HOW TO GROW VEGETABLES
Presented by Hari Prem Singh
April 21, 2007 at Amrit Kaur’s home in Arroyo
Seco.
Hari Prem Singh’s experience is as a commercial
grower and has always made his living in horticulture. Currently he works with
the plantings at the Ranch. We found that if anyone of us would like to organize
a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture where members make dues-like payments, then get regular boxes of great, fresh produce
during the growing season, he might be interested in being such a farmer for us!
Amrit Kaur graciously served us with delicious
muffins, fruit and tea in their lovely new home! And we met Connie Bienvenu,
Amrit’s next door neighbor who is the president of the Espanola Garden Club! We
are looking forward to having them come to our gatherings and picking their brains for ideas in the future. At the end of this paper, you will find notes from the impromptu tour of Connie’s garden that we
took after this presentation!
HARI PREM’S SUGGESTED RESOUCES:
Gro-Power 800-473-1307 for specialized soil amendments,
including “hemantis.”
Growers Supply, http://www.growersupply.com Suppliers of a huge range of garden equipment, supplies, all kinds of greenhouses, and other
goodies, such as bird feeders! For commercial growers and home gardeners.
Johnny’s Seeds of Maine, http://www.johnnyseeds.com/home.aspx?ct=HG 800-854-2580.
These are great cold hearty, but not drought resistant seeds! The catalog
gives “how to” notes for each kind of plant.
New Mexico Vigas
753-6189, Dennis Duran, near the DreamCatcher Cinema—free wood shaving mulch, and perhaps sawdust for composting. You can go over there during work hours to see them.
A truckload of mulch is free, but you pay about $40 for delivery.
Organic Supplies
Safer Soap—organic spray for bugs that works
immediately. Good for aphids, weevils, squash bugs, etc. Available at Walmart, Lowe’s, etc.
Thuricide—concentrate for spray. For bugs when Safer Soap doesn’t work. Good for cabbage
worms (green inch worm)—spray on the leaf and the worm eats the leaf. Spray
when you see the bugs, not before. This doesn’t kill the eggs. Available at Payne’s Nursery.
Safer Garden Fungicide—for powdery mildew,
blackspot, rust and fungus. Spray when you see the diseases on roses, tomatoes,
etc. Available at Santa Fe
Greenhouses.
Rudolph Steiner Agricultural Remedies—like
Back Flower Remedies that you mix with water in a sprayer, then spray over your garden.
They give amazing vitality to the area! Fascinating to do a Google search
on this “Bio Dynamic Agriculture!” For remedies and recipes for remedies
from England, go to http://www.biodynamic.org.uk , then near the very bottom of the page, click on the link “INFO ON HOW TO OBTAIN THEM
READY MADE.”
A biodynamic (energy?) broadcaster available at
http://unionag.net/field.broadcaster.htm
If anyone gets this, please let us know all about
it!
Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening, by the Staff
of Organic Gardening Magazine, published by Rodale Press. This is classic, definitive
organic gardening. You can probably get it used at Amazon.com.
For Grasshoppers:
Peacocks—The Ranch wants to give away some
peacocks. Call Guru Kirn Kaur who works at the Ranch to find out how. The females are nesting now, so chicks may be available soon. If
you handle them as babies, they are friendly as they grow. They eat bugs, but
sit on the plants.
Nolo Bait—Spread on your garden. It gets on grasshoppers and spreads to other grasshoppers, but it has a short life, so have to keep re-spreading
it. It is especially good to get the tiny baby grasshoppers early! Has been available from Gurbani K. and Kartar S. last year 753-4516, also at Country Farm Supply in Espanola.
VEGETABLES IN ALPHABETICAL
ORDER:
Since Hari Prem is a commercial grower, he always
uses seeds instead of starter plants. This is much more cost effective!
Arugula—is a summer planted culinary herb.
If you plant it now, mid-April, it will get scrawny because as the days get longer
before Solstice, it begins to make seeds. When you plant it later, after July
4, it will be bushy because it makes more leaves. It is “length of day”
sensitive.” It reseeds itself; the seeds are in a peapod-like case. If you leave these in your garden over the winter, the pods will disintegrate and
seed that part of your garden.
Asparagus—harvest a little less than 1 lb.
per plant per year. They are a perennial and last about 20 years. 25 plants over 20 years yields 400 lbs.! Here, they are traditionally
planted along ditch rows under trees. Or plant at the bottom of the trench in
between hills of a row where the irrigation water flows.
Basil—that wonderfully aromatic herb, needs
shade and is a summer plant.
Berries—blue berries, black berries, raspberries,
etc. Micromanage berries by giving them special care to best suit their
needs according to the native habitats, which is not here!
Beans (fresh pods such as snap beans, not the
dried beans)—do well in our soil. Plant after May 15, our last frost date
of the season. Are delicious eaten raw off the plant! Different varieties—green, yellow, purple (not as sweet).
Beets—plant the seeds after May 15 when
the soil temperature is 54 degrees. Their many tiny seeds are encased in kernels. Once they start coming up, you need to thin beet seedlings or transplant to about
2 ½ to 3” apart because they don’t accommodate room for each other. Instead,
the beets just stay small. The soil needs to be worked or dug deep before planting
them, but if your soil is sandy, you don’t have to loosen it deeply. If you leave them in the ground beyond their maturity,
they will become woody. You can keep them in boxes of sand in a root cellar.
Beets were developed from Swiss Chard, and the beet greens are a real treat! Although if you leave the beet in the ground and pick its leaves, their leaves grow
back slower than with Swiss Chard.
Broccoli—is a lot of work, and it is too
hot for it to mature well in hot weather. Since it is a cool weather plant, you
can plant the short season variety of broccoli seeds in July, then harvest in the fall.
Cabbage—Savoy cabbage is big and rewarding! This is
that ruffley kind of cabbage. Plant the seeds after May 15 in shady, moist soil
and mulch well.
Carrots—they loosen the soil themselves! The “1/2 Long” varieties called Danver or Mantes are the sweetest! Do you remember Hari Prem’s scrumptious carrots at our Thanksgiving Dinner in
2005? The smaller ones don’t have to be thinned because they work themselves
into the soil and grow every which way to accommodate each other.
Chard—plant early in the spring. If you pick the leaves, they will continue to grow back fairly quickly because they don’t have a
big root to feed as beets do.
Cilantro—weed it right away and cut it early. If it goes to seed, these are Corriander!
Corn—takes a lot of space to get a decent
quantity. Keep it moist. It is easy
to lose corn to weevils, worms and black mold. You can plant it in rows or in
patches of 3 to 4’, but the plants need to bunch together—not simply in a single row in order to cross pollinate
to produce the corn ears. Indian corn makes a great decoration, or you can dry
and grind it to make tortillas!
Cucumbers—are susceptible to the cucumber
beetle. It is a member of the squash or cucurbit family, and they don’t
transplant well.
Dandelion—also called chicory. The leaves are a bitter salad herb when picked young, and they can be cooked as well. Seva Simran Siri Singh says that in Oriental Medicine, this is a natural antibiotic!
Dill—reseeds itself. It is a moderately big, feathery bush, and does well here without much care.
Eggplant—takes a lot of work, and it likes
moist soil.
Endive (not so frilly), escarole—bitter
lettuce-like plant. Good for your health!
It is good cooked Italian style (sautéed in olive oil with garlic), or pieces in a salad, or Ravi Kaur, teacher likes
it on a sandwich with veggie spread.
Fennel—needs a long growing season, too
long for this area.
Garlic—separate the bulbs that you get in
the grocery store and plant each clove in the fall, perhaps October. Then you
will get garlic chives for your salads in the spring. It will take one year for
each clove that you plant to become a full bulb. And they will not be as big
as the parent bulb, or as strong.
Greens—such as bok choy and mustard greens
are in the cabbage family. It may take 100 days from planting seed to harvest
them. Greens do well in the fall, but at a certain point, their nutrients go back into the roots, such as with turnips and
beets.
Lettuce—needs high nitrogen (manure, etc.),
but not phosphorus or potassium, which are the other two ingredients in most packaged fertilizers. If the lettuce looks like it needs water, then it’s too late because the leaves will become bitter
and the plants will begin to bolt (grow a long central stem) to produce seeds. Lettuce
needs shade in the hot part of the day, and regular watering, with more on hot days.
Hari Prem turns on the soaker hose or T tube in the middle of the day to keep the ground wet. And he mulches with seedless straw.
Plant lettuce early in the spring and then when
sprouted, you can cover your row with an old turban or frost cloth if the temperature will go below freezing in the night. This adds about 7 degrees more heat.
Bib or butterhead lettuce takes hot weather better,
so is more of a summer lettuce. They will survive longer than leaf lettuces. Plant the seed early and put it in the shade.
Crisp head lettuce stays leafy. It gets little heads on it that are tasty.
Melons—favor alkaline soil, which is what
we have. Melons don’t spread as much as squash. Whereas winter squash, spaghetti squash, etc. vines spread out. Sugar
Baby watermelons are sweet and grow fast.
Mint—takes over like an invasive weed and
becomes a ground cover. To keep it from spreading, you can plant it in a pot.
Okra—are wonderful to eat when small, fresh
and uncooked.
Onions—grow them from “sets”
that are little tiny onions that you buy in the garden center. In a small garden,
you can grow them intensively. If you don’t harvest them on time, they
can get tough.
Peas—are a cool weather crop and you can
put them in now—mid-April.
Potatoes—Don’t grow too many. Small, new potatoes, especially the red ones taste delicious! To plant, cut a potato in 4 or 5 parts and put them in the ground at a depth that is 2 times the size of
the full sized potato. Or you can put them under about 10” of straw, not
dirt to keep them moist. In 50 days, you will begin to have new potatoes. They “flush out” all at once, so you need to harvest them then. Don’t leave them in the ground.
Pumpkins—are nice in a field. You only water the stem where it comes out of the ground. Corn
uses more water than pumpkin. When planning where to plant them, remember that
they spread and climb to where the sun is, so they can climb uphill.
Radishes, including Daikons—grow very quickly. Daikons mature in 45 to 50 days. The red radishes mature in 28 days. Plant them in the early spring, and then replant a teaspoon full of seeds every two or three weeks so that
you can continue to get radishes over time. You can’t leave them in the
ground beyond harvesting time because they get woody. You can eat the young radish
leaves.
Scallions—True scallions don’t produce
bulbs, but are grown from seed.
Shallots—are easy to grow from sets, like
onions.
Snow Peas—now, mid-April is a good time
to plant all kinds of peas.
Spinach—is hard to grow in the summer. It is a cool weather plant. If you pick
spinach, the new leaves grow back in slowly compared to Chard.
Squash—such as summer squash. Plant 2 or 3 times over the growing season. You can let the
squash bugs eat the first planting, and then do another planting when the bugs are dying off.
Try to kill the bugs as soon as they come out. See Safer Soap near the
beginning of this document. The squash family is called cucurbits. Winter squash, spaghetti squash, etc. vines spread out.
Zephyr squash is beautiful! It is the shape of summer squash, but one end is yellow, and the other end is green, as though dipped in
paint.
You can put squash blossoms in with your steams
if you put them in at the very end. You can also stuff them and cook!
Tomatoes—He plants tomato seeds outside
at the end of April and tomato plants outside on May 15. Then he gets fruits
from the ones he put in as plants, and two weeks later, he gets fruit from those he planted as seeds. They need rich soil and you can feed them special tomato food to make more tomatoes. Once the plant is established and on the trellis, they are taller than the weeds, so you don’t have
to worry so much about weeds then.
You can lay a young stalk horizontal along the
ground and then cover it with dirt. Then it will send up shoots all along the
stalk.
“Determinate” tomatoes are not staked. They put out only one “flush” of tomatoes and then don’t produce
any more. These varieties such as Roma are used for making tomato paste, sauce
and canning.
“Indeterminate” tomatoes have to be
staked or use a wire cage. They continue blooming and fruiting through the growing
season until frost. Theses are all the varieties that are eaten fresh for salads,
sandwiches, etc.
Turnips—The Siri Singh Sahib said that turnip
greens are good for neurotic women, they are high in magnesium. Turnips will
continue producing greens as you pick them, but at a certain point, their nutrients go back into the roots.
Zucchini—takes 42 days from seed to fruit. It is very fast! They produce prolifically.
MORE TIPS!
Cool weather plants, or seeds to plant in the
early cool spring or mature in the fall are lettuce, peas, cabbage family and spinach.
Raised beds, French Intensive Gardening allows
the water to run out. But they are good to create good soil because you put it
on top of the native soil. They work well with soaker hoses and mulch.
Old time New
Mexico way to plant seeds with ditch flood irrigation is to first create your trenched rows. Then open your irrigation so that the water fully flows down the trenches. This leaves a water line (dark mud) along the sides of the row hills.
Plant your seeds just above this line so that their roots can get water, but the plants are not soaked and the seeds
are not washed away.
To prepare your garden, roto-til the dirt to loosen
the soil into small particles, then add soil amendments by spreading them on the ground and mix them in 4-6” deep. This creates a continued regeneration process.
Use paths in your garden rather than walking all over it that would pack the soil down.
Soil Amendments.
Plants eat soil, so feed the soil with amendments. Add to your soil. Hari Prem Singh uses processed steer manure that is baked to kill weed seeds, and
it gives all important nitrogen. Chicken, sheep and goat manure are also very
high in nitrogen. But don’t use them fresh because they are “hot,”
meaning that as they decompose, their temperature will rise and kill your plants. But
you can put this fresh manure in the bottom of a hole, mix in dirt and then plant. Depending
on your composting method, it takes varying amounts of time to compost manure. It
would take about a year of just sitting on the ground for these to decompose adequately before putting them in your garden.
Alfalfa and rye draw nitrogen in from the air
and “fix” it in the soil through nodules on their roots.
A simple way to compost kitchen scraps is to dig
a hole in your garden, empty the scraps in the hole, and cover it with dirt. The
next day, dig another hole down the line, and so on!
Humantis, made of biodegraded, possibly fossilized
ocean shells is quite good to supply a lot of minerals. They are available from
Gro-Power, listed at the beginning of this document under “Resources.”
Connie’s Home Worm Farm—She has an
area in her yard that may be somewhat enclosed like a raised bed. Then there
is a vertical screen across the middle that separates this whole area in half. She
puts kitchen scraps on one side, then puts seedless straw over them. She has
introduced red worms from Santa Fe Farmers’ Market to
the area, and it also draws native worms. Then the worms eat everything, even
avocado pits! The worms’ poop is call “castings” that are incredible
dirt!
When all the scraps on one side have turned to
dirt, she takes the straw off that side to use the castings for her garden, and continues the process on the other side of
the screen. This draws the worms over to that side and the process continues!
Watering—Hari Prem likes to use the black
soaker hoses, or “T” tape, which is a particular kind of soaker hose that is a flat tube within a tube, with a
hole every 8”. With the double tube, the dirt gets flushed out and so they
don’t get clogged as easily. Sat Want Singh and Sat Nam Singh use these
as well. Commercially, it comes in rolls of 600 ft. Ravi Kaur, teacher 747-3962 would like to share some of this with someone if possible.
The black, recycled tire soaker hoses that look
like rough garden hoses seep water from all over their surface. They may break
down in less than a full season.
If you stretch either kind of soaker hose or T
Tubes down the length of a row, you can plant on both sides of it. Don’t
bury either kind because they clog up, but you can put them under mulch.
When water comes out of each small hole in the
soaker hoses that have holes drilled at intervals—T Tubes, etc., the water spreads out under the soil as it goes down
into an inverted cone pattern. So, it supplies an abundance of roots. You can use these for trees.
Our soil here is often called “caliche,”
which is a mixture of sand and clay. He calls it “adobe” and it holds
water. (The water runs out of sandy soil quickly, and clay soil pools water.)
Once you have prepared your soil, water it thoroughly,
but not soggy. Then you don’t have to water it so heavily again, but keep
a check on it by feeling the ground, sticking your finger in the soil and get to know your plants’, including your trees’
water needs. But do water regularly, and give them more in the heat.
Mulch—ornamental mulch doesn’t degrade
(rocks, rubber, etc.) And the viga wood shavings hold water and degrade slowly.
Planting—the best time to put little starter
vegetable plants in the ground is when they show up in the stores. Their merchandising
is planned this way. And planting instructions for seeds are always printed on
the back of the envelopes. You can use last year’s seeds, but the germination
rate won’t be as high as this year’s seeds.
Weeding—get rid of the weeds early so they
don’t stunt your young vegetable plants. Keep the weeds shorter than the
plants. Once the plants are tall, you don’t have to worry so much about
the weeds. A “saddle hoe” is horse-shoe shaped and goes back and
forth to pull up weeds by the roots.
To guard against rabbits—use a fence around
your garden, or chain a dog near your garden especially during the night, or spray with a preparation of garlic and hot peppers
available in the store. Or Connie says that she puts some scrap lettuce at a
distance from the garden to distract them, or put down blood meal that repels them.
Gophers—Connie says they are repelled by
daffodils and castor beans, which are large leaf, big plants with poisonous beans in spiky round pods that grow in bunches.
Grow Holes—are “poverty greenhouses.” First, you make a wide hole the size of a parking space, and deep enough to walk into
from the side. Next, put beams across the top; then cover with clear plastic. Being in the earth keeps the temperature more steady.
To calculate the temperature, add the hottest and coldest temperature within 24 hours, then divide by 2. Use it to start your new seedlings.
Edible Flowers—marigolds, which are related
to calendula. You can put day lily buds, just before they bloom in your salad.
They taste spicy, but the bulbs are poison.
In the future, those of the Garden Club that were
present would like a presentation on ponds, waterfalls and water features. There
is a good supplier south of Santa Fe.
Seva Simran Siri Singh would like to have a hands-on
garden project for him to learn on. So, Ravi Kaur, teacher will write up a curriculum,
and we will see if others would like to participate on a weekly basis. SSSS would
find the teachers, schedule the meetings and provide the equipment and supplies for this to happen in his yard.
After Hari Prem Singh’s presentation, Connie
and Jim took us on a tour of their gardens! C875bienvenu@aol.com
CONNIE’S SUGGESTED SUPPLY
Garcia Landscape Materials in Velarde, 505-852-2569. They deliver topsoil, which is rich in mushroom compost (full truckload of 6 cubic
yards, $230), plus many other ground materials such as gravel, stone, manure, etc. You
can split a truckload, which would split the cost of delivery—about $40, or get a partial truckload and pay full delivery. They will mix soil or whatever to your specifications and deliver it to you.
She uses rock mulch in areas that are particularly
windy. She had buried the porous black soaker hoses about 3” deep under
her garden. These are plants that she had there and appeared to be doing well:
Thread grass
Pampas grass
Blue flax reseeds itself,
and the plants last about 4 years.
Mexican hat
Iris
Daisy
Onions and chives
Rosemary
Snakeweed
Broom
A nameless fragrant
leaved ground cover
Winter jasmine that
has no smell, but makes tiny yellow flowers in February. It is a spiky shrub.
Lilacs
Yarrow, called Moonlight
that has a flat yellow flower and healthy green fern-like leaves. It needs little
water.
Coreopsis
River willow twigs
that she had cut and were dead, but looked great in bare groups sticking up straight about 4’.
Apache plume—puffy
pink bloom
Skunk bush sumac
Mint that took over
Herman’s Pride,
Dead Nettle—low plant with green and white stripped leaves with tiny white flowers.
Day lilies
Jim had two tomato
growing contraptions that he got out of a catalog.
They are rectangular plastic basins that are about
18” x 2’ x 1’ tall. They hold a reservoir of water in the bottom
and are filled the rest of the way with good dirt. Then wire cages are attached
around the rim of the basins and extend up about 4’. Then they put tomato
plants in the soil. They say that these set-ups produced tons of tomatoes of
different kinds! They ate them raw, cooked in spaghetti, on pizza and gave lots
away.
On the side of the house, there was a row of about
4 raised beds that had healthy looking strawberry plants in them.
They were made by first putting down a special
cloth weed barrier. Then he made frames for the raised beds from 2” x 10”
boards that are 4’ long and attached them to make the sides of the square beds, using special corner connectors that
hold the boards in place. He got those from a catalog as well.
Then they got Bobby Garcia from Garcia Landscaping
to mix a truckload of dirt for them—1/3 mushroom compost, 2/3 topsoil and spread it in the frames.
Jim had put in an irrigation feeder line of white
PVC pipe that ran along the top of the ground next to each frame in the row. And
then he put in a single vertical extension with an elbow at the end to each frame that would carry the irrigation water up
and into each frame. Then he got black soaker hose that he cut the brass fitting
off of so that he could glue a raw end into the elbow pipe. I expect he capped
the other end of the soaker hose in each frame and then buried it about 3” under the soil. So, he just turns on one spigot to water all his strawberry raised beds!
They mulch the strawberries with straw in the winter.
In the front, they plant different kinds of lettuce,
and sugar snap beans in tall plant support cages first thing in the spring. And
when these are finished, they replace those plants with pole beans, onion and garlic.
