Organic Vegetable Gardening
First of all, I must apologize to anyone who checks for new material on this blog. I’ve been too busy to get here before now this week. Spring is an extra busy time for me as I’m trying to keep up with my store, keep up my inventory of hand-crafted jewelry, candles, and gift baskets, and, in addition, get all the seedlings for my organic vegetable garden planted and maintained.
Our weather has been exceptionally wet around here for quite a while and it’s had an effect on my garden, slowing everything down and making me wonder if the seeds I’d planted were ever going to come up! This weekend is the traditional time for putting out tender plants since we rarely ever have any frost from this point until late Fall. My little greenhouse is full of tomato, pepper, eggplant, celery (first time I’ve tried planting this), herbs, and a few flower plants. At least I hope that’s the case since I forgot to open the door a bit this morning and it may well have gotten awfully hot in there today. I’m planning on getting everything into the ground over the next two days.
Our soil is not the best, being mostly clay and the inevitable load of rocks; however, I’ve been mulching and amending it for a few years now and can see the difference already. Most of the organic fertilizers and amendments I’ve seen have been a bit too expensive for me to buy in the quantities that I really need, so this year I’m trying something new. I bought a 50 lb. bag of alfalfa pellets for only ten dollars and change from a garden supply/feed store and have brewed up a big trash can full of “alfalfa tea”. I’ve heard great things about how plants thrive when watered with it and will have to report later on how this experiment turns out. Here’s an organic gardening tip for anyone who’s been trying to compost large numbers of fallen leaves. If, like me, you have tons of leaves but no ready source of manure to add to it, you may have found that it is extremely difficult to get your compost heap to heat up enough to break the materials down quickly. I received one of those expensive double-barreled composters as a gift and hoped that that would do the trick. Nope. Even when I added the so-called compost “starters” those stubborn leaves would just kind of sit there. Last week I added some yarrow leaves as I’d read somewhere that they were supposed to help in the composting process and saw no difference after a couple of days. I then threw in a gallon or so of the alfalfa pellets and when I checked the composter yesterday I actually felt a bit of warmth in there! I’ll post more on this later and hope to finally be able to report success.
In the meantime, if you enjoy gardening of any type and haven’t already found the “Dave’s Garden” site, you’ve been missing one of the best resources on the web for information on plants and gardening. So, here’s the link:Dave’s Garden Enjoy!