Battling Slugs

It's not a very exciting picture but what it represents is very exciting, at least for us. I've posted about our problems with slugs in the past and about a solution we tried with some success last year. This year we're trying coffee instead. Apparently slugs don't like coffee so we've been saving our used grinds and spreading them around the dahlias. Not all the dahlias are up yet but the ones that are show no signs of slugs at all. Since our dahlia selection has dropped from 20+ to 7, this is great news!

Organic Container Gardening

 

I love containers! They are one of my favourite things in the garden. I have been known to turn anything into a container and I continue to use all my broken pots to grow plants in. The more they are broken, the deeper they get placed.

Containers are easy to do organically. I start with an organic potting soil and add a little bit of my own compost, making sure to keep the mix light. Heavy soil will compact. Do not plant containers with soil from your garden. Garden soil is too heavy for containers and becomes compacted over the season with weather and time. Roots need oxygen.

The compost I add to the potting soil helps to feed the plants over the season but containers need to be fed regularly throughout the season as well. There are a lot of organic feeding options such as fish emulsion or seaweed extract. I use compost tea. It is easy and free to make by steeping my own compost for a few days in a covered bucket of water placed in the sun. The resulting tea can be used weekly to feed my containers.

In Saskatchewan, we have long, hot, hot, hot summer afternoons that make containers a challenge. It is very hard for containers to survive without daily watering. Daily watering makes me feel guilty about my garden so I have developed a two step trick for watering containers. Step one is heavy mulch. I use straw. It can look a bit messy in early spring but the plants will completely cover any mulch long before they are full grown. The mulch prevents evaporation from the top of the pot and helps keep the roots of the plants cool. Step two is to water completely through twice each time I water. When I water my containers, I water until the water is freely running out of the container bottom and then I move on to the next container. Once I have done them all, I do it once more. I go back to the start and water until the water runs through. This doubles the time the job takes each time I do it but it reduces the number of times I water from daily to once a week, with the exception of the very small containers that I toss water on with the watering can almost every time I walk by in the summer. This trick has allowed me to plant far more containers than I could have managed if I was watering every day or even every second day. I am a lazy gardener at heart. Watering daily would reduce the amount of time I have to smell the roses!

Compost Simplified

The first few years I was gardening, I fed my plants with mixes I bought. I was diligent about buying the right mix for the right plant. African violet food, rose food, food for annuals and food specifically for perennials. Some were liquid you mixed and watered with, some were granular for mixing into water and some were granular for mixing into the soil. Slow release. I spent a small fortune in the two years it took me to realize that the same three nutrients are required by all plants and the balance of them in the plant food really didn't matter that much.

Plant nutrition can be really complicated. There are micro vs. macro nutrients, essential vs. beneficial elements, and soil pH. This can be further complicated by soil pH, in that if the pH is less than 4, the phosphorus will be chemically locked in the soil which makes it unavailable to the plant. Thankfully, I have found it can be simplified. What we need to remember as gardeners is that the plant uses nitrogen for stem and leaf growth, phosphorus for flower and fruit growth and potassium for roots. So if you are feeding flowers, you want a higher phosphorus number and if you are feeding root crops, you want a higher potassium number.

Over the long haul, I have discovered that making my own compost solves every problem I have had in the garden. If you use a good balance of different things in your compost, you end up with a good balance of nutrients in your soil. The trick is to keep the compost material diverse. When I first started composting, I had trouble keeping it free flowing and easy to stir. Everything I added, it seemed, was wet and heavy. That too, is easily solved. Keep your compost a good balance of wet and dry material and you will find success. I use a layer of green (wet) and a layer of brown (dry) material and just continue to build and stir, always leaving a dry top layer.

A few other tips: keep the top layer a dry layer to eliminate smells coming from the compost, grass clippings can be green or brown depending on the level of moisture in them, do not compost meat or bones if you do not want insects or smells but all waste vegetable material are excellent additions. If you have never composted, do not let the complications scare you. Just try it. A good compost pile does not smell and produces black gold for your garden that has no chemical substitute that will perform as well. If you are just getting started, Organic Gardening has a good, brief video to help you select your compost ingredients. I encourage you to jump right in and try it. I know I was sorry I waited so long once I spread the first results in my garden soil and witnessed the difference good compost can make. Much better than buying something in a bottle and environmentally friendly too - no chemicals and less landfill. Happy composting!

Garden Time Saving

 
I came upon Organic Gardening's 11 Time Saving Tips and was going to post it here. Then, as I was reading, I realized that most of us have already heard we need to make a plan, pile on mulch and keep tools handy and close to the garden. The idea that was new for me was a good one though. It was wash your harvest in the garden. What a great idea! Saves bringing in all that dirt to the kitchen. They suggest you collect your harvest in an old laundry basket which will act as a strainer in your garden when you hose it down. This is definitely a great garden idea I am going to use. Thank you, Organic Gardening. It is always great to find new ideas I hadn't heard before - especially if they are going to save me time!

The other tip I found interesting was one I first discovered in Ruth Stout's Gardening Without Work. The tip was build soil in place. The idea is that you compost between rows all spring/summer and then dig in after harvest in the fall. Ruth advocated just planting in the between rows next year and build the soil where the vegetable rows were this year, next year. Ruth's garden philosophy, as advertised, was for the Aging, the Busy and the Indolent. I wish I would have met her. Her book is well worth the read and was published when she was 76 years old. She was a wealth of information and I have used many of her methods in my flower gardens. I must confess however, that I do not employ them all because I am rather fussy about the look of things in my flower gardens and no work does mean a bit of a messy looking garden. Beautiful, big, healthy flowers but messy overall with informal composted paths. This year, I plan to use all or most of her methods in my new kitchen garden. In my vegetable patch, paths are not required other than to walk on to weed and what it looks like is secondary to the harvest quality and size it is producing. Ruth and I are going to be great friends this season. I think I will go pull out her book now.

Protecting your Garden

I have often posted about the adventures of my pets in my garden. Although there is some work involved in having so many dogs and cats AND a large garden, it has been well worth it for me. One of the big benefits of all my cats and dogs is that wildlife, generally speaking, stays out of the yard. We get the odd gopher or two and Hannah brings me mice that are no longer alive but we are not overrun with anything in the rodent family. This year I am starting my new kitchen garden and it will have an 8 foot fence around it because I need to keep my animals out of it as well. Digging in my flowers is one thing, digging in my food is quite another!

If you have wildlife bothering your garden, Organic Gardening magazine has a good article here on protecting it from wild things.