Organic Gardening Info from Peaceful Valley

Hi,

Can you suggest a ground cover for the summer for my five raised beds? I want to enrich weak soil and give the beds a rest for the rest of the year.

In the past I’ve used green manure for the winter for the soil on the ground. Is there anything like that for raised beds?

Thank You!

Regular readers of this blog will remember the GGP I started back in November.  The cover crop came up beautifully, and the result was a rich, fertile soil, which was moist and pliable.  After renting a rototiller from Gold N Green rentals 2 weeks ago, I spent about 3 hours with a huge, self propelled machine, tearing up my front and back yards.  Word of advice: take frequent breaks; your arms will thank you.  The vibrations from that machine caused my forearms to ache for days — and the grass allergy I didn’t know I had helped too.

We are now in the middle of waiting for the cover crop to finish decomposing; about a 4 or 5 week process.  Once that is done, we can start installing the irrigation system and prepping the beds.  The goal is to have our seeds in the ground by mid-May.  Stay tuned for updates.

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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Stock market downturn got you down? Wall Street bail out got you scratching your head about where to invest? Well I have a suggestion for you… Invest in a garden! Once established a garden can produce thousands of dollars worth of fresh vegetables, fruits and nuts, for less than $100 dollars of investment each year. Now if you ask me, that’s what a return on your investment should look like. Even google stocks can’t provide 1000% return… (can they?). What about the security of your investment, you ask? Well there are risks associated with all investments. Deer could come looking for a snack, aphids might too (we’ve got solutions for that)… you might have an unexpected freeze or you might forget to water it (we have solutions for that too). But for the most part home gardens rarely fail to produce some produce.

Just in case my math is not getting through to you, let’s talk taste;

Money (while some enjoy the smell), tastes awful! The texture is no good, the flavor is like a combination of greed and the inside of other peoples pockets. Aside from the obvious fiber benefit the nutritional value is nil.

Fruits and vegetables on the other hand are delicious! You can grow better, more tasty varieties of all types of fruit and vegetables in your garden than super market suppliers do (since you don’t have to ship them across the continent). Your garden investment returns will have a fiber content rivaling any denomination of money. They will also have all the other vitamins and minerals you need, this will give you the energy you need to do things like… umm, live. As long as we are on the subject of living, the idea that gardening is something that takes a lot of time… it’s not true. A modern home garden, with a timed drip irrigation system, healthy soil, using some kind of organic or sustainable principles needs little to no daily maintenance. This year I have been slacking off in my garden. I planted my seedlings and transplants in spring over a weekend. Adjusted and fixed my irrigation system a few weekends later.

A recent New York Times article reported that Americans spend 15% of their money on Food & Beverages… however only 1% on fresh fruits and vegetables. That means only one fifteenth of our average food budget is spent on fresh food. Now if you say the medium income in the U.S. is around $40,000 a year… say 1% of that is spent on fresh fruit and veggies now, that’s $400 a year you can save right off the top. But if you get half of what you would spend on food out of your garden (this is what most avid vegetable gardeners could do) you’d save yourself $3,000 a year.

Now this ideas is not mine alone, apparently lots of Americans are digging into gardening to fight the fiscal crisis. We’ve seen a rise in new customers in the last year or so. So next time you read or hear a report about our failing financial system, or how the stock market is going to crash… remember that’s the stock market, not the farmers’ market. Money is not on the list of “Things Needed To Live” (it feels like it sometimes, I know)… nobody ever fills their back yard bunker with money… they fill it with canned fruits and vegetables. I am positive that economists and wall street strategists across the nation will admittedly disagree with me when I tell you to take your money (at least $100 of it) out of stocks and invest it in a garden. But I’m okay with that, economists and those on wall street are the ones who got us here in the first place.

I’d rather take the advice of a local farmer, you’ll notice no one ever blames them for financial crisis, or wars, or irresponsible lending… there are a few out there that use too many pesticides… but we’re working on that too. So take some of your green backs and put them in produce backed stalks, you’re sure to see a greener yard, a greener planet and a little more green backs in you wallet. Here at Peaceful Valley we believe you can have your planet and eat it too .

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.”

I planted some heirloom tomato seed varieties that I bought from you this spring in a bed in which I had plant the Soil Builder mix over the winter season. The soil is rich and has good drainage. I have drip irrigation. The bed gets 4-6 hours of direct sunlight every day, and I live in L.A. so it is warm here.

Thanks,
Pamela

Hi Pamela,

Hope that helps! Thank you for growing organically!
Amber

I’ve just finished putting up a very handy organic fertilizing info page taken from GrowOrganic.com here on the site. If you have any questions this season about what to do to amend your soil, start there.

Everything you need to know to start fertilizing organically.

I talked to a guy in the Peaceful Valley store who found out through a soil test that he has really high levels of micronutrients (he was probably overzealous with the Azomite).

It’s kind of like what happens when I reach too often for the Girl Scout Cookies or Valentine chocolate.  My body gets overloaded then I crash and feel like I need more! A vicious cycle of wrong signals!

So in the soil if there’s too many micronutrient competitors, they antagonize each other.  Pretty soon an all out brawl breaks out!  Zinc has Copper in a head lock…Manganese is gouging Iron’s eye out…Nickel body slams Boron!

As a result of the overload below, the brawling micronutrients are unavailable to the plants, so the above ground symptom is that the plants need MORE micronutrients.  And the natural reaction is to reach for more Azomite.

Whew! I’m tired.  A Coke sounds really good (but maybe I should have some raw almonds instead…).