Mountain-Toes Gardening

This point in winter, just after the Solstice and during the general holiday season, always seems to me to be the most contemplative time during the year.  At least in terms of my life as a gardener.

Oh, yeah.  I’m still digesting the experience of last year, thinking about what I want to do in the upcoming year.  And how to improve garden results next year.  And how to deal with specific problems.

River, reflections, snow and ice in the Nature Park

At this point, all our outdoor planting areas are covered with about 30cm of snow.  It’s a little warm out today (meaning just above freezing), but the general trend is naturally toward deeper cold and deeper snow.  On Christmas day, before joining a local family in the early evening for supper, we took a walk in the Winlaw Nature Park, where we could see the ice creeping out from the snowy shore onto the surface of a placid stretch of Slocan River.

Looking at some pictures I shot on that walk, the snow (and implied cold) evoked thoughts about what’s going on in the soil beneath.  I found this page (by Norma Evans, Peterborough Examiner) on this particular subject and felt like sharing it.

Winter curtails our outdoor gardening activities, but it provides certain benefits, too.

Joys of the season to you.

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There is “gardening” in the literal sense of the word, and in the metaphoric.

In the literal sense, for me right now it consists of harvesting the last of the lettuce and kale from our sun-heated greenhouse.  There’s no supplementary heat in there, and considering that our nighttime temps have gone below -12, it amazes us that we’ve still had lettuce growing.

A small bowl of our winter lettuce

Besides that, I’ve got a multi-faceted research and dialogue going on about dealing with a couple of common Kootenay food-garden plant diseases, namely blight (of solanaceous plants) and clubroot (of cabbage-family plants).  For instance, I’m collecting info from on-the-ground ag and gardening people about blight-resistant potato varieties.  Many of the old standbys – and many of the pleasing and exotic varieties more recently cultivated in our region – were ravaged this past gardening season.

Prior to spring 2012 planting, I plan to publish the results of my research, in brief practical form, here in Mountain Toes and over in Gardening in the Kootenays.

The metaphoric sort of “gardening” that I do in the winter is proceeding, too, in these cooler months.  Gardening in this sense is “self cultivation.”

I’m writing some short stories, and have a number of them in second draft.  And I’ve been getting a bit of exercise doing the firewood splitting and snow shoveling our home place requires.

The fun aspect that I look forward to every year, XC-skiing in the open areas around and near the valley bottom, hasn’t been great, so far.  Several times, what snow has fallen has melted to slush.  I look forward to a build up of fresh snow on the base of the sketchy layer we now have.  Yeah, it’ll be nice to have some good snow.  And to have some sunny, blue-sky days, now and again, to go with it.

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My gardening involvements at present consist of managing and harvesting lettuce and other leafies from our sun-heated greenhouse.  On the mental-work side, there’s planning for next year’s planting, and also researching information about how Kootenay food gardeners can succeed in the face of challenges like solanaceous blights and clubroot!  (These pursuits are ongoing, and I’ll be blogging about them.)

But, as I said from the beginning, my blog is also about how a long-time rurally based Kootenay resident looks at the larger world.

So topic jump to:

OSE, open-source image

All of us humans have our relationships with technology.  In my life, prominent aspects of this include not only computer stuff but also rakes and rototillers, trowels and trucks, weedwhackers and welders.  (Oh yeah, X-C skis and bikes.)  Many of these techs enable a lot of building and maintaining  (e.g., carpentry, stone masonry, plumbing, and house/shop electrical work). And also enable exercise and fun.

My habitual sphere of interest is background to why I’m moved to share this page about the work of a guy, Marcin Jakubowski, whom I’m inspired by!  His work brings together food-raising, sustainability philosophy, engineering, physics, hands-on fabrication, communications, and business models.  There are three short & interesting vids on this page.  See what you think.

(This is Marcin’s ongoing, earlier-established site.)

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As everyone realizes, growing plants on soil means that the plants will draw out nutrients from that soil.  Some soils start out in fertile condition, offering a high level of essential nutrients – and some don’t.  But in any case over time, there will be a draw-down of nutrients – mainly nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, calcium, and sulphur – but “minor nutrients” like copper and boron, as well.

Photo: Joel Russ

Every year, we’ve been adding organic materials to our topsoil.  Given the fact that we’re not currently raising livestock on our place, we judiciously use the manure that we acquire, spreading it completely over our smaller “salad garden” and placing it into the rows in the large garden.  On both, we apply mulch (mainly straw), in broad coverage in some areas.  And in some parts, I’ve been planting fall rye to add organic matter.

To supply extra nutrient to the roots of plants, we sometimes use supplemental materials (like compost we make, or rotted manure) or diluted brews (like fish emulsion mixed in water) in the rows we plant.

I have to say we’ve become a little cautious about the fish emulsion, at least in the later part of the gardening season.  Friends of ours in Vallican were using it this past year and found that it attracted a bear or two in early summer.  And the intrusions occurred despite the fact that their place, like ours, is fenced to keep the deer out.  The bears became pretty troublesome.  And this fall we had one climbing over the fence to get to the ripening corn.  Not an attraction we want to enhance.

This fall I used an inexpensive NPK soil-test kit, bought locally, to test soil in our gardens for nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.  I tested the soil from spaces between rows, since I knew we tended to use extra amendment materials within the rows we’d planted in the spring.  Nitrogen turned out to be pretty low, and phosphorous – though it varied according to places from which each sample was taken – was pretty low, too.

For the phosphorous, I’ll spread phosphate rock, a commonly available soil supplement, on the gardens next spring.  It’s generally acknowledged that nitrogen is the essential plant nutrient most frequently deficient.  This page discusses some of the options available for organic supplementation of soils: feather meal, composted manure, alfalfa meal, and vermicastings.

At the moment, I lean toward the idea of using alfalfa meal, due to the fact that it provides other nutrients, including minor or micro nutrients, in addition to the nitrogen.

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We’ve harvested garlic, onions, pears, apples, squash, hot peppers, and a few other things in the last ten days.  I’m now getting a jump on some of the autumn work, since I will be away for some of the early part of the season.  We’ve got fall leafies growing in the greenhouse.  I put in next year’s garlic, planting about 330 cloves – which should turn out to be enough for our household and to give away or trade to friends.

Initial germination of fall rye

Fall rye has become my preferred cover crop, generally speaking.  You can easily find the seed for it locally.  Planting early, like I’ve done this year, I can get at least one cutting from it before the snow comes.  The cut grass will eventually rot into the soil surface.

I broadcast my rye about a week ago.  I put fifteen pounds of seed into about 1400 sq ft of garden space.  This was on portions of the garden that I’d harvested and cleaned-up, after which I’d rototilled and then raked the soil.  On days when it wasn’t raining, I gave the patch a good sprinkler watering.  The picture shows the preliminary germination.

In the spring, after the snow goes but a couple weeks before planting, I’ll give the rye another cutting.  Then I’ll till the ground, which will place the rye and its roots mostly under the surface.  The accumulated growth – having drawn nutrients from the air, and having processed minerals from the soil -  will decompose, adding organic matter and plant nutrients to the topsoil.  It’s a good contribution, though soil amending doesn’t end with a “green-manure” or cover crop.

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In a small way, I’ve resumed my informal experiments with volcanic-rock dust or powder as a soil amendment for plant starting.  I reported on some results with the powder in the spring (see my post of April 26).  In that case, I was starting several kinds of plants using a bagged potting soil we bought.  I used the soil (or “growing medium”) unamended, in sets of matched starter trays, except for those trays in which I’d added about 15% volcanic rock powder to the mixture.  All those seedlings were started under grow lights.

About a week ago, I again used starting trays (“six packs”) and matched the basic growing medium, the watering regime, and the lighting on the experimental and control trays.  However, I made up my own starter medium as follows: 50% sphagnum peat moss; 30% worm castings; 20% perlite – well stirred.  This, in itself, is a pretty rich mix because of the worm castings.  One of the trays contains this mixture as such.  The other has this mixture with about 12% volcanic rock powder stirred into it.  I made up only two trays, and identified each one to be able to interpret my results.

The tray on the left has the volcanic powder in it

With each of the six packs, I filled each of the cells as close to the same level as I could.  I planted each cell with two radish seeds from the same packet.  I kept the trays on a bench in our greenhouse.  Then I was careful to keep the watering and the light exposure the same.  Seed germination took about 48 hours, on average – and the germination rate was pretty much the same, comparing the two six packs.

The picture, taken eight days after planting the seeds, pretty much tells the story.  The seedlings with the volcanic powder in their growing medium are clearly doing better.  I’d estimate the difference in vitality and growth to be maybe 20%, at this early stage.

With my spring-time experiment, the difference seemed more marked – probably because the commercial growing medium was very basic and not high in nutrients (such as those the worm castings provide to the new mixture).  With the spring experiments, the seedlings growing in the medium that included the volcanic rock powder did twice as well, in my assessment, in terms of vitality and size.  However, I judged this difference not after eight days, but after a month or so.

Once again, I’m impressed with the benefits of this powder.  I sourced sample amounts from a Victoria-based company called Paramount Growth Holdings.  They do not have the rock powder on the market, as yet.  They state that their rock powder registers a high paramagnetic value.  I can’t define this for you, and can’t discuss the product from that standpoint.  But my own trials display the value of using the powder.  I’d buy it in big sacks if I could get them.

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Here’s a handy little garden tool that can be made in a home shop. I designed it as an alternative to the common three-fingered small garden claw.

Experienced gardeners know a number of tools and pieces of equipment can be valuable for dealing with garden weeds – examples being the rototiller and hoe for the broad-scale work. But a lot of the work of weeding gets down into small spaces right around the desired plants in your vegetable or decorative beds. The tool I made digs right in there!

The business end of the tool is made from 1/4″ mild-steel rod. I cut a piece about 8″ long, heated about half of it into the glowing-orange heat range, and used a piece of 2″ diameter steel pipe as a form for shaping it. Having clamped the section of pipe into my bench vise, I used a hammer to coax one end of the hot steel rod into a sort of question-mark shape (reheating the rod as necessary).

I used an oxy-acetylene torch for the heating, though you could use a blacksmithing forge for the purpose.

After making the basic shape, I heated the very end of the rod and hammered it to a taper, which causes a slight flaring at the tip end of the profile. So, once the taper was basically established, I did a bit of grinding (using a bench grinder, and a belt grinder) to remove any burrs and to give final shape to the tip.

When I was satisfied with the shape, my focus shifted to making a handle. I chose a piece of ash wood – a 5″ section of an old broken shovel handle. I shaped this into a comfortable handle using a coarse belt on my belt grinder. Once I was happy with the feel of the shaped handle, I drilled a 5/16″ hole about 2″ into the appropriate end, and cleaned it out well. I coated about an inch and a half of the shank-end of the shaped steel rod with a fairly thin layer of epoxy glue, and pushed it fully into the handle. Excess oozed out of the handle, so I cleaned that off. Then I let the glue set and cure for about 48 hours.

Once the bond is strong, common sense can be applied to any clean-up the finished tool needs. I rubbed some vegetable oil into the handle so that it would have a bit of resistance to the moisture that’s everpresent with both sweaty working hands and garden soils.

I wasn’t sure just how much use this tool would get. But I now find myself using it about three times as much as I use a standard garden claw or a trowel. A person who was helping us for a few days with weeding our gardens – and who had her choice among maybe a dozen tools – said this one-finger gadget wound up being usually her tool of choice. Actually, she said I should patent it… but clearly, the concept of this thing is way too simple for that. Make one yourself.

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We’re growing a variety of corn – Hooker’s Sweet Corn – that is able to form ears even in a year like this one, with its cool nights, lots of overcast and rain late into the gardening season, high humidity, and a minimum of truly hot days.  The ears of corn are forming now on stalks averaging four feet high or so.  They’re not quite ready to eat but will be before long.  Planted later, some of the corn in that block still has shorter stalks.  So the yield will probably span a period of time.  I’ve got a second block of corn, and it’s Sunny Vee – the short-season hybrid variety I used to depend on.  It may or may not make it this year.  It didn’t make it last year: put out ears, but none of them matured.

Photo: Joel Russ

The weather has been unusual for two years.  Last year, the issue was a lengthy cool spring, and mainly a lack of general warmth through the season.  This year we’ve had that lack of general warmth (we’ve had to heat our house sometimes in July!) plus all this extra humidity.  We and our neighbours are having to re-assess our veggie varieties of choice, because the old standby seeds are no longer necessarily the best.

The weather is treating some things okay.  We’ve had a stellar onion-family crop, and pulled our garlic a week ago.  No problems.  Our leeks and bulb onions are all doing great.  Peas have done nicely, as have cucumbers and radishes.  The carrots, after a first thinning, are coming along nicely.

Our strawberries and raspberries have borne lots of fruit, and the blueberry crop (which we’ve just started to harvest to a small extent in the last four days) looks like it will be at least moderately good.  We’ve harvested a fair amount of basil, which we raise for making pesto.  And though the basil might have liked more heat, the quality has been good and we’ve gotten several cuttings.  Squash is developing okay, none harvested yet.  Asparagus yielded nicely, and I planted some more roots toward future crops.  Artichokes have been maturing, and we’ve cut some for upcoming meals.

Then there’s the other side of things.  Some sort of wilt or blight has hit the solanaceous family in our neighbourhood (and elsewhere in the central Kootenay), and is affecting farmers and amateur gardeners alike.  Neighbours of mine who grow for the market were noticing ravaged tomato-plant leaves and stalks around the same time I had noticed my potato plants were wilting and dying down – early!  Results for us: a potato yield of maybe 25% of what I’d have expected, and dying tomato plants in the greenhouse.  (My farming neighbours are getting an analysis done on the leaves, so I hesitate to try to give a specific name to the disease.  But we figure it is probably airborne.)

Finally this year’s rampant mosquito swarms have diminished by 80% (my estimate).  Makes weeding easier now!  Overall, I’m happy to say the garden is yielding an abundance of healthy food.  And I can feel that way despite the fact that we love to cook with our own tomatoes and potatoes.

Well, in 2010 we had a garlic fungus that ruined a lot of our crop.  Nevertheless, in the fall I planted in a different spot, with fresh seed garlic, and had a wonderful crop this year.  That’s the philosophical outlook, I suppose. Live with the times, adapt, carry on.  “Climate change” and all that.

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Most of us have heard the expression “knee high by the first of July,” referring to a standard for gauging the progress of sweet corn here in Central Kootenay. In the past, usually having simply direct-seeded corn into our garden, we’ve rarely achieved quite that stature in our corn plants by July 1. Nevertheless, most years have offered us a pretty good crop of ears. This year, having started seedlings for about 20% of a sizable planting of corn, we’ve got that same percentage of our growing crop which exceeded the desired “knee high” by Canada Day.

Garlic - up to 37" high, right now

Having rounded a corner into typical summer heat, it’s now imperative to get the water into all our garden areas frequently. With about 5000 sq feet of garden area in veggies, another 1000 sq feet in decorative plants, and a greenhouse and numerous cultivated trees, you have to develop a sense, and even a plan, for watering. We water mainly in morning (up until about 11:30) and in the late afternoon and evening – a more efficient use of water, with less evaporation, and a reduced likelihood that water droplets on leaves in full sunshine will damage plant foliage.

We’ve been enjoying the production, too. We picked a whole lot of juicy, strong-flavoured strawberries, ate some fresh and froze the remainder. There will be another good picking soon. We’ve been eating cukes from our vines for a while now.  We’ve made our first cutting of basil, toward pesto. Jalapeno pepper fruits are showing up. We’ve got little green tomatoes forming. Of course, the radish supply has been bounteously – ridiculously – abundant.

Potato plants are bushy. Garlic tops are about a yard tall, and the onions seem to be straining to match that stature! Lots of blueberries forming, raspberries too.

There are the weeds to consider… Well, they’re not too bad in most of our gardens. But I’ll be honest: between the uncouth heat of afternoon, and this year’s teeming mosquitos hell-bent on pricking us in the cool of morning or evening, it’s hard to stay up with the task of weeding as well as we might wish. Sigh…

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The Slocan Valley Garden Tour has taken place for many years, and Lou and I have usually gone on it to enjoy seeing other people’s places. This year, organizers asked us if we’d put our place on the tour – and we decided to try it.

Sunday June 19 was the designated date for the Tour. Spring planting, complicated by a late season, was underway during the lead-up. We had also taken on the project of building a set of timber-and-gravel steps down ten feet or so from the yard at the south side of our house to the level of our pond.

Hence, we had a lot of work cut out for us to accomplish normal springtime planting chores plus complete that project, and groom the place so we wouldn’t embarrass ourselves. (In the middle of it all, a crisis developed, with some kind of wilt begining to attack our tomato plants in the greenhouse.)

We mulched our side garden, where most of our salad veggies are, with an under layer of cardboard and a thick top layer of straw. I planted out our corn seedlings in the big garden, and completed the corn rows by direct seeding the remainder of the corn. We planted out squash seedlings. I hilled the potato rows.

As the weeks to June 19 dwindled, we topped the raspberry canes, planted a few new trees and shrubs.  We marked out a parking area by cutting down bracken along the backroad, cut out a decrepit (and unredeemable) old cypress tree, netted willow leaves off of the pond surface… and weeded, weeded, weeded. Around the lavender, amongst the blueberries, between and among the rows of lettuce, down around the pond – everywhere.

Then there was mowing. Can’t call it a lawn, I don’t think. We’ve got a lot of what’s termed “coarse grasses” on our place. Expanses of quack grass, bunch grass, and wire grass. We keep it all relatively short, using a weed whacker, just to discourage mosquitos. So I did that during about a six-week period – finishing off in quite a few areas (a day or two before the Garden Tour) using a lawn mower. Our place is semi-wild, so the green areas under control shade off into bracken and stands of wildflowers and eventually to native trees around all the edges.

Every year, we do most everything that was involved in all this preparation, because soil building, planting, watering, mulching, weeding, trimming and the rest are just aspects of living on land. But to try to accomplish so much of it by June 19, that was different!

Well the morning of the 19th came and we felt a bit worn out, but ready. We were supposed to open our place to visits at 10:00 AM and it was only a couple minutes past that time when an old friend from north of New Denver arrived with a friend of hers, and another six or eight people arrived within 20 minutes or so. The trickle eventually became a flood, and people from Castlegar, Nelson, Proctor, Nakusp, Calgary, and Nanaimo identified themselves to us. We estimated that upwards of 250 people had come through our gates by time it all concluded at 4:00 that afternoon!

Among the visitors, of course, were some people we know as acquaintances and friends – but we often found our attention pulled in too many directions to have lengthy chats even with the people we knew.

But, it was a friendly episode. All said and done (and overall) I enjoyed it.

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