it seems a little icky, but you can do it.

Yeah. It’s a lot. And depending on what sort of calamity hits us, you will need to have all these supplies on hand because mail order or even your local garden center may not be available. Because diseases WILL show up. Because the pests WILL arrive. Because you WILL have to deal with them.

Rotation

Rotation is critical for keeping diseases and pests from building up in the soil. I have four zones in the back and five in the front. I rotate in this order, using a rotation plan from http://www.growveg.com/growguides/crop-rotation.aspx :
Zone 1 – Solanaceae (tomatoes and potatoes). Enrich soil with compost before planting.
Zone 2 – Umbeliferae (carrots, parsnips, parsley).
Zone 3 – Brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, kale, rutabagas). Lime the soil first.
Zone 4 – Legumes (peas and beans).
Zone 5 in front is a freebie that gets included in the rotation.

So the second year, Zone 1 plants get planted into the Zone 2 beds, Zone 2 into the Zone 3 beds, and so on. There are dozens of rotation schedules, so find the one that works best for you and your area, depending on what you will be planting.

In the front, the potatoes follow the parsnips, which follow the cabbage and broccoli, which follow the shelling peas. In the back, the tomatoes follow the carrots, which follow the rutabagas, which follow the yellow (wax) beans. This way, all the Solanaceae or all the Brassica aren’t in the same section of the yard. There is less chance for the spread of disease this way.

Record Keeping

How do I remember what was planted where from year to year? I make a map of both the front and back gardens on graph paper. I have maps going back twenty-five years, all kept in notebooks, so I know not only what was where, but what I planted so I can keep track of the failures. I know. It’s an illness.

What to plant

What to plant depends on what your family likes to eat and what you plan on preserving. It also depends on what types of fruits and vegetables do well in your area. Ask neighbors, talk to the folks at the local garden center, or call the extension office in your county for advice.

Several notes on choosing varieties. Don’t pick F1 hybrids if you plan on saving the seed (which I HIGHLY recommend). They won’t reproduce true but will come out like one of the original parents. Choose open pollinated or heirloom varieties. Plan on including vegetables from many families.

I grow carrots, beets, parsnips, rutabagas, two types of potatoes (German butterball and Russett), lettuce, Swiss chard, two types of cabbage (an early for summer coleslaw and a late, Danish ballhead, for sauerkraut), broccoli, yellow wax beans (easier to find come picking time than green and just as tasty), three types of shelling peas, yellow summer squash, butternut squash, five types of tomatoes (two romas for sauce and soup, two slicing tomatoes for eating and for sauce and soup, and Principe (a small tomato which is the tomato of choice in Tuscany, Italy, for drying), jalapeno peppers, yellow onions (best for storing), and two types of garlic (Music is my go-to for huge cloves, great production, and decent storing capability). A perennial bed in the front has prickly pear, horseradish, and rhubarb.

The culinary herbs I grow are thyme, rosemary, parsley, sage, chives, oregano, basil, cilantro, bay laurel, and mustard (for pickles). The rosemary and bay laurel are in large pots because they are tender perennials and cannot take the cold in my area, so they spend the winter in the basement under a west-facing window. The medicinal herbs are calendula, chamomile, elderberry, lavender, valerian, bee balm, lemon balm, echinacea, anise hyssop, peppermint, spearmint, and wintergreen. I can’t offer medical advice, but there are many good websites that can help with which herbs to use for what ailments. By the way, many culinary herbs are also used medicinally.

When to plant

Plant as early as possible so your plants will be a larger size when the pests come out. Here in the Northeast, I start the following inside under grow lights in early March: onions, broccoli, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes. Onions are transplanted out March 18, when peas and potatoes get direct sown. March 22 beets are direct sown. April 5 carrots, Swiss chard, and any greens, such as lettuce, are direct sown. April 19 the broccoli and cabbage get transplanted out. May 17 peppers and tomatoes get transplanted out while beans, cucumbers, and squash are direct sown. I use https://garden.org/apps/calendar for my planting schedules.

All the transplant and direct sow dates are, of course, weather dependent. Some years, there’s still snow in the beds until mid-April, and I have to rearrange my timing. There is much more detail as to when the fall crops get started indoors or direct sown outside, so if you plan on fall/winter gardening, find a planting schedule for your area. I always have things growing in the fall. Last year, I pulled the fall carrots right after the new year. They were under double layers for protection and, while small, were quite tasty.