September 15, 2016

Since the fellow who brought compost-able material by the house on a very regular basis retired, my composting regularity has decreased immensely and so my soil has suffered. Soil fertility is paramount with organic gardening.

It has been difficult to break away to go collect material and then build the piles. This all takes time. Somehow I have not been able to include this very important duty into my regular schedule. But I do continue to explore ideas.

One idea I am exploring is the use of green manures. After the manure reaches maturity, I will then kill it and leave it in place to plant through. I will expire the green manure with a layer of greenhouse film over black plastic. Most of the time green manures are turned into the soil once they have matured. I want to explore no till culture.

There are a number of reasons: this will give me an abundance of time, since I do all my tilling with a shovel, the intact dead root systems will improve soil structure. My garden is home to a lot of spade foot toads and this would eliminate me killing any of them (shovels are better than a tiller but I still hit them) and there would be an increased mulch layer.

This would all be good for the warmer months, but we will have to see how it would work through the winter. The additional mulch may prevent the soil from receiving solar heat gain. This mulch might need to be raked off or incorporated into the soil for winter time.

Then again this may not be a problem. I plant with the intention that my beds at maturity are completely covered with plant crowns. This could have the effect of a living mulch. This does slow evaporation in the summer.

Then again this mulch may keep the soil warmer going into winter.

Bed preparation would be made easier by just cutting the plant tops off from the roots and planting trough the mulch with plants. With seeds, the mulch could be raked back, plant then the mulch replaced. My hope is that the soil would not become crusted and would be easy to plant in.

My only concern is with leaving the roots in the soil, it is difficult to see root knot nematode (RKN) spread. Sometimes the tops remain healthy and do not show typical RKN signs.

We will just have to see what happens.

Speaking of RKN this year for the months of April, through the middle of July I chemigated with Azaguard (a neem oil by product with RKN inhibiting properties). The results seem to be promising.

As I harvest my sweet potatoes the RKN infected plants are on single tubers within a cluster of tubers that are attached to a root crown. So far I have not found the huge root galls that I have seen in the past. Another side benefit of the Azaguard, it appeared to have kept other pests subdued. The reason I stopped chemigating in July is in order to siphon the azaguard there is also a reduced water flow in the drip system. July was a beast with the evaporation / transpiration rates being off the charts. I felt that I could not restrict any flow of water and expect to have my plants survive that heat. Then when the heat broke and it started to rain, the garden started to show signs of rain induced chlorosis and to add more water in a chemigation I felt was not prudent. Although this is when most of my insect pests starting making their increased appearances. It is always something.

This week I anticipate to harvest chard, kale, green onions, carrots, green beans, okra, squash. From storage bulb onions, garlic, butternuts and sweet potatoes.