Garden update: catching up after a late start

The photo above shows the greens bed on June 15. The yellow flowers are growing from the bolting bok choy plants. In front of the bok choy is the lettuce crop, in back are the cabbage and broccoli crops. To the right of the greens bed is the bed with beets and carrots; to the left is a bed with peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, ground cherries, basil, and two types of annual flowers, cosmos and zinnias.

During the weeks since my last post, I have been adding the rest of this year’s crops to the vegetable garden, harvesting various crops, and keeping up with the lawn mowing. Now that summer crop planting is nearly completed and since it is raining yet again, I have time to offer my first update on the scientific dialogue that my garden and I are engaged in.

It’s rained a lot so far in 2013. According to the St. Louis NWS office, we’ve already received 30 inches of rain this year; compare that to the normal yearly rainfall of 40 inches which is rather evenly spread throughout the year to get a sense of how wet it has been. At our location I measured 7.1 inches of rain during April, 7.9 inches in May, and 5.7 inches of rain in June, a marked contrast to last year when we received almost no rain after the first week of May through the end of July. April 2013 was also cooler than normal, with our last frost occurring on April 20, while May was somewhat warmer than normal and June was near normal for temperatures. The only significant storm we have experienced so far this year was the close approach of the May 31 tornado that travelled about 32 miles across the St. Louis metro area. Near its end it passed a few blocks south of us at EF0 intensity. There was little if any hail associated with the tornado and thus no effect to the vegetable garden, but we experienced strong winds that threw tree limbs from neighboring trees on our yard. We lost electrical service for a few days but had no structural damage from the tornado. I’ll post about that experience sometime in the next few weeks as it is relevant to the larger purpose of my blog.

The combination of heavy rain and cool temperatures kept me out of the vegetable garden during most of April, a time when I should be planting all of the cool weather crops for the best yields. This year I planted the peas at close to the right time, April 5, but I did not plant the onion seedlings until April 24, the potatoes until April 30 and May 1, and the bed with cool-season greens such as lettuce, cabbage, and broccoli until May 12 and 13. It was May 17 before I planted seeds of parsnips, beets, and carrots. In all cases except for the peas this was well past when Missouri Extension recommends planting the crop, although I have planted on similar dates some past years.  The warmer weather since mid-May has been more favorable for garden work and I have planted warm-season crops like peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, dry beans, cowpeas, and flint corn since then. I still have squashes, melons, and cucumbers to plant since I have found that the Missouri Organic Association’s recommendation to plant them in late June to early July to reduce squash bug damage works well for me.

The potato bed was the first bed I prepared and planted after receiving the report on soil sampling and preparing the fertilizer recipe for 2013. Since then each bed has received the recipe, modified to fit whatever phosphorus source I could buy locally or order on-line once the hard rock phosphate bag I had on hand emptied. The pea and onion beds were planted using the recipe from earlier years that was not matched to soil test results.

So far I have harvested all the spring lettuce, bok choy, and potato onions and garlic and nearly all of the peas. Because I did not pre-sprout the pea seeds and the soil at the time I planted them was quite cold, most of the seeds rotted. I should know by now that there is no point to my wasting pea seed on the garden unless I pre-sprout it before I plant it. Even with the poor germination, however, I still got about 3.3 pounds of garden peas from an area of 32 square feet, which translates to a yield of about 10 pounds per 100 square feet, not far below my best yield of 17 pounds per 100 square feet. Improving my pea-growing technique should result in improved yields even without fertilizing to remedy deficiencies on soil test results.

Since the area where the lettuces and bok choy were planted received the 2013 fertilizer recipe and the effects of using that recipe are part of this year’s scientific dialogue, I was especially interested in noticing any effects on lettuce yield and taste. Of the three varieties I grew this year, the winner for both taste and yield was ‘Anuenue’, the round green lettuce in the photo at the top of the page. It yielded at an adjusted level of 113 pounds per 100 square feet, slightly better than the previous best for any variety of lettuce I grow, and it set a solid head with a delicious taste and no bitterness at all, not even when it bolted! Neither ‘Bronze Arrow’ nor ‘Pirat’ tasted any better than usual and their adjusted yields were about half that of ‘Anuenue’. The bok choy yielded at 121 pounds per 100 square feet, not a high yield for a spring crop. All of it was bolting by the time I picked it, perhaps because the cool conditions in April primed it to bolt early. It tasted about the same as usual but it seemed to be less bothered than usual by the green caterpillars that feed on the cabbage-family crops. (The cabbage and broccoli also seem to be less bothered with the same insect pests this year.)

Of the root crops, the parsnip seeds showed very low germination. Because I have only grown this crop one other year, I did not remember that parsnip seeds require cool soil for good germination. Next year I plan to change how I grow it and the onions and leeks I grow from seed: I’ll add the parsnips to the bed that includes onions and leeks and direct-seed all three crops, ideally sometime between March 15 and April 10, rather than attempt to grow the onion and leek seeds in flats and then transplant the seedlings. This year the onion and leek seeds did not germinate well, perhaps because the porch was too cold during that time. I think direct-seeding and thinning the onions and leeks may result in a better stand and not take much if any more time than it did to transplant tiny onion and leek seedlings, and the parsnip seeds should germinate much better in the cooler soil at that time of year.

For those of you who are not familiar with potato onions, these are in the same genus and species as bulb onions but the bulbs divide underground into a cluster of bulbs as do shallots. The potato onions I grow look and taste like yellow bulb onions. Single bulbs of varying sizes are fall-planted and mulched after the ground freezes to prevent frost heaving. I use leaves to mulch my crop. In early to mid March when the ground thaws for the final time the mulch is removed so the bulbs can grow on. They are harvested when the tops die back around mid-June. This year I harvested them on June 18 for a yield of about 33 pounds per 100 square feet, about half of the best yield I’ve obtained from these onions. The better yield came in a year when I planted them 6 inches apart rather than 8 inches apart as I did last year. Last fall when I planted the crop I did not add any additional fertilization beyond what the previous dry bean crop received when I planted it. This year I will again plant the potato onions (and the garlic) in fall after the dry beans are harvested, but I may re-fertilize before planting the onions and I’ll plant them at 6 inches apart. In the long term I’d prefer to plant only these onions and not the bulb onions because the potato onions are much easier to work with. The yield of the potato onions in the best year has been higher than the best bulb onion yield, but it has taken me several years to learn from experience the need for the winter mulch and for its prompt removal in early spring in order to keep the potato onions alive during winter and allow them to grow on in spring. Once I am sure I know how to grow the potato onions well I will stop growing bulb onions and try to grow enough potato onions to satisfy our appetite for onions.

Of the fruits, I had a tied-for-best yield of strawberries: 40 pounds from the 100 square foot bed of them. This bed hasn’t been fertilized since I planted it in 2011 with two different varieties of strawberries, ‘TriStar’, an everbearer, and ‘EarliGlow’, a May bearer. We had so many strawberries that I was able to preserve some of the crop for later use for the first time. Later this summer I plan to renovate the bed by removing excess plants and weeds and adding the 2013 fertilizer recipe to the surface of the bed. By now I think most of the plants are ‘EarliGlow’, the flavor of which I prefer, so my goal will be to end up with one plant per square foot of all ‘EarliGlow’ strawberries in the renovated bed. I’m glad we had so many strawberries this year because the birds ate nearly all of the plums and are eating a lot of the blueberries before they ripen (I’ll try netting the blueberries later this week as some of the bushes still have most of the so-far unripe crop on them). I did harvest a little over a pound of serviceberries before the robins moved in one afternoon and stripped the two plants nearly bare. Later this summer we expect to harvest pears, apples, and persimmons, perhaps even a couple of pawpaws. I hope to harvest some hazelnuts and chestnuts as well if the squirrels decide to share them with us.

The photo above was taken on June 15. In the middle are the ‘German Butterball’ potatoes. The bed on the left has ‘Elba’ potatoes in back and sweet potatoes in front. These two high-calorie crops are a mainstay of the Ecology Action approach to growing high yields of foods in small spaces. This year I want to see if I can beat the best yields I’ve gotten so far for these two crops. The sweet potato slips were planted on May 29, at the right time according to Missouri Extension. Both crops look good so far. To the right is another view of the bed containing tomatoes and the other crops mentioned at the top of the post. This bed was planted on May 21 and 22 and so far all the plants are growing well. This year’s wet conditions are conducive to the disease that has attacked my pepper plants in past wet years, but it’s too early to tell if this year’s plants will be spared. So far they look good and have set peppers. The dry bean, peanut, cowpea, and flint corn crops were all planted in June and look about the way I would expect them to at this point.

It’s been a good start to the garden year with more to report later on as the summer crops start bearing. In the meantime, after the squash, melon, and cucumber seeds have planted, I will have other topics to write about. I’ll meet you here again after awhile!

Tea for Two in the Lou

Now that the Siberian irises are blooming (the blue flowers in the photo above) ruby-throated hummingbirds spend a lot of time in our yard. Yesterday Mike and I watched them work the iris flowers as well as other flowers in the gardens surrounding the patio. The warmer weather and lack of rain (except on the 20th) of the last couple of weeks has allowed me to finish planting the last of the cool weather crops and prepare and plant the first bed of warm season crops: the bed containing peppers, eggplants, ground cherries, tomatillos, tomatoes, and basil. Meanwhile I’ve already harvested four pounds of strawberries in just five days!

Count me in among the set of gardeners who like to push the limits of what they can grow. Just because something isn’t supposed to be able to survive a St. Louis winter -- or a St. Louis summer -- doesn’t always mean that it won’t. It does seem highly unlikely that during my lifetime I’ll be able to grow, say, a coconut palm in my yard. But I may be able to grow more than gardening books, nursery catalogs, and the USDA claim that I can.

Those of you who garden in the U.S. are likely familiar with the USDA Zone Map as many retailers mark their perennial plants with a range of USDA zones in which the plant is supposed to thrive. Each zone marks out locations with the same range of lowest expected winter temperatures because winter lows are one of the key factors that determine whether or not a perennial plant survives to grow another season past the one in which you purchased and planted it. Generally the farther south the location within the U.S., the wider the range of plants that can be grown because of milder winter conditions. However, some plants need a period of winter cold to survive (most daffodils and tulips, for instance) or need at least some winter chill hours to set blossoms and fruit (most apple varieties), so a plant’s zone rating is often a range, such as Zones 5-9.

The problem with relying on zone ratings to determine what you can grow in your area is severalfold. The first issue is that the zone ratings seem more rigid and exact than they really are. Plants, like people, are individuals. Some plants of a given species, variety, or cultivar may have a slightly different genetic make-up that allows them to survive colder temperatures than most other plants of that type, or conversely, makes them less able to survive cold weather. We gardeners can’t tell by looking if the particular plant we buy or receive will live up to its zone rating or be the occasional individual that is exceptionally hardy or exceptionally delicate. We have to plant it to find out if it survives our weather and climate conditions.

Even without that problem, zone ratings are inexact. Sometimes plants can survive colder temperatures under snow cover than they do the same temperature in a St. Louis winter that mostly lacks snow cover. Some plants can take the dry summer heat of the West better than a humid summer of the South, or vice versa. Sometimes you can help a plant to survive by putting it in a spot in your garden that is warmer or cooler than the rest of the garden, what gardeners call a microclimate, thus extending the range of what you can grow beyond your official USDA zone rating.

Catalogs don’t always agree on the zone rating for a particular species or cultivar. As an example, Raintree Nursery claims that ‘Enterprise’ apple trees are hardy in Zones 4-9 while Stark Bro’s claims they are hardy in Zones 4-7. Which is correct? I don’t know. My ‘Enterprise’ tree is doing fine but I don’t know if someone in Atlanta or New Orleans could grow it or not. Neither catalog tells me how many chilling hours it needs to bloom, information that would help more than the zone rating for someone in the south who wants to know if he or she can grow this apple variety.

As if all that isn’t enough to cause a person to question the usefulness of zone ratings, then there is the issue of whether the USDA Zone Map actually reflects on-the-ground reality. Consider the 2012 map, the latest one available. It puts St. Louis in the middle of Zone 6, where the coldest winter lows would be expected to be in the range of 0F to -10F. But the official lowest winter temperature for St. Louis has not dropped below 0F since 1999! That fact suggests that St. Louis is currently somewhere in Zone 7 (lowest winter temperatures between 10F and 0F) rather than Zone 6. This is quite a change from when I first moved to St. Louis in 1984 and through the 1980s and 1990s, when the lowest winter temperatures routinely dropped below 0F and sometimes dropped below -10F. The last two winters have seen the lowest temperatures closer to 10F than 0F. If this trend holds, we could be close to the border between USDA Zones 7 and 8 in terms of winter hardiness. That would allow me to grow some southern plants that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to grow, especially if I take care to locate them in an appropriate microclimate.

One classic southern plant of interest to me is the camellia. Most of the zone ratings I’ve seen for camellias put their northern hardiness limit at Zone 8 though some cultivars are hardy to Zone 7 or even Zone 6. The only camellias I’ve seen in St. Louis so far have been in the Linnean House, one of the oldest greenhouses west of the Mississippi River, at the Missouri Botanical Garden. During a winter visit the camellia flowers in the Linnean House provide a welcome shot of vivid color to relieve the gray-brownness of a typical St. Louis winter day.

In theory I could keep a camellia alive on my glassed-in front porch during the winter as it has never gotten colder than the mid 20sF, but that space is small and already overcrowded. I’m much more interested in the possibility of keeping a camellia planted outside alive. And not a floral camellia either, despite my enjoyment of them. The camellia I have in mind is Camellia sinensis, otherwise known as tea. This is the plant from whose leaves we get black, oolong, green, white, and the other types of the caffeinated beverage we call tea. The type of tea obtained depends on which leaves are taken and how they are processed as well as on the particular variety of the plant and where it is grown.

I am a tea drinker. I don’t like coffee at all, but tea is another matter. I limit myself to one or two cups a day most days because of the caffeine content and also because I buy organic, fairly traded tea as much as possible. This is one plant that I’d like to grow in my yard, even if I have to coddle it a bit, because I’d feel better about being able to provide even a little of a beverage that I drink so much of. And we are so close to being able to grow it that it seems worthwhile to spend a little money and time on some plants.

It has taken me awhile to decide on where to grow the tea plants. Since I don’t discount the possibility that St. Louis could experience winter lows close to or even below 0F in the future, a site protected from winter winds seems best. The articles I've read on growing tea plants suggest that they are quite adaptable to my conditions otherwise: they can grow in Zone 7, they like acid soil, and they can tolerate summer heat and drought. They grow in full sun to partial shade. The best location seems to be on the east side of our house, where they would enjoy morning and early afternoon sun yet would be protected from cold northwest and north winter winds. That space was already occupied by two spiraea shrubs. All I had to do was remove them and a few companions, including poison ivy, and in a few years I can be harvesting, processing, and drying tea for Mike and myself. Not much, probably, but I can always drop my consumption of tea down to what I can harvest and for the rest drink herbal teas like spearmint and lemon balm that I also grow and harvest for that purpose.

A month ago, after cutting the spiraea shrubs to the ground (carefully so as to avoid contact with the poison ivy), I planted two tea plants that I purchased from Edible Landscaping and which they claim are hardy to Zone 7. Whenever I plant young trees and shrubs I always protect them with a circle of hardware cloth to keep the local rabbits from nibbling them down to stubs. The photo below that I took a few days ago shows one of the tea plants within its protective cage. Both plants seem to be doing well so far. I plan to leave them unprotected next winter unless the low is predicted to be near or below zero. In that case I will cover each plant with a large pot overnight. Once the plants grow tall enough I plan to leave them unprotected all winter long. In a few years I hope to make tea for two in the Lou from our own plants!

Science as Dialogue: What My Garden and I Are Discussing in 2013

Another cloudy, wet spring day in St. Louis. The mulched bed is my herb garden.

In the last post I brought up my use of the scientific method in my gardening practice. Now I’d like to talk more about how ordinary folks (and as far as gardening goes, I’m as ordinary as any of you) can use the scientific method to solve problems that come up with the materials of everyday life. What I hope to do is de-mystify the method and also separate it from any negative associations you may have picked up about it from prior experiences, so that you can turn to it when the question you have in mind is amenable to its use.

In my previous post I quoted Wikipedia’s definition of the scientific method: “the process of systemic observation, measurement, and experimentation and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.” It’s an accurate enough description, but I suspect rather forbidding for ordinary people to apply to everyday problems in the material world. This may have something to do with schooling and its tendency to separate knowledge into fields that seem to have nothing to do with each other. The scientific method gets classified as something you do in science class and nowhere else. If you didn’t like or do well in science, you may not realize how useful the method can be.

So let me suggest a more informal and friendlier description of the method so that anyone who is curious about a problem in the material world can use it fruitfully. Think of the scientific method as a dialogue with the material world, a process by which you can ask questions about aspects of the material world that puzzle you and obtain information that may help you to answer those questions, or modify them, or ask new ones, or any combination of these things. The questioning part corresponds to the hypotheses mentioned in Wikipedia’s definition. Obtaining information corresponds to the systematic observation, measurement, and experimentation portion of the definition. The questioning and information-gathering process continues for as long as you find the dialogue useful to maintain.

Suppose we want to find out why a friend holds a particular position. We might have an idea about how our friend came to that position and start by asking questions to see if our idea is in fact important to our friend’s thought process. Our friend’s answers to these questions would provide information that we would consider in deciding whether or not our idea has merit. If it doesn’t, we might have gained enough information from our friend’s answers to change our idea about how she came to that position, or perhaps we are now thoroughly confused about why she holds that position. Maybe we’d ask some more questions, especially in the latter case, as we attempt to understand her position from her viewpoint. Perhaps she’s changing her own ideas as she listens to and responds to our questioning; she may ask some questions of her own about our position and why we hold it. Eventually the process, done well, results in a clear understanding of each person’s position and the reasons for it. It may lead to changes in one or both peoples’ positions due to the new information that comes to light. This sort of extended dialogue is what I’m doing in my garden. I can’t do it through talk because of the language differences between me and the plants, animals, and other materials and processes that constitute the garden system. The scientific method, or scientific dialogue, offers me a language in which to ask and receive answers to questions that I have about the garden system and change the way in which I garden to interact more fruitfully with it. In the process, I’m likely to be changing the garden itself ... and it changes me in turn.

In the scientific dialogue that I am having with my garden, the major question that I’ve been asking since I first learned of Ecology Action’s work in the middle to late 1990s is the one that I mentioned in my last post: can a person grow all of his or her own diet in a small backyard garden in the St. Louis region without making it difficult or impossible for someone else to do the same thing in a similar sized garden elsewhere? At the time Mike and I were living on a 1/8 acre lot, of which I had less than 150 square feet in vegetables. I obtained One Circle by David Duhon no later than the 1999 three day Ecology Action workshop in Fairfield, Iowa that I attended. Duhon’s claim that it was possible to grow a complete diet in about 700 square feet of gardening space suggested to me that the answer to my question could be yes, at least in principle. If we chose to remove the trees, ornamental plantings, and patio from the back yard and planted the flattest portion completely to vegetables, and if I put some of the prettier edibles in the front yard, I could have installed close to 1000 square feet of garden space into that excessively sloped and paved-over (a 100 foot long driveway!) lot, enough space to provide two adults with most of a complete diet according to the book. That lot was similar in size to many urban lots in St. Louis. Most suburban lots in the region are closer to 1/4 acre in size; a sizable fraction, including our current lot, are larger than that.

Since the availability of sufficient gardening space didn’t appear to be an issue for most people in the region, the next question became whether or not I could obtain a high enough yield (measured as pounds of food harvested per 100 square feet of growing space) of the crops discussed in One Circle to grow the complete diet worked out there. The tricky part of working out a complete diet is that the usual crops grown in a backyard garden -- largely salad crops like lettuce and tomatoes along with fresh vegetables like snap beans and peas -- provide vitamins and minerals but not many calories for their weight. One Circle has an extensive discussion of human dietary needs, the first among them being calories, or food energy. Most backyard gardeners haven’t concerned themselves with growing crops dense with calories, primarily root and seed crops, because these are widely available at low cost from agribusiness and its distributors and retailers. Backyard gardeners prefer to grow the more perishable vegetables that do well in small spaces, often taste better grown and consumed fresh than do the multiple-day-old versions available through the agribusiness chain, and cost more to purchase fresh from a local farmer than they do to grow oneself. In addition, the seed crops such as wheat, corn, and rice that constitute a high proportion of the calories in my diet and that of most people in the U. S. take a lot of space to grow per calorie obtained, more than is available in a small backyard garden, and also require considerable processing to use. Root crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes, in contrast, do provide a lot of calories for the garden space they take up and don’t need special processing to use but do require a lot of storage space in living quarters. Potatoes are harvested in the height of summer and require a cool, dry storage space, something St. Louis conditions don’t provide at that time of year. Sweet potatoes may be better suited to our climate and storage conditions but still require a lot of storage space. Both crops are cheap and readily available in grocery stores however so most gardeners do not bother with them. All that being the case, One Circle puts forth a convincing argument that a backyard gardener who wishes to grow most of what she eats should concentrate on growing calorie-dense root and seed crops along with some highly nutritious greens. As jobs and income continue to erode and food costs continue to rise, the economic argument for raising a higher proportion of calorie-dense crops in backyard gardens gains merit as well, for me and Mike as well as many other people.

For this reason I started including most of the One Circle crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, soybeans, sunflower seeds, onions, garlic, leeks, wheat, parsnips, parsley, collards, and turnips) in my garden once we moved to our current lot, where we have enough space for a 1500 square foot vegetable and grain garden. For the past several years, therefore, the form of the major question that I have been asking my garden to answer has been can I obtain high enough yields of the crops profiled in One Circle that we could grow almost all of our diet from them in the 1500 square feet I now have available for those crops? So far for all of these crops except parsley, the answer has been no.

I’ve been trying to understand why my garden keeps telling me no. As I noted before, it could be my gardening techniques are not optimal for this climate and I continue to pursue information that could help me to improve them. However, I think two other factors have a larger effect. One is an unbalanced soil mineral base as discussed a few posts back. That’s what has prompted the particular question that I am asking my garden to help me understand in 2013: what effect does proper soil mineralization have on the yields that I am able to obtain under my particular growing conditions and at the skill level I now have? As the year proceeds and I harvest my crops, I’ll be reporting on the yields I obtain and other garden observations I make so you can follow the dialogue as it proceeds. That may help you learn how a scientific dialogue could aid you with questions you have about your material world.

The second factor is one I mentioned briefly in the last post: it may be that growing conditions in the St. Louis region will not allow for high yields of some of these crops because our growing conditions do not match well to the requirements of the crops. I suspect this is the case for many if not most of the crops on the list. If after proper soil re-mineralization and attention to garden technique (planting the crops at the right time and in the proper spacing, for instance) I still cannot achieve the yields needed for the set of crops advocated by One Circle, then I’ll need to use the information in that book and a later Ecology Action publication, Designing a Grow Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farm, to work out the space requirements for a complete diet specific to the St. Louis region and the yields I have been able to obtain. Then I’ll have to try growing that diet and eating it to see what modifications it may require. That means lots of good scientific work to be done in upcoming years and reported on in this blog!

As for how to conduct my dialogue with my garden, I rely on another of my favorite garden writers, Carol Deppe. She includes in her excellent book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving a description of how to conduct the dialogue (which she calls gardening research) as it pertains to variety trials. She points out that variety trials are central to answering gardening questions. I’ve used her work as a guide to my own.

Observations, data gathering, and record-keeping are essential to any scientific dialogue. Your partner in the dialogue -- in this case, my garden -- offers its answers in the form of things you can sense by sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. So you won’t forget these things after you sense them, you need to write them down someplace where you can refer to them later as needed. These pieces of sensory information are what scientists call observations and data. An observation is usually something qualitative: the lettuce leaves have some kind of insect on them, for instance. Data is more often quantitative: on May 8 I harvested 13 ounces of asparagus. You want a place where you can record both kinds of information. The Bountiful Gardens website has a downloadable pdf (Crop Record Keeping) form with spaces for both qualitative information (called Observations) and quantitative information such as weight harvested (and number if it’s something like heads of lettuce or cabbage) and the date, as well as information on what variety was planted, when it was planted and in how much space, how the bed was prepared and how the crop was spaced, and other important information to help you figure out what your garden is telling you. You can use this form or devise a similar form more suited to your own garden. I keep records the old-fashioned way, using paper and pen, but there is nothing to stop you from keeping the information on your computer if that makes more sense to you. I use a separate sheet of paper similar to the form linked to above for each variety of each different crop I grow each year. I keep all the current year’s sheets in one binder, arranged alphabetically by crop and then alphabetically by variety within each crop, because that binder is small enough to carry with me to wherever I need it. After each variety is completely harvested and I’ve calculated the yield and written down anything else I want to remember about it, I file its data sheet into master binders also arranged alphabetically by crop and variety. Within each variety that I grow for more than one year, I arrange the sheets chronologically by year. I find this arrangement is the best for answering questions on yield and how it changes from year to year. You may prefer a different system depending on the questions you most want to answer. As for the information you might want to record, see Deppe’s book as she has a thorough list that you can choose from according to the questions you are asking.

In order to get answers to the questions you are asking, you have to know how to set up a gardening plan or design that will allow the garden to answer those questions for you. Scientists call this design an experiment. Deppe calls it a garden trial. Whatever you call it, you have to make sure you can obtain the answer you want from the way in which you garden. Since one of the questions I want to answer has to do with how many pounds of, say, ‘German Butterball’ potatoes I grow so I can compare it directly to the yield for potatoes in How to Grow More Vegetables, I need to know the number of square feet of those potatoes that I have planted and I need to weigh all the potatoes that I harvest from that area. The square feet of garden space devoted to these potatoes is noted on my garden plan for 2013 and on that potato’s data sheet. I weigh all the produce I harvest, and I also record the date it’s harvested. At the end of the season, I add up the total pounds harvested for these potatoes, convert that to pounds per 100 square feet using the actual bed space for the crop, and check that against what I’ve obtained for this and other varieties I’ve grown over the years. I’d like to see the yield increase in 2013; at least it should not decrease, or if it does, another factor like taste should increase enough to compensate for that. But I think it will take a few years for me to obtain a definitive answer to the yield question, for reasons I’ll explore farther down.

One of the claims for Ecology Action’s method is that when the soil has been properly fertilized, the compost that the garden produces maintains garden fertility without further importation of fertilizer. Steve Solomon makes a similar claim in The Intelligent Gardener: a garden with a proper mineral balance should maintain that balance for at least a period of some years and should require over time fewer mineral imports. A quantitative method to assess both of these claims is to test soil mineral levels each spring. If my garden is moving closer to a balanced, self-maintaining fertility, those minerals that are currently deficient or in excess should become less so over time. Each March I plan to repeat the same soil testing I did in April of this year to see if this pattern is observed. If anything is deficient, the 2014 garden prescription will be based on the March 2014 soil test. I expect it will take at least a few years to learn how the garden answers this question as well.

Besides these two quantitative tests, I will be evaluating some qualitative properties as well. One of Solomon’s claims is that produce grown on well-balanced soil tastes better. Since I have been running garden trials of different varieties of crops against current favorite varieties for many years, I will be checking for any obvious taste differences between, say, this year’s ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce and my memory of its taste from previous years. Obviously this sort of test is highly subjective and can’t make subtle distinctions, but that does not mean it’s useless. If it turns out that most of my favorite varieties seem to taste better this year, I’d consider that a major point in favor of soil re-mineralization even if nothing else changes. The other qualitative testing I’ll be doing is watching for any pest or disease pressure among the various crops. The major pest problems I have are squash bugs on the squash-family crops and harlequin bugs on the cabbage-family crops. A common disease issue, especially in wet years (and so far 2013 has been a wet year) occurs on many to most pepper plants and sometimes tomato plants as well. I’m not sure of its identity but I do know the symptoms so I will be watching for it. Again, properly balanced soil is supposed to grow crops that are less susceptible to pests and diseases, so this is my guess for what I’ll observe. And again, I suspect it will be a few years before I can say for sure how the garden answers this question.

I might be able to get quicker answers to some of my questions if I were more careful about using controls in my gardening dialogue. A control could be planting some of the ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce in a bed that was fertilized the same way I have fertilized that bed in past years, which in this case would be not at all. Using a control would correct for problems like unfavorable or especially favorable weather conditions or an unusual pest or disease problem or lack thereof that might happen in any particular year. This year, my lettuce crop is going in very late, probably next week in fact when I would prefer to plant it by April 20. If it gets and stays hot rapidly, none of my lettuces might do well. But if the lettuce in the re-mineralized part of the garden yielded better than the same variety in the control area, I’d be pretty certain that the reason was because of the re-mineralized soil.

The problem with running controls has to do with the large numbers of different crops I grow in most beds and the consequent small space devoted to most varieties of most crops. It would be quite difficult to get uniform yet different fertilization schemes into two 8 square foot areas next to each other, the amount of ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce that I grow each year. The only one of my crops that I will grow enough square feet of in different beds that I can use a control is corn. For corn I might in fact fertilize one bed (100 square feet) with the original fertilizer formula and the other two beds (200 square feet total) with the 2013 formula. As long as I segregate the ears from the differently-treated beds and weigh them separately, I will have a good control for that one crop. However, for most of the other crops I grow I do have at least one variety that I have grown from anywhere from 5 to 15 years, in a variety of different weather conditions. It shouldn’t be too difficult for me to determine if the yield I get for ‘Bronze Arrow’ lettuce is about what I would expect for whatever conditions it has to grow under, or much better or much worse. I can always change gardening patterns in succeeding years if it seems necessary to the quality of the dialogue that my garden and I practice.

A Project Takes Root

A week ago the dogwoods and redbuds were in full, beautiful bloom in our backyard. After three days of highs in the 80-87F range, their flowers have matured and the petals are dropping, while their leaves are expanding. During the same three days I finally planted the seed potatoes, about a month later than I would normally plant them. It hasn't been a normal spring, if such a thing even exists in the Midwest. But at least St. Louis won't be getting any snow today or tomorrow, just lots of cold rain. By next week I should be back in the garden to complete planting of the cool weather crops.

It’s funny how projects can creep up on a person. When I began this blog I intended to touch on different aspects of the practice of voluntary simplicity, or if you prefer voluntary poverty, in the St. Louis region. I don’t prefer calling it voluntary poverty because Mike and I own our land, at least as much as anyone does in the U. S., and we don’t feel poor, but most people would consider us poor if the only piece of information they had about us was our yearly income. Certainly we have limits on what we can do because of that income, but after years of practice we find we can do most anything we really want to do with careful use of the resources around us. More importantly, we know that since we can only do a few things, we’d better be very clear on exactly what it is that we want to do and why.

As I wrote more posts, it became clear to me and I suspect to those of you reading this blog that my gardening efforts dominate the subject matter, and that I approach gardening in a rather scientific way. That shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve read this post out of the series that I wrote on how our simplicity practice evolved. My application of the scientific method to my gardening efforts isn’t something I have to think about; I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Making scaled graphs of each year’s garden layout, weighing all the produce that I harvest, calculating the weight harvested per square foot for each variety and comparing it to the target yields in How to Grow More Vegetables, comparing the yield and taste of new varieties of vegetables to our current favorites, noting the various patterns of pest and disease infestations each year, looking at all the data at the end of the season to determine what did and didn’t work, trying to puzzle out why something didn’t yield well or why something else got hit by a pest or disease, reading gardening publications in an effort to learn better gardening techniques: all of these things are part of approaching my gardening efforts in a scientific way. But I haven’t been explicit about that in my posts so far.

I’ve been considering my reluctance to admit to the scientific aspect of my gardening practice. I think part of it is imagining the scorn that past scientific colleagues of mine would heap on me for working on what they would consider an uninteresting problem. Back when I was in grad school, we worked at the bleeding edge of science. We had a laboratory full of expensive, delicate optics directing high-powered laser beams that required an amount of electricity to generate that must have been orders of magnitude over what our household uses in the same period of time. We included lots of mathematical equations filled with Greek letters in the papers we wrote to describe our studies. We published these papers in the leading journals in our field of work. While I never presented a paper at a conference (I didn’t have the self-confidence to do so), my colleagues did. I was part of a group of people who considered themselves, and whom society at large considered, as bona fide scientists. Yet as far as I can tell, nothing that I did in grad school or in industry made the slightest bit of positive difference in the world. If anything, it went the other way. On the other hand, I think the gardening science I’ve been and will be doing does have the potential to be helpful to ourselves and others in a world of energy decline, even though it’s strictly amateur (in the sense of done for love rather than money), done on my own time, at home, without the need for fancy math or expensive equipment. It’s the sort of science that anyone can do and that I’d like to see more people learn and practice on the problems that are amenable to it. It’s this kind of science that I’m doing as I work on an issue that’s been of considerable importance to me and I suspect will become more so to more people over the years: just how much food can be grown by ordinary people in their backyards without making it difficult or impossible for other people to do the same thing?

Among the gardening books that are of use to me in my gardening practice,  John Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables (HTGMV), produced by Ecology Action, most directly deals with the issue of growing the most food in the least space in the most sustainable way. Another Ecology Action publication, One Circle, claims that it may be possible to grow a complete diet for one person in about 700 square feet if the method is applied correctly, crops are chosen carefully, and one is willing to eat a monotonous diet heavy in root crops like potatoes and onions and oily seed crops like sunflower seeds. A prerequisite for growing so much food in such a small space is to obtain yields at the medium to high levels for each crop (these are given in HTGMV). However, I’ve only been able to achieve low yields for all of the crops except for parsley mentioned in One Circle, and in fact for most of the crops I grow. I’ve been trying to understand why this is so. After 19 years of gardening I think I’ve gotten pretty good at the basic techniques. I know when to plant each type of crop and how to grow them in St. Louis. But since I’m still obtaining low yields on most crops, there must be a reason or reasons for that.

One possibility is that St. Louis’ growing conditions do not fit well with some crops, especially crops like potatoes and cabbage that yield best in long, cool spring and summer conditions. For crops like these I may never be able to achieve high yields. I also may not have fully optimized my growing practices, hence my continuing study of gardening publications. Lately I’ve been wondering if mineral deficiencies in my soil might be part of the reason for continuing low yields for most vegetables I grow. While Ecology Action’s publications suggest that a proper application of their techniques allows for self-sustaining fertility, they do say that one should have a soil test done when beginning a new garden and fertilize to remedy any deficiencies in the soil before doing the first dig. After that compost made from garden and kitchen refuse should be sufficient to maintain balanced fertility in the garden. When we first moved to this house I had a soil test done through the Missouri Extension service. I made an attempt to fertilize according to its recommendations for the first bed that I dug. But I did not repeat that for any of the subsequent beds.

After reading Steve Solomon’s book Gardening When It Counts, I began to use a version of the Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF) recipe in that book to see if it might raise yields of some crops. It seemed to help a little but not as much as I was hoping. Two of the components I used in the mix, rock phosphate (for phosphorus) and greensand (for potassium), are mined minerals that are expensive to ship due to the weights needed to be effective as fertilizers. I was leery of relying on them both because of the expense and because it didn’t feel right to be using so much of these non-renewable resources in a world of limits. In the past year or two I’ve been using the COF only on the beds planted with corn, as corn is a heavy feeder that needs a lot of fertility to grow well. However, I wasn’t sure if that would leave enough fertility for the next four years’ worth of crops (I’m currently using a five year rotation of crop families to avoid building up family-specific pests and diseases in my garden beds). Meanwhile, I’d been reading Acres U.S.A., a publication devoted to various aspects of holistic farming, where I’d been exposed to the idea that most soils need re-mineralization to produce the kind of pasture and grain crops that make for the best health in animals and people. It sounded good, I wanted to try it, but the bewildering number of publications on re-mineralization was off-putting. I’ll admit, too, that I didn’t want to engage enough with chemistry to understand the science behind the method. You’d think I’d be the ideal person to make sense of it, but the thought brought back too many bad memories of grad school and industry. Thus my excitement at reading Steve Solomon’s newest book, The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. Someone else had done all the hard chemical work for me and all I had to do was apply the results to my own project! The previous post began that project, with my calculating a fertilizer mix specifically to remedy the pattern of mineral deficiencies and excesses in my soil. As the gardening year continues, I will let you know the results.

I have two different reasons for writing about this project. The first is that some of you may find the results applicable to your own gardening efforts. As I noted earlier, all signs are that more of us will either want to or have to grow more of our own food in backyard-sized plots as ongoing decline in available fossil fuel energy intersects with the ongoing decline of Western industrial civilizations. If anything that I have learned can help any of you grow a better garden, I’d like for you to have that information. Of course you will have to translate what I’m doing to your own situation, but I will do my best to provide enough background and references for you to do that.

The second reason has to do with one of the common effects of civilizational decline as discussed by John Michael Greer in his excellent and highly recommended blog The Archdruid Report.  One of those common effects is the loss of a large amount of the knowledge base of a civilization. Greer is particularly concerned about the possibility of the loss of the scientific method to future generations as our civilization moves through the decline process. Note that he’s not referring to the vast body of knowledge built up by using the method. Most of that will prove to be of little if any use to people surviving on a very small fraction of the fossil fuel energy base that our civilization was built upon. He’s referring instead to the process by which that body of knowledge has been obtained: the process of systemic observation, measurement, and experimentation and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses, as Wikipedia puts it. Because we swim in a sea of science and technology, this may seem nearly unbelievable. But between the case that Greer makes for it and some of my own observations, I share his concern. Even so, I’ve resisted the possibility of doing my part to attempt to get the scientific method through decline. I think that has a lot to do with those same bad memories of grad school and industrial science that I mentioned earlier and the lack of self-confidence in myself as a scientist that resulted. But the scientific method has just as much applicability in the garden as it does at the bleeding edge of scientific research. Perhaps if I make my application of the method more explicit, which I will do in one of my upcoming posts, some of you will be inspired to apply the method to those problems for which it works well. Perhaps if any of you try it and find it works, you’ll pass on the method to someone else. The more of us who are applying the method to more different problems in more different ways and passing on our experiences to others, the more likely it is that we can get it through to the people who are alive when things settle down enough to begin work on whatever comes next.

I have lots of other things to talk about this year as well. Just to give you a hint: one of them has to do with tea. You’ll have to check back later for more ...

The Soil Doctor Writes a Prescription

Since my last post spring has arrived in St. Louis, bringing with it sufficient warmth to open the flowers on our serviceberries and magnolia, shown in the above photo. We have had a wetter and cooler than normal spring season. Last week I measured a total of 4.0 inches (about 10 cm) of rain at our location. I had prepared the bed for the onion and leek seedlings before the rain began but I haven’t planted it as I have been waiting for the saturated soil to drain. While I was waiting, I weeded and mulched the herb bed, just in time for today’s rain. I don’t think we will get nearly as much rain this week as we did last week so I will be able to plant the onions within the next couple of days. Then I must get busy on getting the rest of the cool season crops planted before summer begins and it is time to plant the warm season crops.

A couple of posts ago I discussed Steve Solomon’s new book The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. The book describes the re-mineralization process he has outlined for us home gardeners so that we may grow the most nutritious food possible in our gardens. I had a suspicion that our garden soil may not be as well mineralized as it could be and decided I’d like to test his program this year. So I collected 15 plugs of soil using a tubular soil sampler (it could be done with a stainless steel trowel as well but I sprung for the soil sampler because I expect to collect soil samples each spring from now on). Each plug was taken from the approximate middle of one of our vegetable garden beds; there are 15 of them in all, each 100 square feet in area. I mixed the fifteen plugs together as described in the book and labeled that sample Garden. Since I’d been using a version of the Complete Organic Fertilizer (COF) in Solomon’s earlier book, described in this post, on these garden beds for varying periods of time, I was curious as to what effect it may have had. To understand this, I took another 15 plugs of soil from the lawn in between the two largest groups of beds, mixed those plugs together, and labeled that sample Yard. I then packaged and sent both soil samples to Logan Labs, LLC, using their downloadable instructions and form. About a week later the soil report shown below landed in my email box.

From a quick scan of the results I learned some interesting things about our soil. If you look at the pH (level of acidity: 0 to 7 is acidic, 7 to 14 is basic) of both samples, you will see that the soil in the yard is more acidic (lower number) than the soil in the garden and that both values are on the acid end of the pH scale. (Fun but ignorable fact: because the pH scale is logarithmic, the yard soil is actually more than 10 times as acidic as the garden soil.) This makes sense because St. Louis gets about 40 inches of rain a year, enough to leach a significant amount of calcium out of the soil and thus raise its acidity. The garden soil has a less-acid pH than the yard soil because of the garden lime in the original COF formula that I’ve been using. Just about every gardener around here uses garden lime to raise soil pH and calcium to levels conducive to good vegetable growing. The pH value of 6.4 in the garden sample is about what most veggies want.

The organic matter level is nearly the same in the yard and garden samples, running around 4%. Solomon says that north of the Mason-Dixon line, levels of 7% are not difficult to achieve. South of the line, 4% is about as good as you can expect because long, hot summers burn up the organic matter in the soil. St. Louis is close to the line, perhaps just a bit south, so 4 to 5% organic matter is probably about the best I can expect. Considering that I have been adding only the minimum amount of compost according to Jeavons’ book and that last summer was the hottest, longest summer I have experienced here, I’m quite pleased with 4% organic matter. I may look into adding a bit more compost to each bed in the future to see if it might raise the organic matter a little higher, if I have enough extra compost for this.

The total exchange capacity has a lot to say to anyone who takes the time to study chapter 5 of Solomon’s book carefully. To very briefly summarize Solomon’s argument, the various minerals that plants need can be held onto (a chemist would say adsorbed to) either or both of the organic matter or clay fractions of soil. The more of each you have, the more minerals you can potentially store in your soil, available on demand to your plants. Clay has a higher holding capacity than organic matter for many of the minerals plants need in higher quantities but only organic matter can hold onto phosphorus and sulfur.

Our soil is a silt loam soil derived from wind-blown glacial deposits. Its clay content is rather low. Since summers are long and hot, I can’t hold a lot of organic matter in the soil. Thus my soil starts out with a major disadvantage: the soil mineral pantry will always be on the small side, sort of like the pantry in our 85 year old house is too small to hold everything Mike and I would like to keep in it. That’s what the total exchange capacity of around 7 means. Those of you with more clayey soils have an advantage over me because your soil’s pantry is potentially larger even if we have the same percentage of organic matter in our soils. What this means to me is that re-stocking my garden soil’s pantry by side-dressing with extra fertilizer in midseason could boost my yields to some degree. I will consider that possibility as the garden season progresses. Certainly with that small exchange capacity I need to be attentive to re-mineralizing every year, especially for crops that need high nutrition to grow well.

In order to understand what the rest of the results on the soil report mean and how to develop a soil prescription from them, you’ll need to read chapters 6 and 7 of Solomon’s book. He has developed a worksheet to help with that process. You can find the various versions of it in Appendix C, or you can download a pdf file of the latest version of the worksheets at this site. Since I have an acid soil, I used the acid soil worksheet in the downloadable version.

Please forgive me for not subjecting you to the level of detail Solomon does in the example in his book; I’d really like for you to read the book yourself rather than attempt to summarize it for you. What I’m going to do here is discuss the pattern of mineral deficiencies and excesses for my soil and the COF prescription that I’ve designed to address those patterns.

Above is side 1 of the filled-out worksheet, in which I used the information from the soil report to determine the pattern of deficiencies and excesses for my soil. Note that sulfur and phosphorus are both deficient. The phosphorus deficiency is to be expected since I do not use N-P-K  fertilizer (the P represents phosphorus) on my garden and the organic matter level is not high. Plants need and use a lot of phosphorus so many soils are deficient in it, thus the widespread use of N-P-K fertilizers. My soil also has a considerable sulfur deficiency, as does the example soil in the book. As for the rest of the minerals, magnesium, potassium (the K in N-P-K), iron, and manganese are all present in excess in my soil, while the rest of the minerals are deficient.

Above is side 2 of the acid soil worksheet, in which I work out target amounts of minerals to include in my customized COF prescription for 2013. It was easier to work out the quantities and materials for my COF versus the book’s example soil because I have an excess of potassium and because I need to add sulfur and calcium but not magnesium. Gypsum (calcium sulfate) is the perfect choice for this situation. Two other minerals I need to add, copper and zinc, are added as their sulfate salts (salts with sulfur included in the formula). What I did was determine how much of each of these minerals I needed and how much sulfur they brought with them, then adjusted the amount of gypsum to add to remedy the rest of the sulfur deficit. We are cautioned to avoid adding over a certain level of sulfur each year. Our sulfur deficit is less than that so I don’t have a problem there. I’m really glad to be adding gypsum because our soil has the classic symptom of a soil that needs it: it’s sticky when wet and compacts easily. Solomon had the same problem with his soil and found that adding gypsum greatly improved his soil’s texture. I’m eager to see if it does the same for ours!

The gypsum brings with it about half of the calcium our soil needs. Because our soil already has too much magnesium, I don’t want to use the dolomitic form of garden lime to add the rest; dolomitic lime brings in some magnesium along with the calcium. What I need to use is high-calcium lime, often referred to as high-cal lime. I determined how much of that to include to remedy the rest of the calcium deficit.

To add phosphorus, I chose to use rock phosphate because I have a nearly-full bag of this at home. The analysis on the bag suggests nothing else on the worksheet is coming in with it; I hope that is the case. If calcium comes along it won’t be a major problem. Once I use up the material on hand, I’ll probably switch to bonemeal for the phosphorus requirement since it does not bring in anything that is in excess in our soil.

This leaves two more minerals to balance, sodium and boron. Both of these are needed in only small quantities and toxic at levels not much higher than the needed levels. St. Louis gets enough rain that sodium chloride (table or sea salt) will leach out of the soil, which is probably why our soil has a small sodium deficit. I don’t find any information about sodium in the water quality report of our water supplier (it’s probably low because we draw water from the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers rather than a well field) and we still have a sodium deficit after irrigating heavily most of last summer, so I will add sea salt for the sodium requirement. It brings in some valuable trace minerals as well. For boron, my target to add is below the application limit, and I will use borax as recommended.

Solomon says that pounds per acre is about the same as grams per 100 square feet, the size of my vegetable beds. There are 454 grams in one pound, which I need to know because my postal scale reads in pounds. Some of the minerals are added in just a few teaspoonfuls for a 100 square foot bed; Solomon has those measurement equivalents on page 191 of his book. I’ll spare you the calculations that I made to convert pounds per acre to the amount used in the prescription for our soil.

Two other components besides those mentioned above will be part of the 2013 prescription. The first is an oilseed meal, cottonseed meal in my case (lots of cotton is grown in southern Missouri) since that is what I have been using in the earlier version of COF. Solomon suggests using about 3 quarts of this per 100 square feet. The meal feeds the soil microlife which in turn makes nitrogen (the N in N-P-K fertilizers) available to the plants as the microlife eat, poop, breed, die, and decay. The second component is kelp meal, used to provide a lot of trace minerals as well as a little nitrogen. Solomon suggests using 1 quart of that.

So here is the Soil Doctor’s prescription for 2013 for our soil, to dig into each 100 square feet of bed space before planting crops.
 - 3 quarts cottonseed meal
 - 1 quart kelp meal
 - 5 pounds rock phosphate
 - 1 pound gypsum
 - 10 ounces hi-cal lime
 - 1.4 ounces sea salt
 - 1.0 ounces (about 2 tablespoons) copper sulfate
 - 0.8 ounces (about 1 1/2 tablespoons) zinc sulfate
 - 0.2 ounces (about 1 teaspoon) borax

To prepare the 2013 prescription, I’ll put the cottonseed meal into a large tin that formerly held popcorn. Then I’ll mix all but the bottom four items into that. Solomon suggests dissolving the borax in a full watering can, then watering the entire surface of the bed with that water, in order to get a reasonably even distribution. I believe I can do that with the salt and copper and zinc sulfates as well. The others won’t dissolve sufficiently in water to play that trick.

After I remove any existing vegetation from one of the beds, I’ll sprinkle the mixed prescription as uniformly as possible over the entire surface of the bed, sprinkle 3 or 4 five-gallon bucketfuls of my compost similarly, and then dig them into the bed using a broadfork. Following this I’ll dissolve the last four items into a 2 gallon watering can and lightly water the bed surface with that solution. Then I’ll plant the bed.

If you play soil doctor and come up with your own prescription, you will need to locate the materials for it. Most decent garden centers carry most of the materials I needed for mine and most you are likely to need for yours. Borax is the same borax that you find in the grocery store and use for various cleaning purposes. What I had a hard time finding were hi-cal lime, sea salt, and copper sulfate. For copper sulfate, I searched the ‘net and found out it is used by aquarium hobbyists and can be obtained in 5 pound quantities. Even for my size of garden this will be many year’s worth. Fedco carries sea salt and hi-cal lime as well as most if not all of the other materials in Solomon's book if you are unable to obtain them locally.

Watch this space for details on the results I get. If any of you want to try this, I’ll be curious to learn of your results as well. I’ll explain more fully why I’m doing this and how I will determine if it’s worthwhile in one of the next posts I make. In the meantime, enjoy life!

Lingering winter

I took this photo of plum trees and spicebush shrubs in our backyard following what the St. Louis National Weather Service has dubbed the Palm Sunday Winter Storm. The official snowfall total at Lambert Field, around 10 miles from our house, was 12.7 inches of snow. I measured 12.0 inches in my backyard, but some melting may have already occurred before I made the measurement. As is typical of late season snowstorms, the snow was quite wet and heavy. Until the breeze picked up later in the morning and the air warmed slightly above freezing, the snow clung to shrubs and trees. The weight of the snow brought down a branch of the blue spruce in the side yard. That branch fell on the nearby blueberry shrub, breaking one of its branches off. Another shrub, a spiraea, suffered stem breakage from the weight of the snow on it. As more of the snow melts, I will check to see if any other woody plants were damaged.

Today I pricked-out seedlings of bok choy, cabbage, broccoli, cosmos, and zinnia from the flat in which each was started into individual cell packs. It was a good activity for a cold, snowy, but sunny afternoon. It felt like winter outside, but on the porch the temperature climbed to 80F.

A year ago, spring came very early and I did not respond in time, losing some unknown portion of the yield I could have gotten from my spring garden. This year I am late getting the ground prepared, not only because we were out of town for several days a few weeks back but also because of the lingering winter weather. Until the snow melts, I won't be able to begin preparation for the peas and onions that should have already been planted, much less the next set of seeds that I should have been preparing for now. Once the snow melts I'll have to check the soil temperature to find out if it is high enough to support seed germination now that we have had a week of very much below average temperatures. A week ago I measured the soil temperature at around 48-50F, which would have been warm enough for many of the spring crops I wanted to plant. I hope it hasn't dropped much. All of this is a good reminder that despite whatever I'd like to think, I'm not in control and nature has no obligation to grant me or anyone else the sort of world we think we should have. The best I can do is try to respond in a timely and appropriate way to whatever is actually happening - and in this case it is winter lingering on.

Soil re-mineralization for the rest of us

Now that spring is supposed to be here, I should be outside working on garden beds for the earliest spring crops. But we are having a late spring this year, at least compared to recent years. The temperature at the official St. Louis NWS site is 33F as I write. One year ago, it was 81F. The average high for today is 58F.

To really appreciate the difference between last year and this year, compare the picture of two redbuds in my backyard above (the small trees in the foreground), taken yesterday, with the picture below of the same two redbuds taken one year ago.

Last year the redbuds were in full bloom. This year, they haven’t changed much from midwinter. Granted, this year is closer to climatic normal than last ... but even the magnolias and most of the daffodils aren’t blooming yet.

With winter hanging on for at least a few more days, I have had time to read most of the way through Steve Solomon’s new book, The Intelligent Gardener: Growing Nutrient-Dense Food. Unlike his previous book, which I discussed here, this book looks in depth at one topic: why and how to re-mineralize garden soils. I’m really glad Solomon wrote the book because a couple of years ago, I had a subscription to Acres U.S.A. and read about soil re-mineralization and how important it is in that publication. However, Acres U.S.A. is written for farmers rather than gardeners. The articles discussing re-mineralization referred to many books written by and for farmers and their advisers. I could tell that different people used different systems, but I wasn’t up to reading the various books in order to piece together what might make sense for me to use on a garden scale. Fortunately for all of us, Solomon became interested enough in the topic and, as he puts it, honestly passed high school chemistry, so he could read much of the re-mineralization literature and interpret it for gardeners.

The first few chapters of the book explain why soils need re-mineralization and why composting and manuring are not sufficient to restore a full mineral balance to most soils, although they do benefit soils by feeding the soil microfauna. For those of us, myself included, who grow by the organic method as explicated by Organic Gardening magazine, we have much to learn. Solomon isn’t knocking organic gardening methods; rather, he wants to extend them to take into account what has been learned by soil chemists and successful holistic farmers about the need for and practice of re-mineralizing farm soils. Soils need re-mineralization because they are leached by rainfall and because typical agricultural, horticultural, and landscaping practices (even organic practices) remove some of the soil’s mineral reserves without replacing them and may create excesses in some minerals that are harmful to crops. Crops grown on such soils will not be as nutritious as they could and should be to sustain their own health against disease and insect attack. Since they lack nutrition, they cannot create the proper level of health in those of us who eat them.

The good news is that we can gradually replace the missing minerals in our soils and reduce excessive levels where those occur; Solomon’s book tells us how to do both. For those of us who don’t have the inclination to have our soil tested, Solomon offers an updated version of his complete organic fertilizer recipe. It’s not quite as simple to prepare as his earlier recipe because his research has led him to tweak the mixture depending on where you live, but it should also work a little better than the version in his earlier book. For those of us who want to develop a mix better attuned to our particular soil, Solomon tells us how to collect a soil sample, where to send it to for analysis, and how to interpret the results and use them to develop a mix tailored to remedy the particular pattern of deficiencies and excesses our own soil exhibits. I’ll be doing this and will report on what I learn, the mix I develop, and its effect on my garden throughout the season. I encourage other gardeners to read the book and try the updated recipe (or, if you want a personalized mix, have your soil tested and develop your own mix and try that). Let me know how it works for you. I’ll be interested in comparing results with those of you who have the more clayey soil typical of most of the St. Louis region rather than the silt-loam loess soil that I have.