Soil Nutrition

We're on the cusp of 5 weeks before the last frost here in the Hudson Valley! Have you planted all that stuff you said you'd plant indoors (oops...no!)? Are your peas in the ground (yes!)? Garlic come up (yes!)? are you preparing your beds, repairing fencing (and garden tools and hats and hoses), adding nutrients, and finalizing plans (err...mostly)?

Preparing rich beds for Spring - soil nutrition and amendments
It's easy to see the larger picture when you look at your garden soil. Rich, black soil with lots of worms, easy-to-work texture, lots of air, and a soft, sweet, earthy smell are the obvious markers of good soil. What's hard to see is the details - who know how much Nitrogen or Potassium you have in there? Or what the pH is?

You want to make sure your plants are healthy and well fed this summer. If you haven't tested your soil for pH and basic nutrient levels, I would go ahead and send in a sample to Cornell co-operative extension (if you're in New York. In Jersey it's Rutgers, in Massachusetts it's UMass). You can also find diy soil pH tests at most nurseries, though I suggest building a relationship with your extension office - they're a huge help and a wonderful resource. To get a sample, dig up a good 6-inch deep cross-section of soil from your garden, put it in a mason jar or a plastic bag, and drop it off or mail it too the nearest extension office, asking for a basic soil test (they probably have a form on their website to fill out). It'll take 2-6 weeks to get the results back, during which time you can ask any gardening/farming neighbor what they add to their soil. Asking neighbors is a great way to find out what your soil will need, and just about everything else about gardening in your area.

The most common soil nutrient folks add to their soil here is lime to neutralize acidic soil. It's important to have a balanced soil pH because many dangerous soil chemicals dissolve in solution at an excessively low or high pH causing the plant to uptake them more easily, while good chemicals and elements, which a plant needs to survive, cannot be taken up by the plants in extremes of pH. pH stands for "parts Hydrogen," low pH is acidic while high pH values are alkaline or basic, a pH of 7 is neutral. Ideal soil pH is between 6.3-6.8. If you find that your soil is acidic (a pH lower than 6), add lime (follow instructions on the bag) or wood ash (I would just spread it liberally on the beds, which is what we do in my landlord's garden all winter). Since soil acidity is determined by the bedrock in your area, it will be a pervasive and consistent feature of your garden, and adding lime will be an annual endeavor (unless you build really effective raised beds).

After incorporating lime, you want to make sure that your plants have the nutrients they need for the coming year. The best soil amendment is finished compost (or fully composted manure). Not only does it add organic material and living nutrients, it also improves soil texture, pH, color (and therefore heat retention), beneficial bacteria, and is an all-around wonder drug for your garden soil. do NOT add raw compost or manure to spring garden beds (the one exception to this rule is rabbit manure, and if you have access to that, you've struck gold). Raw manure will burn delicate plant roots while raw compost will take hold up nutrients in its decomposition that you want to go to the plants. (In the fall, the rules are different, but we're not in the fall, are we?). If you don't have finished compost, go get yourself a bunch of manure, straw/mulch hay/leaves, and raw food scraps and promise yourself that next year at this time you will have at least some finished compost. In the mean time, if your soil is depleted (simple test - have you grown a heavy-feeder vegetable crop there last year? If so, your soil is depleted), you can use blood meal, bone meal, soy meal, etc etc etc to increase nutrient levels in the soil. Go to the nursery and get a well-balanced, organic soil additive and spread as per directions. Note that peas and beans are, in their own right, soil nutrients, and beds that will be planted with peas or beans can go without a heavy dose of additional nutrients, though I would add a little bit if you think your soil is very depleted (a 3-year rotation with beans is a classic rotation for soil nutrition).

phew! Got all that? Now that you know what spring is like, there's a lot of good reasons to put your garden to rest properly in the fall (namely that it saves you a lot of trouble come spring). Start asking around at local farms now to see if you can take one or a few pick-up truck loads of manure (1 pick-up load per 1-2 people being fed out of the garden is an easy estimate) so that you have it on hand when you put your beds to rest this fall. The longer it sits composting, the better.


As a side-note: P-K-N ratios seen on fertilizers, often just listed as 20-10-20 or something like that, stands for the amount of Potassium-Phosphorous (usually in the form of Potash)-Nitrogen in a fertilizer.

Also, I'll get around to kombucha one of these days, I promise.

Don't Let the Cool Farm Kids Get You Down

When you spend a lot of time talking vegetables in the Hudson Valley, you're bound to meet a bunch of 20-somethings who are just too cool for you. At least, that's how I've felt for years. I've been known to find kids decked out in anarchist-y, rural fashionista-type clothing absolutely terrifying. I have a name for the fashion style that is the domain of hip, carhart-and-suspender-wearing farmers I so often find myself sharing venison chili with - liederhosen chic (these types can also be found all over Brooklyn, on rafts on the Mississippi, and pretty much anywhere else where activists can find suspenders, carharts, muck boots, and clothes you might otherwise see a cabaret-announcer wearing). For years I was downright terrified of all the cool on the local farm scene.

Let's get a few things straight. I've experimented with patches and holes in my clothing (though never suspenders). However, I am thoroughly uncreative and mainstream by Hudson Valley farm kids fashion and music standards. I absolutely dread the idea of clothes mended with embroidery floss or dental floss, and always feel vaguely guilty about my shoes being dirty and scuffed. I do not listen to punk. I rarely get around to actually mending my clothing, but you won't catch me wearing clothes with holes unless it's my favorite sweater and I just haven't gotten around to that little hole in the armpit. And you will never, ever catch me in air pilot goggles.

My journey of getting over not being the cool-kid food activist-type was a long and winding one. It took me a year of trying on being anarchist-cool (right down to tight black jeans and back patches), followed by realizing I wasn't at all interested in that kind of fashion statement, followed by two solid years of shivering in a corner terrified of anyone who looked at all cooler than me, then another year of just standing around awkwardly. Finally, someone had the mercy to clue me into the fact that most folks are socially awkward, not cold. Just like me! Even with this clarity it took me another whole year of repeating that line to myself like a mantra (and coming to understand that I might be coming off as cold too) to finally, finally let go of my terror of folks who seemed so much cooler than me and just talk. Say hello, hold up conversations, and just relax. Now, I'm proud to say that I can talk to even the coolest farming kids without feeling absolutely wretched.

Sometimes I do run into a genuinely cold person who actually thinks they're too cool to be caught dead talking to someone who is so unashamedly bourgeois as to wear regular clothes (unlike them, who have the decency to try and hide the money they come from). These people were born rich and have a guilt complex. They should be pitied or ignored. if neither will do and you find yourself being looked down upon by one, slip in that you can't afford to have a whole spare wardrobe aside from your work clothes. this will point out that you work for a living and that they live off of a trust fund. Given how cool poverty is with this bizarre subset of farm kids, they should instantly shut up and sulk away or else try to befriend you.

Everyone else, surprisingly enough, will understand that you, like they, grew up nowhere near a farm and won't blame you for not knowing that all the cool city-cum-farmer kids are really fucking radical and wear it on their sleeves. At worst, they might assume you've never been to Brooklyn, don't know how to contra dance, or don't know what consensus means. No fear! Just explain to them that tight jeans make you feel bloated and that you weren't allowed to buy Human-i-tees t-shirts in high school and they'll understand. Bonus points for being from Vermont, having lived communally before, or having a badass prison story.

Repotting, fighting fungus

I repotted all of my nightshades yesterday into plastic pots, composting the newspaper ones into my weeds-only compost. The mold was clearly growing in the newspaper itself, and only then spreading to the soil. Hopefully, the move will help with the fungus problem. I haven't found my book on organic disease-curing in the garden (probably lost in the move, alas!)

Please feel free to ask questions - I'm always happy to answer. Leave a comment and I'll let you know all about it if I can!


More later (about kombucha). For now, endless amounts of data entry.

Rainbows

Most years spring creeps up on me in an exciting, but not altogether novel way. The crocuses are beautiful but unsurprising. Ditto with the warmth. The feeling of "it's spring again, already!" is usually at the fore of my thoughts. This year, something is different. Spring feels new somehow, as if the heat is a shock, the warm rain and the smell of asphalt a rare blessing; The yellow-green willow over the lake the height of beauty, supple and breathtaking in her earliest of robes. Even the forsythias, which I usually find mediocre at best strike me as breathtaking, with a deep and lovely color. I do not feel like spring has come again already. Rather, it seems as though I cannot remember another spring, that this thing called spring is so distant and from such a different life that it may as well have never happened. The red winged blackbirds reappear for the first time, and everything is new, it seems, except the rainbow.

The rainbow which spanned the sky yesterday beckoned to me. I heard the rain start down with the sun still gleaming and I knew that there must be a rainbow. I stood in the warm, sun-filled rain in my apron, looking up at the wonderful and awe-inspiring rainbow remembering. that first time I saw a rainbow at the county fair with friends and managed to hold it for years, a precious omen in my thoughts. The full double, then triple rainbow that arched in the dark, mountainous skies over Lake Issyk-Kul, the most beautiful of landscapes suddenly linked by the bright and glowing arch to the incredible darkness of the gleaming summer skies. I think it is impossible to see a rainbow and not remember. Whether it is God promising no more killing floods or an omen of good luck, it is an incredibly magical experience - and no matter how we think of light breaking through the prisms of tiny droplets, the wonder and beauty of a rainbow in the half-dark spring sky cannot be quantified or explained without appealing to omens.


Garden Journal
In other news, it turns out there was no need to give up hope - my peppers have just germinated after all this time! However, the mold has crept up onto my seedlings. I blame the newspaper pots - all of the other seedlings are just fine, but the ones in newspaper have this mold on them! I will be repotting into plastic soon, and whenever I find my favorite book on dealing with garden pests, I will be concocting a tea to spray on the leaves of the seedlings to ward off the mold and keep them strong. I'll keep you posted

Perfect Soil

I went to help friends at my old house in my old garden - the one I built out of youthful ambition, naivete, sweat, and the odd garden tool three springs ago - and had the unparalleled experience of pure bliss. I would not call myself an accomplished gardener. I am simply too erratic to make a garden beautiful, or to let all of my plants grow. For example, I did not plant ground cherries in their little pots this weekend. My cold frame is still in the ice shed. But when I walked into the garden and slipped (yes - slipped!) a garden fork into the first bed - the one that had tomatoes in it 2 years ago and lettuce last year - and turned the soil, I did what i do every year, and bent to check the soil. My arm slipped into perfect, dark, moist, and crumbly soil right up to the elbow.

After 3 years of gardening in clay and gravel, 2 of them in this very garden, I wanted to cry with joy. There was no way I was abandoning this perfect soil - so dark in color and light in weight - to spend another year in dirt and mud. Maybe I'll plant my onions and leaks and some lettuce at my house - just to have something there. the beds, after all, are tilled. I could add some good compost and call it a day. Which means, of course, that my garden plans were for nothing (though now that I remember it, my beds at the co-op are also 4' by 20'. and there are 3 of them. But I don't think I'll be able to just take up 3 beds even though there are 10+ beds roughly that size), but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter one bit because this success - having created such beautiful, dark, rich, and deep garden soil in 2 years - is a huge achievement. Far better than growing more garlic than I could possibly need for one winter, or making beautiful garden plans.

Building that garden was back-breaking. it's a huge, no-till garden built on what was, at the time, a thoroughly compacted post-construction lightly sloping hill complete with a hard pan, standing water, and more clay than i wanted to deal with. It was built by broadforking every bed just to aerate the soil, digging out paths (and dumping that soil onto the beds), then layering manure, paper, and 6 inches of straw, and watering the whole thing. It was mostly built in spring, so that year, I watched the bed seep moisture out of my seedlings (direct-seeding was not an option) and copious amounts of slugs (attracted by the straw) do a number on everything but the onions and potatoes (after an evening salt-shaker attack on the slugs). The next year was a little better, though I didn't grow much food at all, only tomatoes and garlic - and we know what happened with tomatoes last year. Most of the garden has been fallow one of the two years. And now - it is perfect.

Given how much work it is to build garden soil, I hope you can understand why i wouldn't want to do it again at a rental where I might not even be gardening next summer.

In conclusion I planted peas, lettuce, and swiss chard. My friend planted some herbs as well. I realized I should have planted chives, though I let my friend's interest get ahead of my own. Oh well. There's plenty of time, and there should be plenty of space.

Spring Weekends are here!

It's spring. I will be planting peppers, ground cherries, and tomato seeds tomorrow in the glorious sun, putting them on my new heat pad, and praying (peppers will be small and late this year, but oh well). Then I'll be working my newly-tilled garden over with a broad fork, probably bringing some soil over and forking it into the beds, adding some wood ash (in lieu of lime) and maybe even going to pick up finished manure somewhere or leaf mold, if I can find it. Then planting peas and setting up pea trellising. Definitely going for a long walk at my old house and picking a ton of ramps.

Hopefully I'll be pickling beets and root veggies, and maybe even ramps as well.

And, when it all comes down to it, I need to to get all my veggies out of storage and have a Thanksgiving-in-May party to finish the root veggies - though i think I'll plant some parsnips and carrots just for the hell of it - they're biennials and will therefore flower this year. Umbel-shaped flowers are particularly good at attracting beneficial insects into the garden, though the juice from parsnip stalks is very caustic - so be careful not to get it on your skin! I'm sure the parsnips and carrots are both hybrids and therefore I won't be able to save seed (the carrots aren't worth saving seed from anyway - they've gotten horribly woody), but it'll still be a fun little science experiment.

Now it's just a matter of getting out my farming shirts (long-sleeve button-downs) and my big garden hat, and getting to work!

Ramps! Go and get them!

My dear readers, I hope you will forgive me for totally forgetting myself! The ramps are up! They're up in marshy woods now! Go! Go get them, if it's not so wet as to be impassable.

Ramps are a delicious wild leek that can be used and cooked like a scallion. I hope to pickle some this year. They grow in marshy woods (full shade) in clumps, so if you find one, you'll find a small field (or a large one, if you're lucky). Ramps are a vibrant true green. They have two leaves grwing out of a small, white bulb in the ground, which can either be pure white or with a purple skin. The leaves are smooth, with a single white or purplish vein down the center, and about 6 inches long and 2 inches wide. If you see a plant that fits this description - a bright, deep green (not a light green), single vein, smooth leaves, grows in clusters, about 6 inches tall, tear off the leaf and smell it. If it smells like an onion, you've just met a ramp.

It's good practice to pick no more than half of a cluster, so that you can make sure there will be ramps in that same place next year. take a trowel for stubborn roots (you want to get the whole ramp - bulb and all) and a plastic bag or basket to toss them in. Store in a plastic bag in the fridge or in water like a bouquet (in or out of the fridge).

If you want to transplant ramps, dig up a small cluster of roots with some of the soil they're growing in (which is bound to be muddy), put in a small bucket or a plastic bag, and transplant as soon as possible, making sure to keep roots covered and moist. Transplant to a full-shade location that gets plenty of moisture (outside your kitchen is ideal - ramps taste delicious in omlets!)

They'll be up for the next few weeks, so go and get them!