How Not to Plant a Garden

Spring is my, and many people’s, favorite time of year. Nothing makes me happier than an increase in temperature, breezes, flowers, and chirping birds. Whenever this time of year comes, I’m always itching to get out and plant something. We had a rough winter here in Mississippi and were repaid with a heavenly spring. Basically, we’ve had spring-like weather since late February/early March with few cold snaps.

I was able to get my vegetable garden in early, and with my over-the-top plan, I wanted to make sure I did everything possible to keep out that pesky grass! Please take note, that what seemed like brilliance to my husband and me was actually a disater in the making. Here’s what we did:

Garden Lessons from Old Folks — Newspaper Makes a Perfect Weed Barrier

One of my favorite ways to learn things, especially gardening tips, is from older people. Sure, sometimes older people can be resistant to change, or simply stuck in their ways, but sometimes these ways are good. Case and point: this older man who lives a few houses down from me. I think he’s in his late 70s/early 80s, not positive. I am positive about his gardening abilities though. He’s freakin’ awesome! He has the most beautiful rose gardens I’ve ever seen. They are the talk of the neighborhood. Literally–people actually talk about them.

Last spring, he and his sweet wife invited my husband and me and a few other neighbors over for a backyard barbeque, so I got to see more than his front- and side-yard gardens. In the back yard, I found my inspiration for life: beautiful arches of old-timey climbing roses, numerous individual gardens with perfect amoeba shapes, and a small vegetable garden with the blackest soil I’ve ever seen (actually, it might be a tie with my father-in-law’s, but still). It was gorgeous, and it didn’t have a single weed in it. Not a single one. I just had to ask him his secret. Want to know, too? Newspaper. That’s it, just newspaper.

You'll need a lot of paper, so start saving now.

He said he lays a thick layer of newspaper between the rows each year and then covers it with plenty of mulch (looked like a mixture of leaves, pine straw, and grass clippings). Then he just leaves it there all year and tills that in the next year and lays down a new layer of paper and mulch.

The plants were green and healthy looking, too. “And do you fertilize,” I asked. “No, just this,” he replied. Seeing the amazed look on my face, he was quick to remind me he’s lived in this house for over 40 years, so there are quite a few layers that have decomposed. He wanted to make sure I knew that creating this perfect dirt wasn’t going to happen in one season.

I promptly went home and started collecting newspaper. My husband had (and has again) a truly remarkable stack of old papers in his office at work. Truly remarkable. I had him bring it home, and we set out to covering our garden in newspaper. As you can imagine this is not an easy task. The pages fly all over the place, and unless you have enough mulch (which I didn’t last year), it will just rip and blow away in the first storm. Needless to say, I wasn’t so successful with newspaper in my big garden. And, arguably, it’s too big to cover in newspaper anyway. I ended up buying mulching paper, which I plan to discuss in an upcoming post.

I was, however, very successful using newspaper in my raised beds, which are about 8×8 feet each. I covered those suckers with a quarter-inch or so of newspaper and then mulched on top, and I had very few weeds sneak through. What’s better, when I planted garlic in one of the beds last November, I could see that the paper was breaking down and would soon become part of the soil. Yipee!

This year I plan to use newspaper in the beds again. My husband has been collecting it for me all year. If you have a small garden, or some raised beds, start collecting newspaper. Could you use plastic or landscape fabric? Well, sure, but isn’t that sort of a waste? Not to mention that neither of those options allows air and moisture through to the soil like paper does.

A few things to consider when using paper mulch:

• Don’t use the glossy inserts. You know why, I ‘m sure.
• Have plenty of other mulching material to cover the paper. Paper is very free-spirited and likes to fly away at whim.
• You’re recycling. Good for you!

 

Photo linked to source

Raking's Not So Bad

Three days after our big snow storm, temperatures soared to 65+ degrees and have statyed there for the past five or so days. It has been heavenly. Sipping drinks on the back deck, reading in the sunny back yard, and raking. Yep, raking. I’m not the biggest fan of raking. I treat it much like I treat laundry–wait until the last possible moment to do it and then complain the entire time it’s being done. This year I’m trying to have a more positive attitude about it though. I bought some new gloves (review forthcoming) and a new rake (which broke in half after a half-hour of use; then got another new rake), and I have used the time outside to gather lots of ideas about some neglected areas of my yard.

Most people rake in the fall. I know this. These people are smarter and more disciplined than I am. Most people also bag their leaves and let the city throw them in a landfill. I know this as well. These people, while smart for raking in the fall, are crazy. Crazy for letting all that goodness go to waste. Which leads me to the title and focus of today’s post: Raking’s really not that bad.

Reasons to like raking:

• Raking is exercise, and exercise is good.
• Raking can be therapeutic because it gives you time to think.
• Raking makes your yard look nice and clean.
• Raking neglected areas reveals landscaping elements and borders you didn’t know about (e.g., stone paths, old lumber used to define spaces, etc.).
• Raking provides free mulch, and lots of it.
• RAKING PROVIDES FREE MULCH, AND LOTS OF IT!

Mulch (noun) a material (such as decaying leaves, bark, or compost) spread around  or over a plant to enrich or insulate the soil. (Source, dictionary on my iBook G4)

Quiz time: What is the most important word in that definition? That’s right, “enrich.” Mulch enriches the soil. Don’t believe me? Go outside (right now) and rake around a shrub that has been there a few years. Once you reach the dirt, you will see the most beautiful black dirt. Where do you think that came from? Mulch. And if you’re smart, free mulch in the form of leaves.

Mulch is most often used to supress weeds and to make borders look pretty. These are great benefits, but the best reason to use mulch is to enrich your soil. Buying  $3-4 bags of mulch from the garden center can be quite a costly enriching exercise, but using last year’s fallen leaves and pine straw is absolutely free.

Do decaying leaves make as pretty a flower-bed mulch as pine bark or wood chips or pebbles? Well, no, which is why I don’t suggest you use your leaves for everything. For the pretty flower gardens or areas you want to look manicured, spring for the expensive stuff, but for mulching shrubbery, trees, or the vegetable garden, use the leaves. The vegetable garden is exactly where I plan to use my leaves this year. As noted in previous posts, I have a pretty big garden area, and buying landscaping mulch would just be silly for such a large space. Last year I used some mulching paper, which was great for part of the season, but I didn’t have enough real mulch to cover the paper (because I chopped the leaves up with a mower, or rather I asked my husband to). This year I will use all my leaves, and I have quite a lot. I expect to be able to cover most of the garden with a 2-3″ layer of leaves. Combined with the paper mulch underneath, I expect those nasty weeds and grass sprouts will be held at bay.

And true to Mother Nature’s nature (hardee har), those leaves won’t just supress the weeds. They will decay over time and help enrich my garden soil, making it just as black and healthy as the soil was where the leaves came from. If that doesn’t make Mother Nature a badass, then I don’t…well, it does.

I Killed a Frog

Spring doesn’t normally conjure up images of dead frogs, but, for me this year, it does.  We bought a house last summer, and the yard (I’m tempted to call it a garden after having finished Michael Pollan’s Second Nature) is beautiful but quite overgrown.  We’ve recently been working on the four raised beds/islands that will soon be our herb and cut-flower gardens.  They had a variety of bulbs, roses, and other plants in them, but, in order to use them as we wanted, we had to break them up and get out the weeds.  This meant a lot of work with the hoe (and the hoe-like tool that has tines).  The result:  I killed two frogs.  One I severely injured and sliced open his jaw.  The other, well, I just can’t say much other than I accidentally murdered him.  He ended up impaled on one of the tines of my hoe-like tool.  It was quite sad for me.  I don’t know how he ended up three to four inches below ground level (hibernation, perhaps?), but I definitely found him there and accidentally killed him.

Eyes closed, hands folded, I think he's religious.

You should click on the picture, to get the full effect–it isn’t gruesome, just looks like he is perched (in prayer?) on the tool.  The experience was like Braveheart (i.e., guts spilling out) but, instead of Mel Gibson yelling “freedom!,” this frog just occassionally opened his eyes if I squeezed too hard when trying to remove him from the tine.  All in all, it was really quite emotional for us both.

Lessons learned:

1.  Creatures live in dirt.

2.  Although they live in dirt, sometimes creatures still have to go when you’re working the dirt.

3.  Frogs are quite passive, even when their guts are spilling forth in death.