Welcome to the TBR Garden Thread for the week of July 17th, 2016! This is the thread for all things gardening....It has continued to be a busy time in the garden with abundant rain, so busy that the Sunday's I'd spend doing the garden thread have been giving way to long days in the garden and crashing into bed soon after. We are starting to come to the end of harvesting the spring planted stuff like peas, carrots, beets, cabbage and broccoli and moving into the main summer stuff like corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers, squash, cukes, and melons. If the rain keeps consisten like it has, it will be a bumper crop.
Variety of the week is Lemon Summer Squash. I love squashes for summer Italian cooking with along with tomatoes, fresh basil, home grown garlic, and pasta. Lemon is the smoothest, mildest, best tasting squash bar none. Have grown this one for years and can't wait till it starts producing so I can get to cooking with it.
You can find Lemon Squash seed at Baker Creek and Fedco.
This week we'll explore garden tools for working the soil. We have a large garden, approaching a quarter acre, which makes things like raised bed gardening that is so popular in the<a href-"http://www.mysquarefootgarden.net/">Square Foot Gardening[/url] impractical because of the cost of the materials and such.
So as a result what I set out to do is to accomplish the goal of deep fertile soil of the square foot method by a different route. Instead of going up with raised beds, we chose to go down. Much of this was inspired by
Eliot Coleman and his approach. Ultimately it evolved into something I called the Modified Square Foot technique.
The modified square foot system keeps the same ideas as the square foot system, but just adapts them to a large garden. The ideal layout for us ultimately consisted of 6 rotating plots that are 24' X 48' in size, with a 7th stationary plot that consists of herbs and plants we grow to save seeds. You might notice first of all the dimensions are numbers that are easily divided, both 24 and 48 are divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24, with 48 also being divisible by 16. Those numbers make it easy to divide into halves, quarters, eigths, thirds, and other useful fractions. This helps with planting in proportions in line with the square foot concept.
We generally go with 1 ft. wide 'beds' with 2 ft. of path between. Each of these 'beds' can be planted up to 3 rows, though generally only 2 are planted. Sometimes these are planted in a block. For some things like tomatoes beds are 2 ft. wide, vines like cukes and squash 3 ft. to accomodate for fencing.
We keep the same layout for the garden, and simply rotate plots every year by one. For the stationary herb/seed saving plot, we also rotate by row and even within the row to keep things from growing in the same place every year. I've found this to be the most flexible system for us as the garden evolves to get to the goal of maximum food production. Attached is our garden plan that give the layout as it was planted. The garden is designed to separate heavy feeding crops from each other with either light feeding crops, implementing cover cropping or growing legumes prior to corn for example to put nitrogen back into the soil.
The other aspect of this is tools. Though we have a garden tractor with a large tiller that we use in the spring and fall, much of what we do is with hand tools. However, we have went well beyond the simple hoe, rake, shovel rotation common with most gardeners, and have expanded into tools that help keep the soil and garden in great shape, but cut down on the work substantially. I will list some of these tools and how we use them.
The core tool we use is the wheel hoe. Ours comes from
Valley Oak Tools out of California. It is the best made wheel hoe IMO on the market. The full
package will set you back some good coin, about $600, but it is more than worth it. We've had one for about 5 years and it has made gardening fun again because it cuts down so much work for us on the weeding, hilling, cultivating, and transplantin. Some pics of the unit and attachments:
The next tool we use is the broad fork. We got ours years ago from Johnny's Seeds which was designed by Eliot Coleman, it has been invaluable in helping to create a deep, loose soil without hardpan that can limit root growth while allowing nutruents to go to a lower level.
Some supplemental tools we use to help bust up soil after going down a row with a broad fork are the 3 tooth and claw cultivator. These are particularly excellent for preparing soil for root crops such as potatoes, carrots, and parsnips.
The main thing we use these for though is keeping a well maintained and fertile garden bed that allows for strong root growth and nutrient absorbtion, just like the raised beds of the square foot method, but in reverse.
Our main methods of improving fertility are via compost, cover cropping, manure, and the occasional use of natural fertilizer amendments like blood meal, egg shells, lime, and green sand. We mostly manure in the fall for winter break down, but we cover crop all year, sometimes whole plots, or partial areas, using things like mustard, oil seed radish, clover, alfalfa, buckwheat, canola, etc. Often times we'll plant bee friendly cover crops so they can add to the honey stocks for winter.
For weeding, we like to use stirrup and scuffle hoes. Though the wheel hoe has a scuffle hoe attachment, we do have some hand ones that we use from time to time. We also like scuffle hoes, which push along the top of the soil and are great for precision weeding. I'm planning to expand my inventory with smaller widths than what we have now, and hand tools as well.
I'm also big on Warren and Swan Neck hoes for making rows for planting, both make nice rows for big and small seeds.
We also have many types of hand tools, and there are many other tools I'm interested in trying, including colinear hoes, bed prep rakes, pipe transplanters and others. There are an unbelievable amount of soil prepping, weeding, and planting/transplanting tools out there today that can greatly reduce the work of gardening and make your time more productive, while saving your back. Don't be afraid to explore and build your inventory.
[attachment deleted by admin]