(DF) SALVAGING THE GARDEN

Back in early spring, I tilled up the garden added compost and tilled again.  It looked great!  I then planted potatoes, onions, carrots, beets, peas and green beans, all in their appropriate time.  Other wonderful veggies were to be planted very soon, as the early root crops began to grow. 

All was well and things were growing nicely, including weeds and grass (as always).  The rows had been tilled and weeded once, and almost ready for the next round, as new rows were laid off to be planted.  Sounds great and productive, doesn't it?  But not so fast!!!

This is about the time it started raining.  It rained, and rained, and rained yet more.  Soon, my lovely garden was standing in water, and remained so for some time.  During this time of standing in water, grass and weeds grew quite well.  By the time the soil was dry enough to walk across, grass was chest high and the green beans were ready to pick (actually, many had gone past their prime and rotted).

Between the rain, work, taking care of animals, trying to get Anna moved and dealing with some health issues (both mine and Anna's), there just wasn't time or energy to get the weeds out and start over.  All that was harvested was a small mess of peas and a couple of mediocre pickings of green beans.

!Now, fast forward to autumn !

A couple of weeks ago, with thoughts of removing the grass and weeds from the garden, I waded through the tangled mess a bit just to see if it would be better to cut it all down first or just wait until it died and burn it.  To my surprise, I found potato plants rising up among the tall grass,  Very nice potato plants, in fact.  With that in mind, I vowed to wait until I had a chance to dig a bit, hoping that there were actually potatoes on the other end of those plants.

Yesterday, 17 October, I took a little time to dig.  YES there are potatoes on the other end.  It is not a record crop of record size potatoes, but there are potatoes.  Now I have my work cut out for me.  It will be difficult working among the grass, or cutting the grass first (that decision is yet to be made), but it will certainly be worth the effort.
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Now there is the question of carrots and such.  They will be a bit harder to locate but I must look.   It would be so nice to have homegrown carrots and potatoes from our garden in the stew.  Wish me luck, and if your garden was also taken over, you might want to check before you till.

(DF) GARDEN DAY RAMBLINGS (part 2) ....... machine age farming, or not

While I was working in the garden over the weekend, and considering the "weeds" I talked about in part one of this post, my thoughts managed to wander a bit farther astray, to the consideration of how the garden got in such a mess in the first place. My father (if he were still alive) would not be happy with my considerations but, like it or not, things are what they are.

At this point, I will pause from my ramblings to give a little background, as this post actually begins many years ago. My father was the first "machine age farmer" in the family, buying a tractor when he was a young man and tractors were not common place. His father, on the other hand, was quite an excellent farmer but not at all a "machine age farmer". He worked with a team of draft horses for as long as he was able to farm. My grandparents always had a wonderful, rather large garden which was plowed using the team and cultivated using garden hoes, and sometimes, grandchildren. It was in that garden, by the way, that I learned to plow with horses, but that is a tale for another time.

Enough background for now, so it's back to the ramblings and the garden at hand. My place was purchased from my parents who acquired it about forty years ago and lived here for a few years. When they bought the property, the garden was already here, though it had not been worked enough years to be fully established (such things take time and work). However, it was a reasonably good garden and quickly became quite productive. There were a few small patches of Johnson grass scattered here and there which had to be kept in check, but nothing serious, just a minor annoyance. Then dad got a good deal on a garden tiller, which he was convinced would cut garden time in half and up production.

Early in the spring, I was set to the task of working up the garden with said garden tiller. The garden was normally plowed with a tractor, but this was supposed to be a better machine for the job. After about a half day of hard work, the garden was worked up, my hands and arms were numb from the vibration and my nerves were jangled from the incessant roar of the engine. This was, as I say, early in the spring and at planting time, we covered the surface with compost and I tilled it in. It looked great. The perfectly straight rows were laid off, a bit farther apart than usual, to accommodate the tiller, and the garden was planted. By the time the garden seeds had sprouted and grown large enough to be worked, the entire garden (no longer small patches) was showing a good stand of Johnson grass. Back to the garden with the tiller, and soon it all looked good again. This theme was repeated continually through the summer until the first hard freeze killed everything in the garden.

Springtime came around and this time, the garden looked more like a hay meadow. More tilling and something that resembled a garden was made, but with more effort than the previous year. Within five years, my mother had made a small kitchen garden near the back door which she refused to allow the tiller near.

Please don't misunderstand, I am not really against all farm machines under all circumstances. In some types of soil, garden tillers are quite effective, and depending on the physical condition of the gardener, they are sometimes necessary. Though I don't own a tiller, I do own an old, rusty tractor which works well and I use for many things here on the farm. In fact, the garden has been plowed with it several times in the interest of working the soil deep enough to make it possible to reclaim it as a garden (it had not been used as a garden for quite a few years because of the Johnson grass). Plowing with a tractor is preferable to using a tiller, in my opinion, though the plow will move things around a bit. One plant item in particular, the day lilies at the south end of the garden (which figure heavily into a future post), are no longer just at the south end, thanks to roots being carried by the plow. Now they are along the west side, at the north end and scattered here and there in the middle.

My preference for working the garden up with a shovel and hoe are not only considerations of weeds and such. There are always considerations of fuel and repair parts. There are even environmental considerations. There is also the fact that my gardening method of deeply dug beds, doesn't work well with machines. But for me, there is also the rather large and important consideration of peacefully working the soil, as it has been worked for thousands of years, with the sounds of nature and tools working the earth, and the smells of fresh, damp garden dirt. Besides, it lets my mind wander much better than working with machines.

For those who ARE "machine age farmers", there is nothing wrong with that. This IS the machine age, after all. I am just really grateful that there is still room in this fast paced machine world for those of us who choose a less mechanized way.

(DF) GARDEN DAY RAMBLINGS (part 1) ....... what to do about weeds

Ok, it is actually garden weekend ramblings, but you know what I mean. With my new job, my schedule has been 9am to 6pm, five days a week, which has been leaving me with just enough time before dark to take care of the goats and chickens. This leaves me the weekends to catch up on all the necessary everyday maintenance type stuff that there wasn't time for all week. However, middle of last week that changed. My daily shift became 6am to 3pm, which leaves me some time to get things done of the evening........ sure hope this change lasts. My days off vary week to week but who cares, it is time to work at home.

With my new schedule, I managed to get things caught up a bit in preparation for Sunday and Monday off. The Saturday evening storms threatened to change plans but there was still hope. Sure enough, there wasn't anything one could consider a storm here at dave's farm, just a moderate wind and some relatively gentle rain. At this point, I will shift focus a bit to storms nearby, but please bear with me.

As I was saying, there wasn't a storm here, the closest thing being low thunder in the distance. On the other hand, one of my co-workers who lives less than twenty miles away, had a tornado touch down. It destroyed his barn, commercial chicken house, lots of timber and landscape trees and took the roof off his house. I found out today that while I was being grateful that the storms had missed, he was beginning to sort through the devastation. Just shows how strange and erratic the weather can be and gives pause to reflect. Please remember my co-worker in your thoughts and prayers, he needs all the help he can get.

Now, back to my ramblings. Sunday started calm with intermittent light rain and a trip to town to pick up dog food (which I didn't think I was out of until time to feed the little dog, Poopei). The weather cleared while I was gone and I proceeded to dig up the garden, as soon as I got back, to play catch up on planting. I had already planted tomatoes and peppers a couple of days before (though there are still tomatoes and cabbage that aren't quite big enough to transplant) so now it was time to start on the main garden. Grass and weeds had pretty much taken over already, so I would have to take care of that.

When I am working at something, especially when it is quiet and in nature, I tend to let my mind wander a bit ........ alright, more than a bit, and left without proper supervision, it sometimes goes some unusual places. This time, it only turned to thoughts of weeds, and of course, questions. We all know what weeds are, and where to find them, and hopefully some earth friendly ways to deal with them. But, what are weeds REALLY? Obviously, they are things we don't want in our gardens, right? NOT SO FAST WITH THE WEED KILLER!!!!!!

Looking at the "weeds" in my garden, there were a variety of edible plants that I grew up with, some of which Anna mentioned in today's "Tightwad Tuesday" post. In fact there were at least nine of the dozen or more plants I grew up picking as wild greens. Some of these (and a few others growing among them in my garden) also have some medicinal properties. As Anna said, free food and medicine. Doesn't sound like weeds to me, in fact, I took time to harvest some of them before I got under way.

Now, as for the ones that don't count as food or medicine (at least not that I know of) there was the question of what best to do with them. Before I move forward with this, let me say that I DO NOT advocate the use of herbicides, especially in the garden. In my mind, it is like setting booby traps for home defense without knowing who or what will get killed in the process. They kill types of plants, not individual species and it has, so far, been impossible to convince me that they are safe for the environment. I must be careful with this subject so I don't get on my soap box and over react. Sorry! seems I already got on the soap box.

At any rate, as my thoughts wandered on this subject, it occurred to me that there is no real problem with weeds in the garden and that they actually belong there. The problem is that no body wants them actually GROWING in the garden. If they are not growing, this means they are dead and dead weeds make compost. Compost is a good thing in the garden and since different plants incorporate different nutrients from the soil, what better way to get rid of them than to dig them back into the garden.

Some grasses are not so easy (in my garden, it is Johnson grass). Johnson grass spreads from the roots as well as seed. The roots are segmented and each segment will grow an new plant. Anything that breaks up the roots will spread the grass and soon it can look more like a hay meadow. More tilling means more spreading and this is where many people reach for the poison, and continue with the roto-tiller. I will try not to say too much against garden machines in this post as it deserves a full post of its own (likely a second part of this post so stay tuned). Point being that there are other ways to deal with this nuisance. The best way I have found, is to work the ground with hand tools and pull out every root you find. Each new shoot that sticks its head up can be easily pulled or cut with a hoe (which is the equivalent of grazing, which this grass does not tolerate well). The blades themselves can be dug into the soil or used as mulch with no problem. Soon it is under control.

Bermuda grass is another story, as the grass itself will take root if in contact with moist soil, even after it looks dead. In other words, if you dig it into the soil, you have spread it, so the only way to remove it without poison, is to dig it up and remove it from the garden completely.

I know it sounds like I was doing more thinking than working, but in the midst of it all, on Sunday afternoon and Monday, I did get quite a few onions planted as well as some cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, green beans and carrots (Anna got a bit carried away buying onion sets and plants, but if they do well, we will have plenty of onions this winter).

Sorry about the lack of pictures, but if my camera will work (if the batteries are strong enough and I can remember to use it, that is) I will try to post a few with part 2, where I will be talking about machine age farming and such. Hope to see you there.