The Weeds Are Growing Like... Well, Weeds

It's July, and it's hot.  I'm thinking about water and weeds.  I've observed in previous seasons that immediately after weeding an area, the plants suffer some wilting and shock, and the soil surface dries out and looks like beach sand.  I interplant various species intensively, use mulch, and sow cover crops as religiously as possible. 

Weeds are just doing their jobs, as I am mine, protecting the soil's fertility and host to a multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms that support life, photosynthesizing life or otherwise.  Weeds are the pioneers, reclaiming disturbed land, covering it over as quickly as possible, over time leading to a progressing to edge habitat, and eventually woodlands.  I don't hate the weeds.  I don't want to poison them off, or torch them with a flame thrower.  All plant matter that we don't intend to eat is not removed from the garden.  It is pulled out of the ground, left in the sun, and later returned to the soil either on the surface, or spaded under.  I want total biomass retention.  by removing fertility from the garden in the form of edible vegetables, I need to replace what I've taken out.  I do this with kitchen compost, manures, growing green manures like buckwheat, clover, and ryegrass, and keeping all of my weeds. 

In the spring, I brought in a good deal of wood chips, and inoculated them with cultures of Garden Giant mushrooms.  I needed to keep them in full shade and moist, so I built a really simple structure.  It's essentially a low table with the tabletop made out of chicken wire.  We pull weeds and pile them onto this table to dry in the sun, while also shading the mushroom patch.  After the weeds are sufficiently dried (eliminating the possibility of them re-rooting themselves, they're used as mulch.  It looks something like this:

Currently, some of our biggest garden invaders are Purslane, Lady's Thumb, Ragweed, and Mugwort.  Of course we've got the normal crabgrass and other various grasses, too.  I mostly leave the purslane alone, as I don't see it as a big threat.  All Lady's Thumb and Mugwort are pulled out immediately on sight.  The mugwort is never left directly on the soil surface after being pulled, because it's so tenacious at re-rooting itselt.  Once it dies back, though, it's great.  On the property there are some big expanses of mugwort that are left standing for the entirety of their life cycle, and the soil underneath is GREAT because of the amount of decomposing plant matter from previous years' stalks. 

I like to share my successes, but it's also important to note some of my failures.  For the second year, I've tried to grow a small patch of wheat, since I love to bake bread (provided it's winter!).   On account of a dry spring, and a pinch of neglect on my part, I got terrible germination this year probably from lack of moisture.  In no time, my precious wheat patch was overrun with grass stalks going to seed that were well over my head.  I decided it was time to give up on it and mow it down.  This week sometime when it's less hot, I'm going to turn the whole thing under and probably plant radishes.  Better luck next year.  RIP wheat patch 2012:

This is why we can't have nice things

I'd love to have broccoli, kale, lettuce, cabbage, sunflowers, and beans in my garden but this is why I can't:

Never Quite Caught Up

This weekend was a busy one.  We got two inches of rain, but it was either fast-moving, or happened overnight, so I was able to work quite a bit still.  The biggest thing that I got done this weekend was to mulch my potatoes.  I hilled them with composted manure last week, and just now got around to mulching them.  I use waste hay, because it's available in large quantity, and it's dumped to compost in extreme proximity to the garden. 

In previous years, we've tried growing potatoes in a trench and filling in dirt as the plants grew, but we've had limited success with this method.   The benefit of that is that extra material is not needed to hill around the plants.  You simply use what was dug out of the trench to backfill.  Two years ago, my father tried this method and got a great yield.  For the last two years, however, we have not had nearly the experience that my father has.  I suspect that the flaws with this method are that we have rather heavy soil, and compaction is further encouraged by the digging and backfilling, and that by continually covering up the growing stems and foliage, the plant is weakened.  Then it takes longer to recuperate before growing nice tubers.  Instead, I chose to use a hilling method.  I buried my seed potatoes rather shallow; maybe 2 inches deep.  Once the first stems broke the surface, the plants grew vigorously!  Once they had reached their full height, I began hilling around their bases.  By the time I finished with the hay mulch yesterday, I noticed that many of the plants were blooming quite robustly, as I've never had potato plants do before.  I'll have to keep my eye of the hay level over the plants because I suspect that it will compact and break down rapidly throughout the summer, potentially leaving my tubers exposed to sunlight. 

Yesterday evening, I picked spinach, as it's starting to bolt.  I will replace it with New Zealand Spinach in the coming days.  This is a big event for me, because successfully growing spinach was #2 of my 2 garden goals this year.  The first goal has yet to be accomplished, but it's a long way off anyway. 

Washed and ready to eat!

I've always had trouble germinating spinach, and it's because I didn't understand the plant.  Usually I attempted to start it with my other brassicas, under moist, light, and relatively warm conditions.  This was a mistake.  This year, I did a little research.  I soaked the spinach seeds in water for 24 hours, and then put the seeds into plastic baggies with a wet paper towel, and then put that in the refrigerator until I saw their little white shoots coming out.  At that point, I probably could have set them in the garden to do their thing, but I wanted to keep a closer eye on them, so I arranged them in a flat tray and put it under lights in my living room until they had real leaves.  Then I set them out in the garden.  All of this happened late in the season of course, but I'm happy to have had a success!