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BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden
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Subject: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 13 Mar 15 - 01:53 PM I've gotten permission from the powers in this housing complex to re-purpose a neglected above ground planter into a vegetable garden. The planter is made of concrete blocks, standing four blocks high, about 3 1/2 feet wide and 20 feet long. There is room for a good many veggies. This area of Alaska has a fairly mild climate, i.e. our wintertime temperatures *can* dip below zero but 20 degrees above and ranging to the mid-40s is far more common. In Summer, temperatures rarely go above 80 degrees (90 is the all-time record) but most of the summer hovers between 60 and 75 degrees. Summer is a short season. Our frost-free dates are considered to be May 24- September 15, so root vegetables do best in our climate. However, I have a greenhouse available for starter plants if need be. I plan to plant the old standbys like carrots, beans and peas, of course, (I will plant potatoes in the ground not far away) but what else would you suggest? I'm going to stay away from large-leafed plants, like kale, in order to grow a larger variety in the ones I choose. I'm hoping that the garden will be successful enough that the 60-some people who live in these units will become interested in staking out some of the space for themselves I have gardened most of my life so I'm familiar with various problems as well as perks but I'd love to hear stories. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 13 Mar 15 - 02:00 PM Salads such as rocket and crispy lettuces would do well. Anything that might suffer from a short season can be started indoors, French and runner beans for example. Garlic and parsley. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 13 Mar 15 - 02:11 PM Before you plant anything, tend to the health of the soil. Does it have stuff growing in it now? Does it drain well or are there wet spots where water stands? If you can work in a few soil amendments to boost the vigor of the soil's biological activity you'll do yourself and your plants a huge favor. If it has had commercial fertilizer or pesticide or herbicide sprays, that could compromise your efforts also - this is why the answer to the first question (does anything grow in it now?) is so important. Here are some organic gardening bed preparation basics. If you're going to the trouble to start this as a good garden, don't let anyone convince you to use MiracleGro or Scotts or other pestilential products. If it needs fertlizer, look for one of the granular organic ones or simply broadcast an animal feed called dry molasses (bits of chopped up straw that is coated with dried molasses). If you don't have a healthy community in micro-biological part of the garden, your plants will fail to thrive. Sugar stimulates that. There are other products I can name for you, though mail order may be the only way to find them, though I just queried the dirt doctor database of businesses that carry organic products in Alaska and came up with a few. A food grade of diatomaceous earth for general pest control and a bottle of Bt (for application to soil, not broadcast) for worms and caterpillars would be a good start in that product category. You might warm the soil for a little earlier planting by putting a layer of plastic over the top of the bed for a few days before you plant, or if you have enough of a lip (a few inches) around the bed you could even plant and leave clear plastic over the top for a couple of weeks to boost the early growth of the plants. You DON'T want to "solarize" it and kill everything - keeping plastic off the ground and some ventilation would be necessary. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 13 Mar 15 - 02:12 PM It's a short season but it has very long growing days. There are some remarkable gardens in Alaska, if you decide to google the subject. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: gnu Date: 13 Mar 15 - 05:02 PM Great thread! Good info! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: ChanteyLass Date: 13 Mar 15 - 07:31 PM I suggest radishes, mild or strong, your preference. They add color, zing, and crunch. And they grow quickly. When I was in Alaska I was amazed by the gardens. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 13 Mar 15 - 09:27 PM The really amazing Alaskan gardens grow farther up north- those 60 pound cabbages, for instance - in the Mat-Su Valley. Juneau doesn't have much top soil, frankly, but the Extension Office told me that where I live happens to be a good growing area. Thanks, Stilly. There is stuff growing in there but I have permission to take it out and transplant it to a corner on the ground. It is mostly 'ground cover' which will grow practically anywhere. I plan to cut a bank into the grassy mounded soil at the corner on the ground next to the fence and then make a small rock wall to enclose the stuff I'm transplanting. In the long ago past someone put lots of biggish rocks - 6-10 pounders- among the plants which I will dig up for the wall. Yes, I'm going to add loam and light stuff in the planter. There is good drainage. And you are right- I'm not a big believer in the commercial fertilizers either. Pretty good for flowers but I've never used them for veggies. I will use manure-enriched soil. And Steve S- yes, lettuces will be a good addition. Thanks. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Thompson Date: 14 Mar 15 - 03:19 AM I've visited an allotment in London where several of the plots were run by people from Afghanistan and Pakistan. They had a brilliant method of planting. On the soil they sowed salads, herbs, carrots and onions; above and around this was a rectangular framework of bamboo that served as a support for gourds. The gourds' leaves shaded the plants growing beneath, and the whole thing provided a lovely microclimate. (This was until the politics of the Allotment Committee got to work; last time I was there all the easterners and Africans had, strangely, disappeared, and all the plot-holders were now middle-class Londoners.) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 14 Mar 15 - 03:31 AM Thompson, that sounds nice- however, in Juneau Alaska our plants rarely need to be shaded from the sun. :) I'll combat slugs by submerging beer cups in various places. Tossing the contents is kind of gross but at least the slugs die happy. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Thompson Date: 14 Mar 15 - 09:14 AM A friend who had what we call here a raised bed, which sounds like what you're using (to us, all gardens are above ground… ;) got rid of slugs by a wonderful and simple procedure. She first made sure that there were no slugs or eggs in the rich earth in the raised bed. Then she put a two-inch strip of copper tape around the edge of the raised bed at the top. Two inches, she told me, was wide enough that the slugs couldn't arch themselves and hop over. Apparently slugs get horrible shocks from the copper tape because of the mucous stuff that they slide along on. She may also have had copper where the sleepers supporting the beds joined at the corners, I think. Every time she got new manure she would police it stringently to make sure no slug eggs had been smuggled in. She had huge, delicious lettuces growing enticingly there, with circles of slugs hanging around slavering and brandishing their little clenched fists in fury outside. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 14 Mar 15 - 10:15 AM You could grow summer cabbages which don't take up too much space and which grow fast and make nice hearts. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Thompson Date: 14 Mar 15 - 11:52 AM What would your part of Alaska be in terms of US 'growing zones'? I get the impression that parts are quite like Ireland (though without our coast-warming Continental Drift) and others more like Iceland - warm and toasty with 24-hour light in summer, dark and dreary but beautiful in winter? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 14 Mar 15 - 12:39 PM Our hardiness zone is somewhere between 5 and 6, I gather. We are only about a thousand miles farther north than Seattle, Washington, a mild climate, and about 600 miles farther south from Fairbanks, Alaska, with notoriously extreme weather. Alaska is large (According to Wiki: the E-W extension is 2,261 mi (3,639 km); the maximum N-S extension is 1,420 mi (2,285 km) and Juneau is in the panhandle. This low in Alaska we don't have 24 hour sunshine (or darkness); our longest day gives us about 6 hours of sunlight. (Note that I didn't say 'sunSHINE. :) Our weather is typically cloudy/wet and cool.) I've had a couple of tourists assure me that our climate here in Juneau is not all that different from that of London. I like it- our cheeks are always cool, if not crisp. :) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: MMario Date: 14 Mar 15 - 01:06 PM If you like salads; then planting some of the mixed colour kales and chards to be harvested in the baby stages wouldn't be amiss; there are also varieties of peas that are grown for the greens rather then the seeds. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 14 Mar 15 - 02:22 PM The product called "Sluggo" is organic and does an excellent job of getting rid of slugs and snails. The "Sluggo Plus" has spinosad that will take out pill bugs and a few other pests. I use those every year to keep the snails from clobbering tender plants. Much easier, I think, than copper tape. Copper does come into play in other contexts in the garden, but usually as an ingredient, not as an actual metal tape. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Thompson Date: 14 Mar 15 - 02:29 PM I like the idea of Sluggo, but wouldn't use it myself, as I have a pond and (if the foxes haven't got them all this year) frogs, and I don't know but the frogs might be killed by it. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: John P Date: 14 Mar 15 - 02:31 PM The last time I had some raised-bed gardens I extended the growing season by building a tent over them. I just put a row of pvc pipe pieces in half circles by sticking the ends in the dirt; the sides of the bed anchored them. Then I laid a plastic drop cloth over them and clipped the plastic to the pipes. It took all of 15 minutes to set up. It stayed very warm inside, even though the ends were only nominally closed. I had lettuce and spinach growing all winter here in Seattle. I doubt you'll get things growing in the middle of your winter in Alaska, but you could probably add a couple months. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 15 Mar 15 - 11:33 AM Slugs are a menace here. Mechanical barriers don't work and slug pubs hardly make a dent in the population. I use ferric phosphate-based pellets which are organic-approved, affect slugs only and which work a treat. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 15 Mar 15 - 01:19 PM The other night I faced the fact that my plan is a little over-ambitious; it not a good idea to do all the preparatory digging and rock hauling myself. My back landed me in the hospital once and has 'gone out' a number of times over the years. Don't want to encourage that event. I've checked and there are several youth groups in town who do 'community service'. I'll see if I can get one of them committed to it. I can do the actual gardening. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Thompson Date: 16 Mar 15 - 03:00 AM Sounds like a plan. A raised bed will be better for the back, once it's prepared. Of course, there doesn't have to be any actual digging, if you use the no-dig method. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,Jon Date: 16 Mar 15 - 08:05 AM You don't seem all that far off what I think of as our UK summer growing season. People do vary but our own sort of "guaranteed frost free" start is about May 1st. Perhaps you have a more intense sort of growing seaon from there? Off course at home, we may start things off earlier than that for outdoor planting. Steve mentioned beans. For better or worse, Pip likes to start these off in old centres of toilet rolls. The runners and climbing French bean (we grow cobra) get started in the (unheated) greenhouse or cold frame before getting planted out. I wonder if asparagus would be possible? If you can, the downside would be that you'd be tying up some of your limited space for something that only has a short harvesting season. The upside is that your own asparargus spears should taste like something special. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,leeneia Date: 16 Mar 15 - 12:10 PM Hold on a minute. Everybody's all excited about growing a whole lot of stuff and using a whole lot of products, but let's think about this. First, does this concrete bed have good drainage? Or is it going to turn into a swimming pool which drowns your plants? Check this out. The bed is neglected. It may have thousands of weed seeds in it. It is amazing the way weeds can find and colonize neglected soil. I have raised beds that aren't even neglected, but I will soon be sprinkling the pre-emergent herbicide (gasp)to get the weeds that have found their way in. I have been gardening since 1977, and I have learned that as you get older, it's a drag to have too many kinds of things. Grow too many kinds of things, and every time you turn around, there's a new chore or a new problem. By August you feel overwhelmed. I suggest you talk to people who garden successfully in your neighborhood. (Does your city have Master Gardeners?) Start with tried-and-true crops, maybe three or four kinds. Consider critters, too. Do you have to cope with deer, rabbits, squirrels, grizzly bears? :) Local knowledge is good. Finally, put in a few flowers to gladden the heart. Lilies are good. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 16 Mar 15 - 12:57 PM We've already discussed those things, leeneia. :) The no-till method has drawbacks. The soil is better if it is turned over, and if it seems too hard to work in at the beginning of the garden preparation there are ways to increase the friability (breaking it into small pieces). Here is a post from an organic gardening site I moderate - this guy posts a lot of lawn advice but it also applies to getting this disused bed ready for gardening. The question was originally about aerating the soil in preparation for planting a lawn: I'm going to suggest you do not go to the trouble of aerating. Instead, use shampoo to soften your soil. Healthy soil is like a sponge. When it is dry it is very hard. When the first drop of moisture hits, it does not soak right in. It takes a few seconds before it soaks in. Once it soaks in, the soil becomes very soft. Shampoo can help create this process. I think hydrogen peroxide also works this way, but the shampoo is cheaper to apply. This tip had to do with soil where grass was growing, but the same preparation principle applies with the garden - once you've softened the soil, then if you can find it add lava and and mix in, to help it hold water, or even sprinkle in some decomposed granite for the trace minerals. Home Depot sells bags of generic top soil, humate, playground sand, decomposed granite, any of these you can scatter over the top and mix in. You're not paving the bed with any of these amendments, you're building up the soil. I would suggest that you designate a part of the bed for compost and drop all of your weeds on that spot. Water it along with the rest of the bed and turn it over regularly. Next year you can spread that out in the garden. It is no longer a good idea to use bales of coastal hay in the garden - that is a form of Bermuda grass, and like a lot of hay, is grown with herbicides to kill off clover and other legumes. These are harmful to your garden crop. Here is an article. If you have alfalfa hay with a mix of other weeds in the bale, it is more likely to be okay. Livestock growers have to be careful of the herbicide in the hay also. You can use layers of newspaper over the existing weeds if you want a "lasagna" effect, but that will take a lot of newsprint, and again, is a technique better used when you have an idea about what kind of soil and characteristics you're working with first. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 16 Mar 15 - 01:19 PM Wow. Lots of good information and things to think about. Thanks for reminding me of the No-Till method, Thompson- a friend of mine years ago did that with his bed of potatoes. When he needed a potato or two, he'd go in his back yard and lift up the end of the straw cover. Cool. Speaking of cool, compost here in Juneau is not as successful as it is in warmer climates. It *does* work but the heat generates slowly and things don't break down as well as I've seen in the past and in other places. In Juneau (a long, narrow, linear town that hugs the coastline of the mainland), we have ONE farm, a nine-acre plot of swampy land where they have a number of animals like horses, chickens and turkeys, geese and ducks. They also have a marketing end; I'll buy my straw there. I'll probably get most of the soil/fertilizer at Home Depot. I'm looking forward to loosening up the bed and working in some good soil. First I have to remove the things growing in there- some of them I want to save, like columbine and bleeding heart but most of it is 'trash talk'. At the moment most of the soil is still frozen; we need a couple of weeks of reliably 40+ temperatures. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 16 Mar 15 - 06:58 PM Do not put shampoo on your garden. Shampoo contains industrial degreasers, unwanted salts, bleaches, thickeners, perfumes, colorants and preservatives. The cheaper the shampoo, the nastier the ingredients. If you want to use the no-dig method, you really need to start, paradoxically, by digging your soil over, just the once. Following that, you need to apply far more organic matter to the top than you would were you digging it in. You need to add layer on layer, year on year. It can be fantastic, but only if you have a huge supply of good organic matter. A really good mix would be old straw (from a good, chemical-free source) mixed with liberal amounts of horse manure, stacked up for a month to rot down first. Absolutely no sawdust or wood shavings from the horse bedding. Newspaper is next to useless, and newsprint contains noxious chemicals. It's OK for keeping the frost off in emergencies, but that's it. A good thing to do is to add THIN layers of grass clippings regularly through the summer. When weeds grow, pull them out and leave them on top to wither away on fine days to add their goodness back to the soil. If you can't get access to huge amounts of organic matter, no-dig isn't really for you. You can mess about with plastic sheeting and old carpet, but just think how horrible your veg plot will look. If your garden doesn't look very nice, then why would you bother? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 16 Mar 15 - 08:01 PM Shampoo is like other soaps - it is used to kill some pests but it won't harm the garden. We're not talking about pouring an industrial barrel onto the garden, we're talking about 3T per gallon of water spread over many square feet. Enough to help loosen the soil. Newsprint over here has changed a great deal, the ink is soy based, and I've heard no complaints about putting this in the garden from the organic folks. Perhaps your ink is different, or the change was so gradual you didn't notice? Carpet in the garden is always hideous, because most of the carpet people use is nasty stuff. Solarizing the bed with plastic is a temporary thing and the plastic shouldn't be left on the ground once the weeds below are dead. Vegetable gardening isn't a pretty activity necessarily, except in the beginning when plants are still small and the weeds are still absent. Over the course of the summer my garden becomes a jungle - but it is a jungle the neighbors don't object to (though it is in the front yard) because I give my neighbors vegetables. You may not want to plant as many things in a raised planter as I put in my garden, but I think you'll find if people can participate and enjoy the produce, they're not going to be too worried if the veggies grow out of bounds by the end of the season. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 16 Mar 15 - 08:46 PM If you need to condition your soil, and you'd do that only if you couldn't get your hands on enough bulky organic matter, then you could use seaweed meal or pelleted chicken manure. I can't think that putting industrial chemicals found in shampoo would do anything other than harm. If your soil is very clayey, you could use gypsum, which helps to aggregate the clay particles together. I've been organic gardening for forty years or more, and I've found that there is no soil problem can't be cured by the addition of as much bulky manure as you can lay your hands on. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 16 Mar 15 - 08:56 PM Steve, I'll see your gardening and raise you the research that has gone on via The Dirt Doctor and the Texas Organic Research Center. And yes, as you might guess, I'm a "mod" at the Dirt Doctor site. They're much better behaved, but there's a lot more spam. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 16 Mar 15 - 09:20 PM ? |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 16 Mar 15 - 10:59 PM You don't play poker? I was offering up organic gardening credentials. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 17 Mar 15 - 07:26 AM Putting shampoo on your garden wouldn't go down as organic this end. The amount you put on is hardly the point. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,leeneia Date: 17 Mar 15 - 11:07 AM Come to think of it, Ebbie, if the concrete walls are 4 blocks high, you probably don't have to worry about rabbits. My raised beds are only 12 inches high. I envy you those nice high beds. Is your tetanus up to date? That's important. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 17 Mar 15 - 01:52 PM We'll have to agree to disagree on that, Steve. I contend that it is perfectly acceptable. Orange oil/d-limonene (used in cleaning) is used as a pesticide (mixed in water and compost tea) and in herbicidal uses (mixed with 10% pickling vinegar). Murphy's Oil Soap was one of the originals used as a safe soap in gardening, and it's good to mix a little in water and spray on aphids, mites, etc. Quite often organic gardeners use a small squirt of dish detergent as a surfactant in the mix in the sprayer for foliar feeding of plants. There are lots of commercial versions of organic soap products. The minute amounts of color or fragrance in shampoo are not a problem, and it is probably because of those very ingredients in the shampoo that my lawn expert comrade at the Dirt Doctor site recommended it. SRS |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: olddude Date: 17 Mar 15 - 02:54 PM Ebbie plant some weed, it's legal there and the best pain med there is |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 17 Mar 15 - 07:19 PM ;-) |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,leeneia Date: 18 Mar 15 - 10:26 AM Hi, Ebbie. check this out: alaska extension - gardening Also - please don't put manure in your raised bed. Manure spreads disease and parasites. Farmers spread manure on their fields to get rid of it, and sun, wind, and soil bacteria usually take care of its unhealthful effects. But don't put it in a small bed in an urban area where children are going to handle it, explore it, and make mudpies. Yes, today's children still make mudpies. I saw some not too long ago, and they were as cute as could be. If the bed is growing weeds and feral columbines, its soil is probably pretty good right now. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,sciencegeek Date: 18 Mar 15 - 11:34 AM Manure spreads disease and parasites. ???!!!??? then obviously everyone that works with livestock should at death's door... because we don't use haz mat suits and manure is just another fact of life with critters. Below are links to guidelines for using manure responsibly. http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/manure http://umaine.edu/publications/2510e/ composted manure preserves the most nutrients and is a great soil amendment. when living in a more developed neighborhood, I put the stable waste (manure, bedding, leaves, wasted hay) into a 12 inch or deeper raised bed and covered with garden soil and old compost - then planted fruit bearing vegetables or leeks... it kept down odors and by the end of six months the entire bed was ready to be turned over and planted with root crops if needed. and I don't know a single farmer who spreads manure on their fields to "get rid of it"... other than to take it from where it is not needed to where it does the most good. we seem to have become too removed from the land and lost what used to be common knowledge. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: maeve Date: 18 Mar 15 - 11:45 AM Thank you, sciencegeek. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,sciencegeek Date: 18 Mar 15 - 12:05 PM you're welcome... I have a reflex reaction to blanket statements in general and when they are misinformed, the geek in me can not be restrained. there is so much good information out there, and just a few clicks away in a google search, there is no good reason to cling to bad info. in all the years I've spent with critters and gotten plenty of "dust" blown into my face there has never been any danger of cross species infection... the rest is just common sense... or should I say "uncommon" sense? I'll be 64 next week, so I think I haven't been doing things too badly. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 18 Mar 15 - 12:18 PM If people had never used manure, there would be no agriculture. Stack up your manure mixed with good quality straw for a month or two to rot down. Supplement it with your own compost, leaf mould, whatever organic matter you can get your hands on. Seaweed is brilliant, as is spent mushroom compost (watch out if your soil is already a bit high on the pH side, though). I've used rabbit manure from my pet rabbit runs to good effect (superb compost activator). My favourite is horse manure, but I'm not so keen if the horses were bedded on sawdust or wood chips. As for the kids, they are either helping you to garden or they're keeping off the veg plot! I had an allotment for years on a site with hundreds of other allotmenteers. We had masses of manure delivered by the trailer load all the time, and we were the healthiest people in town! |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: olddude Date: 18 Mar 15 - 12:27 PM Manure is the only thing I ever use |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,sciencegeek Date: 18 Mar 15 - 01:01 PM Steve, any particular reason why you don't care for shavings or chips? I find that its slower breakdown helps keep my tilth OK in the heavy soils we have... plenty of nitrogen with the manure & urine, so no shortage there for the crops. I use wood shavings & chips in the pathways that is then put into the beds later on. waste not want not :) my favorite way to "compost" is to put everything in the pen with the pigs... theirs too... then move the pen and add a thick layer of shavings mixed with leaves/old hay & plant potatoes... keep adding mulch as the plants grow. rotation at its finest lol seaweed is good for adding micro nutrients |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Ebbie Date: 18 Mar 15 - 01:14 PM We do have access to seaweed- I'll see if I can chop some up. "...you probably don't have to worry about rabbits." I've never seen a rabbit around here or in the forest above us. I am a little concerned about bears. However, we have the OK from various places so I will assume that's been figured in. Juneau, Alaska, is a special kind of place. It has definite limitations but it also has tremendous pluses. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 18 Mar 15 - 01:20 PM Too many shavings means too high a carbon to nitrogen ratio. I've got to the end of the season and still found shavings in the soil. The shavings rob the soil of nitrogen until they're rotted. I've had this happen enough times to know that it isn't just theory! If I had manure with a lot of shavings I'd stack it for several months to rot down. Fresh strawy horse manure can be ready in a few weeks if the weather isn't too cold. All good, but needing different treatment! It's the same with leaves - they need stacking for a year or more as they're low in nitrogen but high in carbon. A very good thing to do with high-carbon organic matter is to mix it with fresh grass clippings. The nitrogen in the clippings gets the bacteria going nicely so you don't have to wait forever for the fungi to do their job. I do this with my leaf mould and it's ready in six months instead of years. Bob Flowerdew calls it accelerated leaf mould. It's brilliant stuff for the raspberries and spuds as it keeps the pH down and the mulch keeps the weeds at bay. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Steve Shaw Date: 18 Mar 15 - 01:29 PM The seaweed can go straight on if you're growing brassicas or asparagus, which have seaside origins, otherwise let it get rained on in the stack (or hose it down) before use. It can go on fresh. Some of the cauliflower growers in Cornwall used fresh seaweed every year and got superb crops, but the salt saw off every single earthworm, not exactly what you want. Even good agriculture can have unintended consequences! Unfortunately, the seaweed round here is full of plastic debris and bits of twine, which you end up having to pick out of your garden for years to come. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,sciencegeek Date: 18 Mar 15 - 01:57 PM I must have an embarassment of riches in nitrogen then... lol ... that happens with a large home source of manure. It's the heavy soil that stays cold and damp that hampers me... shaving really help there. One year I hauled stable waste - shavings & manure- for an entire summer to my folk's house which was on almost pure sand... if I left a 2 by 4 laying around, it would have sprouted... the best garden my folks ever had. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: Stilly River Sage Date: 18 Mar 15 - 02:23 PM sciencegeek, thanks for posting about manure. The only droppings that can safely be used in the garden directly, without composting, is from rabbits. Everything else needs to compost. Also, it is an old wives' tale about not adding the cat or dog droppings to the compost. It's all just poop. There needs to be a lot of plant material in the compost in with it to break things down properly, and in my yard I also give it a long time, the compost I'm using in any given year is from a pile I constructed two to three years earlier. There is no good science behind the warning that you shouldn't add pet droppings to compost, it's simply a cultural bias (folkway). I have a small electric chipper that I use for branches trimmed around my very large yard. Those chips are used to mulch around plants in my garden, and they break down very quickly. I buy bagged baldcypress chips that I put down on paths in the garden to slow the weed growth. After a couple of years the path chips are broken down and every year the beds and paths shift a little (I bevel the edges of raised beds but I don't have any kind of firm planks to edge them, making it easier to reshape or reorient beds as I decide what to plant where. Have any of you encountered those "rules of thumb" some places pronounce - don't plant tomatoes where you planted eggplants last year, etc? I've never found those to be true. I do practice companion planting, in particular making sure there are plenty of flowers in the vegetable garden in order to attract more pollinators. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: GUEST,sciencegeek Date: 18 Mar 15 - 02:46 PM even when reading the guidelines, they insert the cover your butt "may", not "will" or "does"... life in a world ruled by lawyers. once it's gone through an earthworm or two, I'm not longer overly concerned. as for "rule of thumb", the geek once spent a frustrating summer trying to corrolate the "testimonials" in my mom's old Organic Gardening magazines into something coherent .... aaaaccckkkk!!!! no basic info on growing zone or climate or soils and one article would directly contradict another in a later issue. And don't get me started on the term "organic"... LOL general guidelines tempered with facts and reason suit me fine... and I'll still experiment. |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: olddude Date: 18 Mar 15 - 04:54 PM Weed ebbie weed at least the bears will smile alot and go off looking for twinkies |
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Subject: RE: BS: Growing an Above-Ground Garden From: maeve Date: 18 Mar 15 - 05:19 PM "The only droppings that can safely be used in the garden directly, without composting, is from rabbits." I would add to that: goat, llama, and alpaca...pellet form manure tends to be more thoroughly digested which also means fewer weed seeds are likely to be present than in horse or cow manure. In old time hot beds, fresh cow manure is dumped into a dug pit, covered with good soil and finished compost, and heat-loving plants are then planted. It's like an underground compost heap, and the underground heat generated can bring on crops in a greenhouse or in the garden without the dangers associated with fresh manure applied directly on and around plants. Everything depends on where the manure came from, what those animals are fed and how they are cared for, and how it's handled in your garden. |
