November 12, 2015

Good morning, Building and maintaining soil fertility is a major goal of organic gardening. The premise is to feed the soil and the soil will feed the plants.

In the recent past there was a fellow who would drop off compostable material at my door. Sadly this has ended. It was nice just building compost piles and not to have to procure the material too. Considering how much compost I used, this does add to weekly garden chores. I do generate some compost from my flock of fowl but not nearly enough. I also mentioned getting the brewery leavings but this needs to be combined with another compost ingredient so it does not compact and go anaerobic.

I am seriously thinking of going to cover crops and turning them in before planting. This would be a lot easier than procuring compost then building piles to heat. The pros of this is time saved by not having to get compost material, a considerable time saver. The cons is that crop rotations will not be immediate like when adding compost. Depending on how warm it is when I turn in a cover crop there would need to be at least 2 weeks for the turned under material to decompose.

I like to have my beds prepared and ready for spring planting no later than the 2^nd week of March (weather permitting). Last year was a cool damp spring which if it were to happen again this year would throw a curve ball into turning in a cover crop and actually have it decompose too. Forecasts indicate that this will be so. What to do. Wish in one hand and pore water in the other. It never is really quite cut and dried.

Another option would be to sow a legume ground cover a month after the main crop is planted and established so that it can out compete the ground cover. A low growing clover such as New Zealand white would be used. I would be curious to see how this would spread over the bed since I do drip tape that only waters a 1 foot wide strip through the bed. Granted it is 1 foot wide at the surface but there is an inverted cone of moisture into the soil. Enough width for the clover to fill the bed? No Idea.

This may have to be my choice since I would hate to have multiple beds of clover to turn under 2 +/- weeks before planting and finding the soil too wet to work. I was fortunate last year that I had compost to work in and was able to go into the winter with ready to plant beds for March. Once a crop is finished I would work the ground cover into the bed after the crop had been pulled..

I do see some potential problems with this but then again I just may be over thinking this. Which could very easily be the case. I will try it and see what happens. Very likely I may have to make time to get compost material.

I am perplexed with my pea crop. Normally when I sow the middle of October the soil is cool enough to not rot the seed before the peas have a chance to germinate. I may have gotten 25% to germinate. The seed packet said that in May of this year these peas had an 80% germination rate. It was a new seed house that I used. I normally use Johnny's but I used a company that had all the seed varieties I needed to complete my fall planting. I did have some year old peas from Johnny's that I used and they performed as poorly too.

Around the time I sowed the soil may still have been too warm but there was some heavy rain showers at about the same time too. I suspect it is a combination of things that all came together at just the right time. Too warm and too wet.

Options would be to delay planting further for cooler soil (maybe I should use a thermometer next time instead of “feelings” ). The other option which would be a perfect solution but extreme care is needed. This would be to germinate the seed in damp paper towels. The seeds would be actively growing but the tinder roots are very easily broken. But only seeds that are actively growing would be sown. Which could make for a 100% stocked bed. One might say why not plant soaked seeds. I have had horrible success doing this in Far West Texas. Up in Oregon there was no problem and I got great results. I suspect why this is so here is that unsoaked seed has a natural protection to fight off bacteria until the seed germinates. Soaking the seed washes off this protective layer. This is why germinated seed would need to be used. Of course the protective layer is my thoughts but it does seem to fit.

One thing is for certain every year is different; adjusting and adapting techniques is always critical.