My garden is very sandy, so our wet weather washes nutrients away every year; that’s why I get out the minute it stops raining to prepare the soil for planting.
Strawberries, asparagus and raspberries are already safely ensconced in their permanent beds, but they also need nutrients if I want a decent harvest.
First I weed everything, one bed at a time, digging under any cover crop or weeds before adding one centimetre of compost and organic fertilizer at the rate of four litres per nine square metres and allowing that to sit for a week. I then sow the bed or transplant seedlings, following a rotated garden plan to ensure the same crop isn’t grown in the same place two years in a row.
Although some proponents of organic gardening feel that nutrients in compost alone will grow fine crops, I suspect the ingredients in most heaps aren’t enough to sustain excellent vegetables and fruit. Spent vines, leaves, manure and vegetable scraps form compost that will grow decent vegetables for some time, but if we want the most nutrient dense food we should add the extra nutrients and minerals that abound in Solomon’s fertilizer mix. On permanent beds I sprinkle compost at the same rate as for the rotating beds (one centimetre thick), but only half the amount of fertilizer (two litres per nine square metres).
Well-made compost contains vegetable scraps, manure, spent vines, leaves and clay. I add sprinkles of fertilizer mix to mine as well and sometimes wood ashes. Ideally, I leave the compost to cure a year and a half, so when it’s filled in the fall, I use it in the spring a year and a half later. When I’ve left it longer than this, morning glory and other nasty weeds proliferate so then I solarize the compost by spreading it out over a tarp and laying another one on top to heat up over the summer. This will also kill small, helpful organisms though, so it’s best if I use the compost before weeds fill it up.
Compost also makes excellent tea that I sprinkle over the garden every three weeks, after I’ve diluted it to the strength of weak tea. One year I used it straight from the bucket and it burned leaves on my cabbages that never did recover, so I’ll never do that again. Here’s how I make compost tea:
Ingredients:
one pillow case
two shovelfuls of compost
a piece of rope to tie the pillow case
garbage can with lid
water
Directions:
Place the compost into the pillow case and tie the case shut. Put into the garbage can and fill with water. Allow it to sit for a week to 10 days, sloshing it around from time to time. Remove the tea and dilute with fresh water till it looks like weak tea then spray it on the vegetables.
(I use two garbage cans, one into which I add 1/4 cup of fish fertilizer that is rich in nitrogen and helps leaves develop, and the other one into which I put 1/2 cup of dried kelp into the pillow case when I want to nourish developing fruit.)
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
