What I learned in one afternoon about growing your own vegetables.
Tom Waller of Elm Tree Farm
is a market gardener who’s been making a living selling truckloads of
produce in Ottawa for twenty years or so. Our friend Mike has been
doing it for his family for just as long. And Cheryl fed her whole
family entirely from their land for many years. I picked their brains
and got just enough info to get started without feeling overwhelmed
with too much technical knowledge. I'll read Eliot Coleman's book more
thoroughly later.
Feeding your plants, organic vs. regular:
If
you’re going to take ten pounds of food off a plot, you’re going to
have to put back more than ten pounds of organic matter OR you’re going
to have to replace the nutrients in the form of water-soluble
fertilizer. Assuming you’re not a ‘Miracle Gro’ sort of gardener that
means gathering and layering:
Compost
“crunchy stuff”
- leaves
- spoiled hay (if you can get it from a farmer who doesn't need it)
- straw
- swamp grass (get it in winter, walking on the ice)
“Green stuff”
- grass clippings
- clover or alfalfa you’ve grown instead of lawn (this is why scythes are in vogue.
- kitchen compost
“Microbes”
- swamp goo
- manure
- leaf mold - forest floor layers (but not too often, for the sake of the trees)
Two kinds of composting
1. Easy, but long range
Windrows are just long heaps four feet wide and as long as you like, with a dip in the top to catch water. You can put any vegetable matter from the above lists in them. You don’t turn the piles until fall. Then you flip the whole thing over into the space beside it, same size. This is either good compost for mulching your veggies next year OR you can grow squash and/or cucumbers right on it, next spring.
This is also what you do to build up a hopelessly bad patch of ground that you wish could grow food. It might take four or five years.
Windrows of compost are one place to put your red wigglers if you are a vermiculturalist, if you have a ‘squirm’ or a 'herd' of worms in the basement like we do, turning our kitchen scraps into gorgeous black humus all winter long.
2. Labor-intensive, but fast and productive
The three-bin compost system is worth a whole page, it's so important in organic growing.
Homemade liquid fertilizer
Tom told me to make “compost tea” by soaking some finished compost (not kitchen scraps, as I previously misunderstood) in a bucket of water for two days, stirring now and then. You drain the liquid into a watering can and feed the foliage (there was a technical word for this). Vegetables love this! Especially squash, cabbage and tomatoes, “heavy feeders”, as Tom calls them. Then you can take the sludge and put it in the compost.
To dig or not to dig
There’s a lot of buzz about no-dig gardening. Back in the seventies I used to dig the whole huge garden up shovel-deep both spring and fall. Tom says you only need to do that once EVER, (whew, we’re way too old for all that heavy work!) because in recent years a lot has been discovered about “soil structure”. As long as nobody tramps it down, ever. There are pathways of fungus and microbes that lead the nutrients to the plants’ roots. Digging the ground trashes these. I dug up a 25 foot square garden last fall, leaving beaten paths every four feet to walk on, narrow enough beds to reach to the center from each side. Tom said 30” beds are even easier, because you can step over them. Too late now.
You do, however need to aerate the soil once a year. You do that with a broadfork. It’s like a two-handled giant pitchfork and you push it in with your foot on the crossbar and then just pull it down a bit to open up the soil a little. Etc.
 | I have a herd of red wigglers (worms) in the basement. The friendly folks on vermicomposters.com helped me hugely! |
Cultivating
You also need to find your favorite tool for working compost a couple of inches into the soil. It might just be an ordinary hoe to chop it in and an ordinary rake to "dress" the surface to prepare it for seeds. There are claw-like and star-like cultivators and even cultivators mounted on wheels. Tom thinks our garden warrants one and we'll test-drive his before shopping. Or we'll find out the hard way whether my old hoe-and-rake method is too much work.
Weeding
Last year's half-hearted attempt at a garden was a bust because I vaguely heard somewhere that weeds form a kind of mulch layer that holds in the moisture around your cabbages and onions, etc. Wrong. The weeds steal the nutrients from your veggies and take over the whole garden. So, don’t do that.
Pulling weeds.
You can wait till they’re a foot tall and yank them out and throw them on the compost pile. This is the method you’ll use if you go camping for two weeks, when you get home.
Hoeing
If you let the weeds get an inch or two tall you’ll have to break up the ground an inch or so deep to kill the weeds. This is hard work.
Scuffling
Mike and Tom both swear this is the easy way to fight weeds. You use a lightweight tool, whatever’s most comfortable for you, and you use sort of a vacuuming motion to scrape the surface before you can really see much in the way of weed seedlings. This disturbs the earth just enough to kill the baby weeds. It also creates a thin layer of “dust mulch” which acts to hold in the moisture. I thought this was great news!
* IMPORTANT PLANNING POINT
Plant your rows one scuffling tool width apart or a multiple of it. If you stretch a string along the seeded rows it will be safe to scuffle on either side even before they come up. That way the weeds don't get a head start on the veggies.
Fighting bugs.
First off, Tom said that once you’ve built up your soil after a few years of diligent composting your vegetables will be so big and strong that the complexity of their tissue will be too much for the bugs’ simple digestive systems. I found this very encouraging and motivating.
The one veggie I eat all the time (duh) is cabbage. It stores in a cold place, so I could theoretically grow and eat fifty heads. But last year the small ones I succeeded in growing were pretty much decimated several leaves deep by bugs. Mike said this is the cabbage butterfly’s work. All you need is a re-usable fabric netting you can buy at gardening supply places. You anchor it to the ground with bent coat hanger wire. It has to be lifted up for weeding. It stretches up as the plants grow and no cabbage bugs get in. This is good for all the brassicas – cabbage, broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, ec.
There are organic ways to actually kill the bugs, but at this point my Buddhist vow not to kill overrides the fear of pestilence. I didn’t like the sound of diatomaceous earth working like broken glass to slash the delicate flesh of grubs, nor did I much like the idea of sprinkling a solution of Bacillus thuringiensis on the veggies to kill 90% of the bugs, much like botulin toxin does. Those are options organic gardeners exercise. So, vegans who think avoiding meat and buying organic means they’re having no part in killing are sadly mistaken.
Rotating crops
Yes, you have to. This is why it’s good to make a map of what you’re putting where and keep a journal each year, so you remember what works and what’s been where. Tom said he doesn’t rotate tomatoes. I was happy to hear that, because they’re tall and I wanted them at the back corner where they won’t shade anything else. And if you make a windrow next to an equal-size squash patch and always turn the windrow over onto the squash patch in the fall, you don’t have to move the squash patch since you’re actually replacing its soil every year.
And as far as I’m concerned, that’s plenty to apply the first serious year we try to grow what we actually eat. At this point we have no idea how much any patch will yield, so it’s pretty hit-or-miss planning how much to plant. I'm devoting about 1/3 to dry bush beans and maybe starting a whole second plot the same size as the first on some terrible ground that won’t even grow weeds - making windrows all over it, for at least a year or two before we even try to plant it. Maybe four years. It’s hard to look that far ahead.
Some crop choices
Dry bush beans
If you're relying largely on legumes for protein, it makes sense to try to grow them. I grew a few varieties in last year's super cool and rainy weather. The crop essentially failed, but in our sunny September enough ripened to save seeds, which are now adapted to our local environment. I bought the "inoculant" you're supposed to use to get the microbes growing around the beans' roots, that help them "fix nitrogen" (great for the greenhouse gas situation as well as for your soil and nutrition.) I bought two small envelopes at a nursery, quite expensive. It looks cheap here at Bountiful Gardens online. You only need to do it the first year, then the "good bacteria" are in the soil. Garbanzo beans require a different inoculant than other legumes, but I'm not sold on growing them anyway. They seemed to have an extra long growing season and the pods only have one or two beans. I grew some white kidney beans that seem like they'd make fine hummus. I think there's a reason why chick peas are a middle-eastern food. I got a few black lentils, but they also ripened really late and geez, they're teeny and fussy to thresh. I'd have to be pretty hungry...
Celery
One thing I use a lot of that is imported in winter here is celery. I had read somewhere that you could grow it here in the north and store it, roots and all, in soil in a cardboard crate in the basement for months. But Tom and another very experienced local grower said celery is fussy to grow because you have to “hill” it to “blanch” the bottoms. For winter use it’s just as good to grow “leaf celery” and quickly dry the chopped leaves for use in soups and stews. And it’s easy to grow and store celeriac (a root with celery’s flavor). I think I'll buy some celeriac and try it in cooking now, to see whether I agree.
Cucumbers
I knew a retired couple in the seventies who grew all their fruit and veggies in a small urban backyard. His cuke patch was vertical. He strung the plants up so there was a five foot cube of cucumber vines, with the cukes hanging like fruit, nice and clean, no dirty, flat, yellow bottom sides. I want to try this. Tom and Cheryl said a length of wire cow fencing made into a circle would work great for training the plants upward. And it’s firm enough that tearing the plants off in the fall is easy. So, we’ll have two of those. We’re really sorry we didn’t have two or three times as many bread-and-butter pickles as we made last year. Yummy with hummus.
Food does grow on trees.
We went to a workshop with Ken Taylor (Green Barn Nursery in Montreal) last spring and got a bunch of very young fruit trees and berry bushes, all bred for thirty years to be hardy in our cold northern climate. Unfortunately we weren’t as pessimistic about what the deer would do to them as we could have been. They have chicken wire cages around them now and we’ll see if they recover this spring.
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