Organic gardening

Photographer: Charles WebberOrganization: California Academy of SciencesCollection: CalAcademy

Here it is, the great Plantago lanceolata, weed from my childhood. I looked it up and found out it's an astringent herb used medicinally. Whata ya know. It's also used to make a lariat for catching lizards, as demonstrated to us once by our lizard loving friends back home.

I just saw a great, weird movie called The Real Dirt on Farmer John. It's about this guy who inherits the family farm and does some very interesting things with it. He's a farmer with a sense of humor, a conscience and a respect for the way things were done in the past. He's downright weird too, which I love.


It's coming up on Farmer's Market and CSA season. When we lived in Aptos, we signed up for a CSA and picked up our box of vegies every week. They now have them up here. To find a CSA, market or farm in your area there's a website called localharvest.org . Locally, there is also www.ruralroots.org . The organic wave has finally swept Idaho.



Mom was an organic gardener, way back when. Which is why Plantago lanceolata was growing in the back yard. The disturbed ground was just a weed patch for a few years. She had the patience to let the field come back on its own. (I have no patience, and usually try to hurry nature along.) Eventually it became a soft, beautiful sea of green oats. It was mowed once a year and the trimmings were left on top to decompose. In the garden, Mom used mushroom compost to fertilize the vegies, (dug in by big bro), and paid us younger kids to hand pick snails off of the artichokes (Yuk!) We had lots of happy lady bugs, butterflies and bees.
So I've been into organic gardening my whole life. We lived in the mecca for it, right next door to the UCSC farm and garden. We went to their stand quite a bit and took the tour. They had excellent produce and I loved the way they farmed.

Here's what I've learned over the years about organic gardening:

1. Plant cover crops to improve the soil, especially legumes and clovers which fix nitrogen from the air onto their roots.
2. Cut down and compost or work in the cover crop while it's green and lush for the highest organic material. Or let die and decompose in place (less labor intensive.)
3. Don't till the soil. Soil has a structure which is important to its fertility. Tilling brings up weed seeds. If the soil is hard, loosen it with a fork. Sprinkle compost on lightly without working in. Plant seeds and transplants by making a small hole and disturbing the soil as little as possible.
4. Throw garden debris, ie. dead plant material, back onto the garden to decompose.
5. Don't compact the soil by walking in the planting beds. Mulch the pathways to prevent compacted soil.
6. Encourage natural predators to take care of pest problems.
7. Get out of the way and let nature take care of itself.

A couple of years ago I read an article in Harris' Farmer's Almanac (2005) called No-Till, No Toil Soil Building. It talks about the methods of gardeners Ruth Stout and Masanobu Fukuoka. Ruth advocated mulching with an eight inch layer of organic material like leaves and straw. Masanobu developed "do-nothing" farming in Japan. He says, "In order to make the work easier, not harder, I ask, how about not doing this or not doing that." When I read that, I knew this was the method for me! He uses nature to do most of the work. He interplants with cover crops, mulches with straw and lets ducks roam on the fields. And of course, he never plows.

I started mulching with straw a couple years ago. I put way too much straw on the first year and it kept the soil too cold. Also, I planted seeds under it which couldn't make it through. You're supposed to pull back the straw and put a board over seeds until they sprout. Duh. The second year all that straw was rototilled in (yes, a no no), and it made the soil nice and loose. The pathways were mulched. This worked better, but the soil didn't hold much moisture and I had to water a lot. This year I'm using the straw mulch in a thinner layer on the plants and a thick layer on the pathways, and the garden has not been tilled. The corn stalks from last year are laying on the paths. We'll see what happens...in late summer/early fall, I should plant winter cover crops to replenish the soil. In the meantime, I'll use the chicken's gift as fertilizer.