Annie Spiegelman aka The Dirt Diva

How to Make your Garden Sing . . . and Stop Talking Smack About you

After the fall harvest it’s time for you and your garden to take a well-deserved rest. You’ve busted your back all year long to impress your neighbors with your green lawn and heirloom tomatoes hanging upside down and organically grown. Isn’t that enough? Simmer down already! Stop being such a show-off. (Till early spring that is. Then it’s time to get cranking again.)

 

We’ve just depleted our soil by growing plants and food in it all year so in late fall to early winter we want to give back to Mother Nature and say thanks. Now is the time to add nutrients to your soil and also to compete with winter weeds that like to hang out on your turf like starving teenagers. You don’t want those hoodlums living off of you! They smell and they text. How do you stop them? By adding a layer of compost and mulch to your soil, by sheet mulching and by planting cover crops. All three of these methods will make your soil healthy.

Here's a newsflash: You can’t grow Jack without healthy soil.

Soil is the mastermind of your garden and is a living part of your garden’s ecosystem. Not much else really matters. Don’t even waste your time planting if you’re not going to give your utmost attention to your soil. You'll just be wasting your money on plants and exhausting your poor back. If you’ve seen the enlightening ‘soil’ love story, Dirt! The Movie, you’ll now know that by placing a layer of compost on your land, instead of a nasty chemical fertilizer, you’ll be adding LIFE to your dirt and can then call it ‘soil.’ (What? You haven’t seen the film? Go order it now. I’ll wait here . . . Hurry up! www.dirtthemovie.org)

 

Feel free to use one or all of these soil-building methods in different parts of your yard. Mix and match. It’s all good.

 

Compost:

I spread a fresh 2-3 inch layer of compost onto the soil at least twice a year, in early spring and again in the late fall. (You don't have to dig the compost in. That's so old school! New thinking is to simply add a layer to the topsoil and walk away. Let the microbes in the compost do the work for you. Amen. However, if your dirt is seriously comatose, feel free to rake it in just a bit.) I top this off with a layer of mulch to hold in moisture and block light from weed seeds. (ie: leaves, wood chips, straw) By enriching the soil with compost just a few times a year I rarely have to buy plant fertilizer. Synthetic (chemical) fertilizers promote constant bloom, which is NOT what nature intended. It exhausts the plants, making them prone to disease and pests. Then you’re on the vicious fertilizer & pesticide cycle, which is dangerously polluting our air, soil and waterways. Stop being an enabler. Your plants are begging to go to rehab!

 

Cover Crops:

I plant cover crops in the raised beds where the vegetables grew last season or anywhere around my yard that I want to compete with the many evil weeds. You will become a fan of cover crops. These are exceptional and inexpensive seeds you sow in the soil when a section of your garden is taking a winter siesta. This is how organic farmers build their soil to grow food when their land lays fallow. If they can grow fields and fields like this, trust me, you can grow a bed of edible crops without poisoning your entire zip code with chemical fertilizers. A pack of cover crop seeds will cost you only a few dollars. Besides adding nutrients like nitrogen or carbon or various minerals, many of the cover crops bloom beautifully and attract beneficial insects. It’s win-win! A few that I love are fava beans with their black and white flowers, hairy vetch with their girly pink pea-like blooms and crimson clover with its show-stopping red blossoms. Once you plant your crops, let the winter rain water them. Once they start blooming, in the early spring, you can chop them up onto your soil and plant your vegetable or flower garden in that spot a month later. Or, just leave the entire plant growing there to reseed if you’re not planting anything in that area. Check with your local nursery and ask them to order cover crops. Or find them online at www.groworganic.com and www.seedsofchange.com.

 

Sheet Mulch:

One last winter idea is sheet mulching. If you have an area of land that has hard, miserable soil that has been neglected or a lawn that you want to get rid of (yay!), you can cover it up with compost and layers of newspaper or cardboard for the winter. This will invite the neighborhood earthworms and their underground friends to take up residence under you sheet mulching project. Come spring, your soil will be workable and the newspaper will have decomposed enough for you to plant a new garden in that spot.

 

Composting, cover crops and sheet mulching are all covered in my book, Talking Dirt (Penguin Books, 2010).  Me? Shamelessly promote myself? Never! Till next time, good luck sweet kumquats and may the force (of nature) be with you.

 

Become a card-carrying dirt diva by joining the Dirt Diva Royal Horticultural Society at www.dirtdiva.com

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