Lasagna garden in July

Too hot for chores!

Can you blame me if weeding has fallen off of my priority list?  The tomato plants are keeping us well stocked, though the canning crop is yet to come.  My late planted corn is doing well.  I expect a great crop of corn ear worms for the chickens, and the pigs and cows have been fighting over the green leaf corn plants that I have been thinning out.  These must be a great snack since the pigs leave not a morsel when they get an armful of corn stalks.  I've harvested a marginal crop of onions due to the chicken destruction they endured early on, but I'm overflowing with garlic with plenty to use and replant in October.  The biggest disappointment so far has been my green beans.  The first planting yielded well until the hot weather put a stop to blossom production, and my first try at succession planting shriveled in the sun.  Now should be the time to start my fall plantings, but maybe a week or two will give us a break in the weather...

Garden after one month of 100 degree days

Lasagna garden in June

Scott and Katherine built me this garden fence, not for rabbits, but to keep my own livestock out!  First, the ducks spent the winter pecking holes in the mulch and underlying newspaper to get at the grubs.  The grass in the expanded portions of the garden that was meant to be smothered, grew through with abandon.  Then, the chickens found their way into the yard and flattened all my carefully raised planting beds with their excavating and uprooted most of my early onion crop.  By the time the baby pigs started escaping into the yard, it was time to build a fence for the garden. 

Now that I have most of the weeds under control, the garden is growing well.  I had enough potatoes come back from last year's bed that I didn't plant any additional seed potatoes.  It looks like I'll have about 1/3 of last year's crop which should be just fine since we couldn't eat them all last year before they put out shoots. 

The strawberry patch that I planted in December had about a 75% survival rate, but the plants that made it are putting out plenty of daughters to fill in the bed for next year.

I also have sweet corn, beans, garlic, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and a bunch of berry bushes that will be moved to a permanent home this fall.

Score one for lasagna gardening

The clerk at Dillon's grocery store laughed when I bought onion sets, but I planted them today, March 10.  With standing water all around the yard, my raised compost beds were just right for digging.  I'm tempted to put last year's stored, leggy potatoes in tomorrow before I leave for a mission trip to the Dominican Republic.  More on that when I get back, if I can fit it to the farm theme...

Last of the stored produce

We didn't exactly pack the larder last fall, so I've been rationing the goodies we were able to put up.  This was the first year that our Keifer pear tree put on fruit.  Only special occasions have warranted opening one of the seven jars up until now, but it's January and we needed a taste of sunshine.  We can thank the internet for our success with the pears; they were nearly pig food.  It turns out that no matter how long Keifer pears hang on the tree, they will not ripen!  We watched them from July until September remain unchanged before I went searching for answers online.  The trick is to pick them while they are still hard and ripen them for two months in paper sacks in the basement.  The beauty of this is not only that it worked, but that all the pears were ripe at the same time.  Scott and I spent a late night cutting and canning for far better results than grocery store pears.

Lasagna gardening

In grad school I grew the most tasty, prolific, heirloom tomatoes in my rental house yard.  Of course, I thought this was due to some skill of mine.  When I married Scott and moved to our first home in the county on 5 acres of degraded farm ground, I was shocked that not only did my heirlooms shrivel up and die, but even the commercial hybrids refused to thrive.  With next to no organic matter in any bit of our yard, the plants had to weather rounds of flood and drought stress.  I grew a fine crop of weeds and cucumbers each year we lived there.

Karen and baby Katherine in the weedy tree garden

Though our new farm had deep topsoil, I'd been burned often enough that I was content to snuggle a few lettuce plants into our tree garden and call it good.  Still, the weeding was overwhelming.  I wanted to be less reliant on grocery store produce and commercial animal feed, but I needed a new way of doing things.  Last winter I started to research alternatives to the traditional tilled garden.

The idea I decided to try is called "Lasagna Gardening," based on a book by Patricia Lanza.  The upshot is that instead of tilling to remove weeds, you smother them with layers of wet newspaper and mulch.  As a soil scientist, I always had trouble with the idea of tilling, and as a wife I always had trouble my tiller, so I was ready and willing to replace this part of gardening.  I also am blessed with an abundance of multi-species manure that was perfect for the job.  I moved spoiled hay from the cow lot, and the contents of all my animal housing, onto an area of the yard 16 x 32 feet to a depth of about 12 inches.  I never once touched the tiller or any chemicals; this all happened on top of a thick stand of yard grass.

Plants are nestled down in the mulch where their roots can spread out or down through the newspaper to the topsoil below.  Plants below the newspaper can't push up through it, so any weeds that grow in the garden have shallow roots and pull out easily.  In 20 minutes I could pull every weed in the garden any time of year!

New, expanded Lasagna garden

Allowing for experimentation, the garden produced very well and I expanded it to 30 x 40 this fall.  Never again will you see soil exposed to the sun here.  I even moved 10 loader buckets of mulch into the old hog pen this winter.  When this composts down a little in the spring or summer, I intend to plant a feed crop of beets and oats for the livestock.  I have high hopes for an edible flower and berry garden in front of the house some day, too.  Lasagna gardens everywhere!

Biochar as fertilizer

We generate a wealth of ash and charcoal by heating our house with wood.  Up until now, we've just scattered the ashes in the yard as a way to get rid of them, but now that I'm more committed to gardening it's time to put them to use. 

Wood ash is a great source of potassium and other trace elements that can be lacking in a vegetable garden, but use it with caution!  The pH of ash is quite high; too much can burn plants.  Used wisely, it can treat unwanted acidity in the soil (a potential problem in my "Lasagna" method of gardening).  Aviod using it on blueberries, roses, rhododendrons, and other acid-loving plants.  I have yet to start testing the pH of my garden, but it was time to deal with the full ash can, so I sprinkled a bit of ash on areas where I plan to plant low-pH-favoring plants, and then enlisted Katherine and Scott in filtering out the biochar. 

Biochar (charcoal used as fertilizer) has all the benefits of ash, with less pH action, and a heap of slow-release carbon.  To separate it out, we passed about 15 gallons of ash through hardware cloth and ended up with about 3 gallons of biochar.  We have a few more months of wood stove weather left for me to determine how much ash I still need. 

Research using biochar on a larger scale in tropical soils is helping boost crop production and reduce deforestation.  Check out more about it here: www.biochar-international.org/biochar/soils

Christmas gardening

New strawberry plants in the lasagna garden

I ordered 50 strawberry plants to get in the ground this fall, thinking that they could get a little jump on their spring growth.  They arrived today, December 20th.  Last year at this time we were covered with a thick layer of ice, but strangely today it was warm enough to plant.  For all the garden planning and wishing that I do every winter, it was a pleasure to do something this time of year.  I'll let you know if the little guys survive until spring.