As I promised in my post about my garden successes and
failures this year, here I tell you about the lessons I learned from my first
big garden. It was a year of gardening experiments, and every thing I tried
taught me a useful lesson. So, here we go.
1. Ruth Stout’s method doesn’t always work.
Ruth Stout was a gardener who, back in the 1960s (perhaps a
bit earlier), stumbled onto organic gardening without ever having read about
it. She just began to question the need to pour all those toxic chemicals all
over her garden, and into the soil. By the 70’s, she had written several
articles about her newfound method in Organic Gardening magazine, and
subsequently had a few books published.
Her method in a nutshell: mulch, and lots of it. She
specifically recommended, and used, spoiled hay. She even said that she never
had to water during a two- to three-month drought. She just had to water
everything well at the beginning of the growing season, and then cover
everything with several inches to a foot (even more) of hay. She had few pest
problems, abundant crops, and only put a little bit of cottonseed fertilizer
down once a season.
That sounded great to me, so last fall we bought six very
large bales of hay and spread them over the garden. Did it work?
Not as well as I liked. I still ended up with tons of squash
bugs (welcome to gardening in the South – Ruth Stout lived in Connecticut). I
did have a lot of production without fertilizing. But I also ended up with a
ton of grass and weeds growing in my garden that wouldn’t have otherwise shown
up – they were from seeds in the hay.
Worst of all, I found out that however hot it gets in
Connecticut during their so-called drought, it must not come close to what we
have in the Deep South. This year, God helped me out by sending rain about once
a week – an unusual frequency for this part of the country during the summer.
So for a long time, I couldn’t really tell if the hay was composting quickly
enough to continually add moisture to the soil and therefore eliminate all
irrigation needs.
But during the last two weeks of August, summer decided to
show up. It was consistently in the mid-nineties and above, and didn’t rain for
over two weeks.
And my garden got sad. The soil got dry. The hay was not
enough.
HOWEVER…maybe I needed a few more inches of hay around the
base of each plant?
I don’t know. Obviously, I’m not going to remove the
existing hay in my garden. I’m going to let it turn into nice, rich compost.
But from now on, I’m going to source mulch from our property, from grass and
weeds that have not gone to seed.
And during a normal summer, I will plan to water by hand.
Which leads me to my next lesson…
2. We need an additional source of water for irrigation.
I’d thought that the two fifty-gallon rain barrels would be
sufficient for supplemental irrigation during the summer. But since the hay
isn’t doing as well as I’d hoped (and as Ruth Stout implicitly promised), I
told J we’re going to need a small pond to catch a few hundred more gallons of
water.
3. Solar dehydration is not a reliable food preservation method here.
It’s too humid much of the time. Need I say more?
4. Fifteen tomato plants is more than enough.
I had thirty this year, and had many more tomatoes rot on
the vine than I could use. Of course, without an electric dehydrator or
freeze-drying system, or the space to store multiple jars of canned tomatoes (until we have a bigger house), I
couldn’t put up a lot of them. Then there were the plants themselves – I had to
do some serious pruning several times because they grew all over everywhere.
Fifteen vigorously-growing plants is plenty to keep us in
fresh tomatoes during the summer, as well as provide us with enough dehydrated
and canned for things like ketchup and tomato soup on a cold winter day.
5. I need to plant only two melon plants, and then one month apart.
We ended up with four plants. WAY too many for three people.
And by planting one a month after the other, I spread out the harvest so we’re
not literally watching them rot on the vine because we can’t eat them.
6. I shouldn’t plant warm-weather crops here until May 1.
I know, I know, we had an unusually cold winter. But I work
hard to grow my seedlings. I don’t want to risk them. And because my garden is
so large, it would take a lot of work to cover and uncover them in the event of
a frost.
7. Two cucumber plants, put in a month apart, is more than sufficient.
See number five. And Beit Alpha fruits are superior to
Yamato Extra Long, however prolific the Yamatos are. The Yamatos turn bitter
four to six weeks after they start producing. They are also not “burpless”,
like the Beit Alphas.
8. I need to spray the cukes for powdery mildew.
I’m happy to say that I can do this with diluted el-cheapo
milk, nothing that will bother the bees or anything else. But diluted milk is
said to keep fungus off of plants, so I’m going to try it next year to keep my
plants healthier longer.
9. Don’t use twine for trellising.
J had more important things to do this spring than build me
nice, firm trellises. He did put cedar posts in the garden for my blackberries,
tomatoes, and cucumbers, but I said I’d take care of the climbing medium.
I used old-fashioned twine. Not nylon, the natural stuff.
They didn’t even last a month.
The next time we go to Lowes, we’re getting livestock
fencing to replace the twine.
I’m sure there are a few other lessons I learned this year,
but those are the major ones. If you are thinking about gardening, feel free to
live vicariously through my experiences and make fewer mistakes. ;)
Take care, and be well! (And don't forget to follow/share this blog if you like the content! :) )
