Looking Back on the Season

Each year we try some new gardening methods and plant varieties in our vegetable garden. One of the methods we are using is the “no-till” method. Normally we would hire a friend to come out and till our soil. At the same time we would amend the soil with organic turkey fertilizer. There is a cost to tilling, and the turkey fertilizer was not cheap either. Repeated tilling will eventually cause soil compaction. It also disturbs the beneficial critters in the soil that help break down organic matter into even better soil. We decided that our gardens are not so huge that we couldn’t aerate the soil by hand. We are fortunate to have a friend who is a welder, and he was able to build us broad forks in trade for some artwork. The broad fork looks like a stout potato fork with two handles. You simply push the broad fork into the soil (I have to stand on it sometimes) and pull it back with both handles to loosen the soil. By loosening the soil, rather than tilling we maintain the biological structure of the soil and help build a better environment for the beneficial critters like worms and microbes. Broad forking is great exercise and requires no gas or machine maintenance.

The drawback of no-till is that you can get a lot of weeds.

I tried not weeding. Really, I didn’t weed…much. What I did do, was plant buckwheat as a cover crop. Buckwheat is fantastic. It grows very quickly and is very easy to pull up. I planted it in between the rows and around the edges of the garden. It quickly takes over where weeds would’ve filled in. When it just started to blossom I’d let the bees at it for a couple days and then pull it up and drop it around my plants for mulch. Buckwheat has a hollow tubular stem and breaks down very quickly as compost, adding nutrients to your soil. I also use a fair amount of straw as mulch. I always mulch my tomatoes, and strawberries. In the past I’d spread straw around most of the other plants in my garden, but this year I let the buckwheat do the trick. I thought I was pretty smart with this Buckwheat method, and for the most part it worked well. But we also applied a four inch layer of well seasoned manure. It produced a lot new weeds! I’m glad we added the manure, because I think it really helped our yield. But we had a lot of Clover, Creeping Charlie, Lambs Quarter, and Purslane. I know that some folks eat Purslane and Lambs Quarter; I just haven’t acquired a taste for it…yet. I don’t mind pulling some of these weeds, but Clover and Creeping Charlie are very difficult to pull. Next year I’m going to try much heavier layers of mulch. Some folks layer their mulch like lasagna. I think I’ll try shredding newspaper and white paper, layer it around where I’ve planted, soak it well, top it with a layer of compost, and finally add a layer of straw. I’ll plant the buckwheat in between the rows and all around the garden. I think I’m just going to relax and learn to work with the weeds, they don’t seem to inhibit our yield, we have never had so many peas. We had huge cabbages, zucchini coming out of our ears, and more cucumbers than we could keep up with (thus the 40 jars of pickles in the basement) All in all, this year was a garden success, but there’s always something new to try.