Organic Gardening Info from Peaceful Valley

Contributed by Bill from his Bay Area community garden plot.

This year we are making a more concerted effort to actually, like, plan meals and buy what we need as opposed to ending up with the world’s most expensive compost heap from the wasted food bought at the farmer’s market with best of intentions.

As a part of that, I’m also taking a more serious run at the whole gardening thing in our community garden plot.

This actually started last fall when I turned and planted the entire 20′ x 30′ (approx) plot with fava beans. Now, we happen to love fava beans, but not that many. There was an ulterior motive.

Namely, fava bean plants do a brilliant job of pulling nitrogen out of the air and fixing it into the cells of the plant itself. As well, since favas are such a vigorous over-winter growth in this climate, they nicely shade and choke out most of the weeds that would be sprouting about now.

To put the nitrogen into the soil, the bean plants must be worked into the soil. Last year, I did this largely by hand (with a much smaller number of favas) by digging holes, chopping up the plants with a shovel and turning them into the soil. It worked, but not terribly well as it leaves potentially large air pockets in the soil that plants hate.

This year, I used Blue Blade (pictured below). Or the scariest damned Make-style hack ever. It is one of the various inventions used by the gardeners in plots around mine. (No, I didn’t make this — if I had, the sides would be a bit sturdier and I would have used nylon nuts to keep the damned thing from falling apart.)

It is a pretty simple device.

• Rip apart an old lawnmower
• Cut a piece of plywood in a circle the same diameter as the lawnmower’s deck
• Drill hole in middle and bolt lawnmower engine to plywood
• Attach blade to bottom
• Attach plywood to a sawed off barrel (In this case, plastic… lending to the fear factor)
• Cut a 2.5″ in diameter hole to the side of the engine
• Attach a plastic tube used to feed in the favas
• Grab a handy stick and jam the engine’s throttle wide open because you don’t have a throttle cable or dead man’s switch anymore

Then? Fire the damned thing up and feed favas, weeds, and any snails/slugs into the tube.

The end result is green gold. A thick mat of minced favas that are easily spread and turned into the soil. Not only does it add a ton of nutrients to the soil, but the fibrous matter loosens the soil quite a bit and makes subsequent planting and weeding tasks a ton easier.

I’m still letting a good sized patch of favas grow to full maturity. Which is frightening. I picked up fava seeds from Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply along with a rhizobacteria that grows in symbiosis with the plant to maximize nitrogen yield through excellent plant growth & health. In my case, this means a solid mass of 6 foot tall favas!

Peaceful Valley or “groworganic.com” is an awesome company. They have been very helpful and have an amazing assortment of heirloom seeds.

There it is.  The first tilled row of the GGP.  At the crack of 8 am (huck it up, farmers…that’s early for us city-folk!) I was out there, tilling up my back yard.  The actual tilling itself took about 3 hours.  We had to go over each row multiple times, stopping to dig up rocks and sundry other oddities.  Among the strange things found that had to be removed: 3 cigarette lighters, a 2′ x 4′, a Happy Meal toy, broken glass, an old irrigation pipe that went nowhere, and concrete support posts for what apparently used to be a deck.  The final stage was going over everything one final time, my son in my lap (he LOVES tractors!) to make sure the yard was as level as possible. (more…)

After many years of apartment dwelling, I was finally able to move my family into a house with a cozy front yard, and a (relatively) nice sized back yard for the kids to play in, and for my wife to have a nice garden.

But the problem looks like this (please forgive the mess, still in the moving-in process):

When I was a kid, I used to HATE yard work.  My parents didn’t garden at all, so our maintenance involved raking leaves, watering plants and mowing the lawn — for a kid who likes to see the fruits of his efforts, this wasn’t exactly fulfilling.  Looking out over this relative desolation, I didn’t feel dejected; quite the opposite, in fact.  I saw opportunity, in many forms.

First of all, I have been working at Peaceful Valley for going on 6 years.  When I first started here, I knew zilch about growing.  Nothing.  I’d never so much as planted a flower seed in a pot for Mother’s Day. In my time here, I have gained a vast amount of theoretical knowledge: I knew the hows and the whys, but never had the opportunity to apply what I’d learned.  Seeing this yard sent visions of sugarplums (and other fruits and veggies) dancing in my head.

What I am going to be doing over the next 5 or so months is getting this area cleaned up, put together and ready for growing.  Come Spring, I’m planting a lawn, and my wife is setting up a small vegetable garden, probably with raised beds.  As I do each step, I will be taking pictures and thoroughly documenting each phase.  The goal is not only to do my own yard, but to give a bit of direction for anyone else who wishes to do the same.

Here’s the plan:

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Our yard was recently a thick stand of manzanita. Now it’s a “masticated” or chipped manzanita open space with a bunch of first year garden beds doing pretty well considering our notoriously poor soils. This week, in an effort to start building soil and some sort of humus in the areas that are not beds, we sowed some cover crop. For us this consisted of picking up a couple of pounds of two different types of clover and trying our hand at using a hand crank seed spreader to broadcast. This was an adventure, because the tendency was to crank a little fast and thus need to keep moving, I mean running.

Afterwards we used a soil rake to scratch the rhizocoated seeds into the manzanita chips. We started with Nitro Persian Clover and later we’re going to continue with Crimson on the other side of the house. The really cool thing to me is the rhizocoat. These seeds are so neat! They’re coated in their own innoculant! Little grey pellets all ready to get broadcast and with really good chances of germination. I’ve read some things about Fukuoka, (sp?) and this reminds me of his technique of clay coating and simply hand broadcasting seed pellets. There’s something really juicy about the whole broadcasting thing, even on the run. Now that the tiny little guys are coming up I can see that the effect worked pretty good. There’s some areas where it’s coming up thicker than others, but it’s everywhere.

This brings me to the real subject: myco. I’m fan of the whole fungus, mushroom and myco world in general. When I transplant anything, I love to innoculate with rootbooster to ensure the health of the plant as well as start little pockets of fungal mat activity. During the right season I love seeing the various mushrooms and puffballs fruiting in the straw under the vegetables. It’s an uderground mafia working miracles and making all the plants “an offer you can’t refuse.” They actually work to move moisture nutrients and minerals around to help the plants!

So, while I was hand watering the covercrop area, I noticed a curious bump in the chips. When I hit it with my thumb hose sprayer, an even curiouser puff of “dust” flew up into the air. The more spray, the more dust. Until I finally stopped the hose and got down to investigate. After peeling back an inch of brown dusted there it was: a big ol’ mushroom. It’s purple and gnarly. I quickly grabbed up my “Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada” written and Illustrated by John Muir Laws. I love this book, it’s got allot of plants and critters I come across in the yard and garden, beautifully illustrated. My best guess is this thing is a Purple Cortinarius. The guide mentioned the brown spores that are all over the chips now. Very wild, very exciting. Just one more visitor I didn’t plant happily munching away on the wood chips! I think I’m going to spread the innoculated chips around and help this thing help us build soil and water holding capacity. It’s so beautifully ugly! Just knowing it’s out there in addition to all the other mushrooms, introduced or not? It’s like insurance, or money in the bank. Lovely.

The mornings have been cool, and I’m finally sleeping through the night without waking up in a torpor from heat induced dreams.

Thus I know that fall is here, and I can plant cover crop in my newly double-dug beds.  It’s been quite a process this summer of preparing rocky clay ground for growing, and I was anxious to finish in time to plant our soil builder mix, and get a good start on my garden next year.

With grandiose thoughts in my head of 6 foot tall legumes fixing pounds of nitrogen by December I scattered the seed and gave it a thorough watering.  I chanted Wendell Barry’s poem “Enriching the Earth” over the seeds for good measure.  The next morning….. who should arrive but thousands of ravenous birds, eating the delicious oat, pea , bean, and vetch seeds laid out so nicely for them.  A perfect fall breakfast!

Determined to fight back, I’m putting up some bird scare tape.  The red and silver kind that they think is fire.  It is still fire season here after all. Hopefully they’ll retreat into the hills.

Cover cropping is a hot topic at Peaceful Valley right now! Wise farmers and gardeners are planting cool season annual legumes and grasses now in order to till in in the spring. It’s a cheap and practical way to add good nutrition and organic matter to the soil.

For the more poetically inspired, I came across a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry, an eloquent writer and careful farmer:

“Enriching the Earth”
To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass
to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds
of winter grains and of various legumes,
their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth.
I have stirred into the ground the offal
and the decay of the growth of past seasons
and so mended the earth and made its yield increase.
All this serves the dark. I am slowly falling
into the fund of things. And yet to serve the earth,
not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness
and a delight to the air, and my days
do not wholly pass. It is the mind’s service,
for when the will fails so do the hands
and one lives at the expense of life.
After death, willing or not, the body serves,
entering the earth. And so what was heaviest
and most mute is at last raised up into song.
~~~~~~~~~~

If you liked that, you’ll LOVE “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”
Here’s a snippet, “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”