OK, it’s been quite a while since I posted anything on this page. I don’t have any valid excuses other than letting life get in the way and not making it a top priority. However, this page is far from the only thing in my life that suffered from neglect over the past several months.
After a great deal of anticipation, my annual vegetable garden ended up being a disaster this year. First, my seedlings got fried inside a cold frame by an early spring heat wave where temperatures shot up over 85 degrees for one day. When the planting season was fully underway, I was simultaneously trying to establish three new areas for forest gardens and three sisters mounds while completing my Permaculture Design Course. All of which while helping out with my year-old son (our 5 year old daughter can address her own immediate needs now) and spending 60 hours/week on my job. By the summer, the only successful things in the garden were wild ruderals — weeds. My tomato harvest was terrible (only 3-4 jars of tomato sauce), green beans were a complete failure (no germination), dry beans were planted too late, lettuce and other greens were minimal (fall spinach didn’t even germinate)… you get the idea. Just about the only crops that gave decent production were shallots and potatoes through the summer, and brassicas in the fall (esp. kale).
Still, now that the season is over and I can have some space to look back upon it, I cannot consider it to be a failure — because it’s been a great learning experience. Here is a quick sampling of some of the major lessons learned this year:
- Have planting areas established by the end of the previous season, instead of trying to get them established and ready during the planting season. For some reason, this is one that I have messed up on every single year I’ve been raising a garden, but I think I’m in position to break the pattern next year.
- Planning is paramount. Not only do I need to have planting areas established and mostly ready to go, but I need to have already laid out what I am planting and where for each succession.
- Invest time and resources to building soil. This past year I think that a good bit of my soil was just taxed too much over proceeding years and not replenished enough. It’s also a no-brainer under the permaculture principles — we need to build resources, not strip them. This is a topic I’ll get into more in my next post.
- Observe my surroundings. Take ample time to just sit down and watch nature at work. She will give feedback as to what actions are harnessing various energy flows (wind, water, sun, etc.) and which ones are disrupting them.
- Keep records of everything. I allowed myself to be so caught up in trying to get too many things going at once, I didn’t keep good track of what I was doing. Key to a successful long-term operation is keeping good records, which I can refer back to when planning out my next year’s activities.
Toward the goal of having things ready to go next year, I weeded my entire vegetable garden, the horseshoe garden, and parts of the front and back forest patches. The grass and weeds pulled out were thrown into a compost bin or pile. Any areas not prepared will not be planted with anything next year.
I spread out a bin of cured compost on one of the garden beds. I buried food waste directly in the ground in another. Most of the wood chips on garden pathways were turned onto some beds. I noted that the chips were heavily infused with fungal hyphae, which will help innoculate my garden soil. For others, I mulched all of the leaves in the yard with the mower, as well as those on the roadside along a woodlot, and piled them around trees and on more beds. This will encourage fungal growth as well.
On the subject of leaves, come late fall people throughout town start bagging up the leaves in their yards, stuffing them into paper sacks, and setting them along the curb for me to just pick up and take away! I bring them home, stack them up and mulch them as I have time to do so. Before winter all of my beds in the vegetable garden will be mulched, and I’ll have a good pile of leaves set aside to rot for the summer.
Christopher
I followed you home. Hope you don’t mind. My gardening efforts this year have been mostly a learning experience too. Too bad you can’t eat a learning experience.
I started with building a wicking bed in the spring. My HOA made me move it, unfortunately to a location with far less sun than the place I put it to start with. None of the plants I tried did stellar, although I’m still working with it.
My adult children who live with me did better with a keyhole garden they built, but neither garden provided us with enough abundance to avoid starvation.
I too think part of my problem is a lack of soil nutrients. I have recently started using the seaweed, but it bothers me that I have to buy it at great cost, and it isn’t locally produced. I will look into the rock dust. We have a lot of rock here, although it’s mostly limestone and probably not high in the right trace minerals. There is a lot of granite to the west of here, within reason. I wonder if granite dust is any good?
I’m glad you’re writing. Hard to find a permie who doesn’t lie about their failures. If I believed everything I read on my local permie yahoo group, I’d think I was the only guy for 40 miles still using a flush toilet. They talk the talk.
Hi Ed — Thanks for your comment. Good luck in dealing with your HOA on anything permaculture. I have enough trouble getting my wife to go along with my “experiments” taking over various portions of our yard. I don’t think I could deal with outsiders coming in and telling me how I can and cannot use the yard.
One of the other problems you might encounter with limestone is that it can turn your soil alkaline. If you don’t want to go the route of getting quarry dust because you’re concerned that it might not have the right spectrum of nutrients, you can always go to your local Agway or similar store and they have a lot of rock dust amendments on hand for sale. That’s basically what my mom did in her garden last year and she had noticable increases in her yields.
Don’t get discouraged by failure, look at it as a learning opportunity. As John Michael Greer consistently opines, NOW is the time to work out all of the kinks in learning new skills like gardening, before you NEED them in order to survive. While I’m sure both you and I would have liked to have gotten more out of our respective gardens this past year, I know that in my case, at least, I don’t depend upon that garden anywhere close to the point that a bad year could cause starvation. Hopefully if it ever does come to that, I’ll have honed my skills to the point that it isn’t a significant concern absent some catastrophic weather event.
I’m glad you found some value in my post, and hopefully you’ll come back and find more value in future ones. All the best!
Chris