Garden Experiments

I’m about to get cracking on my second season in the garden. There’s a mix of excitement, anxiety, and utter impatience that my favorite farming mentor once described as “fear of farming.”

Ernie is mowing and tilling my field over the weekend, so there’s nothing I can do for another few days. But as soon as the ground’s ready for planting, there will be SO MUCH to do: first a frenzy of setting up irrigation, translating my graph paper notes and maps into an actual garden plan, and lots of transplanting and seed sowing. Then there will be six months of daily (well, nearly daily) watering, weeding, harvesting, and attempts to keep up with succession planting. How can I not get nervous thinking about it?

At least this year I have a season behind me, and some solid data to draw from. There is still so much I have to learn, but it’s amazing to think back to all that I didn’t know when I started in my garden last year. (A week or so after I planted my first crop of beets — which I spent HOURS direct-seeding — I rejoiced at the bed full of happy little cotyledons springing up. It took me another couple weeks to realize that they were all weeds.) There were a few areas where I had big problems, so this year I’m trying out some new plans. Lots of them.

Tomatoes

Except for the popcorn (ugh), tomatoes were my biggest source of frustration in the garden last year. The harvest was very late, and almost all of the fruit were unusable because of worms, blossom-end rot, sunburn, mold, and critters eating them. There was only one planting, and only three varieties. What should have been the best crop of the summer was a constant annoyance, and though the shitty weather is partially to blame, it was really mostly farmer error. The much-improved game plan for this year includes:

• Wider spacing – Two feet between plants wasn’t nearly enough
• Succession planting – So the millions of tomatoes are spaced out, not coming at me all at once.
• Trellising/caging/pruning/training – Letting the plants sprawl out on the ground let the gophers get at them, caused the fruit to rot, and made harvesting a disgusting chore. I had planned to cage the plants but never got around to it; this year it’s a priority. I’m going to mess around with a few different methods to see which works best.
• Diversity – You should see my list of tomato seeds to buy. There will be at least a dozen heirloom varieties alone.

Windbreaks

The wind comes screaming through the little valley my garden is in, and on a bad day a couple hours in that kind of wind is enough to make you lose your mind. I’m not sure how much it affects the plants — nothing’s been blown over — but a little refuge would do this farmer a whole lot of good. I’m hoping that planting tall and sturdy plants like popcorn and sunchokes on the northwest side of the garden will cut down the windspeed.

Compost tea

Compost tea is such a weird and awesome idea. You take a small amount of good compost, full of nutrients and happy little microbes, and dump it in some water. You use a pump to aerate the water for 24 hours. The idea is that those happy little microbes swim around, feast on the yummy stuff in the compost, and procreate like crazy. When the time’s up, you strain out the solids, and use the resulting tea to give your plants a dose of microbial goodness. It’s not about giving them nutrients; that should already be in the soil. You’re giving them multitudes of healthy bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa that will invigorate the soil biology, making the soil’s nutrients more easily accessible to the plants.

You can spend a lot of money on a fancy compost tea brewer, but supposedly all you need to really need is a bucket and a pump. Water + compost + air = compost tea. So that’s my plan.

Gopher-proof irrigation

Those gorram gophers. Last year they treated my t-tape as their own personal water fountains. They easily chew through the thin plastic, creating leaks in the lines and plenty of headaches for me. And I’m sure giving them a steady water supply didn’t help with my general gophers-eating-my-plants problem either. I’m reluctant to abandon the t-tape (mostly because I still have half a roll left), but for the most part I’ll be switching to thicker drip tube for widely spaced veggies and sprinklers for greens.