GARDEN CLUB MEETING

Saturday, May 20, 2006

HARI PREM SINGH on

GARDENING in general, and VEGETABLES in particular!

And GURUPREM KAUR on her garden innovations.

Wow!  The old farmer (as Hari Prem Singh calls himself) was fabulous!  He graciously consented to make himself available for our gardening questions on weekends, or leave a message after 9 PM on weekdays.  These hours are free on his cell phone plan!  Call him at 901-9228. 

His greatest lines of wisdom are: TIMING IS IMPORTANT TO EVERYTHING IN A GARDEN—warming the soil, planting time, watering and so on.

 And KEEP GOING, KEEP TRYING!

First he demonstrated tools…

ALL LONG HANDLED TOOLS, as opposed to shorted handled tools—better for saving your back on large areas when working in the dirt.  Short handled tools are generally better for working in close quarters around other things.

GARDEN FORK—as opposed to a pitch fork, used for loosening the soil and then use a pointed shovel to turn the soil over; and for digging carrots and daikon. 

HOE—dig weeds, and turn them over to dry, and to aerate the soil.

CLAW HOE—has tines that are bent at a right angle; used to aerate soil.

SMALL TRIANGULAR SHAPED BLADE placed at right angle to the soil—Used to effectively weed and aerate soil.

SMALL TRIANGLE SHAPED BLADE that is on the same plane with the earth.  Since the edges are sharpened, you move the blade flat against the earth to cut the weeds and to thin lettuce and beets.

SADDLE HOE—looks like a stirrup at the end of a shovel handle.  Also sometimes called a landscaper’s hoe.  Move the sharpened horizontal lower edge against the ground to chop weeds.  Is it especially used to get weeds among flagstones and from cracks in cement.

TURNING THE SOIL OVER

Hari Prem really stressed how important it is to turn the soil over before you plant for the season, and to aerate the soil during the growing season.  This is because our adobe soil is much too hard for roots to penetrate well, the nutrients in the soil are not available to the roots, water needs a way to reach the roots, and roots need oxygen from the air through the soil. 

So, when it rains, or the soil is irrigated, the soil gets compressed again, then baked by the sun.  He likened this to making adobe bricks!  So he showed us how to loosen the soil by hand with a garden fork and shovel, or just a shovel, or a roto-tiller.

You can start with a patch full of weeds by first loosening them.  Or you can dig or turn over the top layer of weeds.  Let them dry for a day or so, and then turn them in when turning the soil over.  When you dig deeper, you can include well-composted manure.  Fresh manure has uric acid, and especially bird guano has too much nitrogen in it.  If these are put on the garden before they are well aged, the high nitrogen content will burn your plants.

You don’t have to do everything at once!  You can turn over a small patch each day and plant it.  Then by the end of the summer you shall have planted a lot of garden.

If you don’t want to turn over the earth, you can lay out your plot, then dig soil from around it and put it in your plot.  Then add deer manure at $1.25 per bag and other additives.

Plants “eat” earth.  So after plants have been growing in the same place for a few years, there will be less soil in that area.

SOIL

“Potting soil” is a medium that holds water, but doesn’t have nutrients in it, so add nutrients and dirt.  If you only use only dirt, you don’t get good drainage, so it can invite fungus.  Dirt that has good drainage is loose and “friable.”

Turning over the soil also helps raise the temperature of the soil.  The soil needs to be warm in order for seeds and bedding plants to grow and thrive.

If the soil is too cold, it is too early to plant seeds and bedding plants in it, even though the air is warm.  Green things germinate in soil that is 45 degrees.  And the soil temperature is determined by an average of our day and night temperature extremes.  So, especially because of our cold nights, the soil doesn’t warm up quickly, which gives us a short growing season.  Warm up the soil by turning it over and letting the sun get to it.

Our soil doesn’t have many microbes.

It is good to mulch a home garden, but it is not practical to mulch a commercial garden.  Ruth Stout in Maine piled up (non-seed head) straw and put her plants between it.  This kept the weeds down and the moisture in.  Then it decayed to leave nutrients in the soil

WEEDING AND AERATING

You can weed a patch by disrupting the weeds with your tool, and let them set to dry in your garden.  About 90% of the weeds won’t re-root if you do this—an exception is grasses.  (Otherwise, take the weeds out of the garden.)  The easiest way to keep down weeds is to dig them out when they are small, because taller weeds have longer roots and so take more energy to get out.

NUTRIENTS

Dried kelp from farm stores.

Well composted chicken and sheep manure from Lowe’s.  Horse manure is the lowest in nitrogen.

Phosphate Rock—good for making things bloom.  The way bone meal is processed now, there is little phosphate in it.

“Grow Power” is made from fossils, and is a good commercially produced nutrient mixture.  It has high iron content—40%.  Our soil is really iron deficient so things get yellow, e.g. grass.

Don’t use “Ironite.”  There is too little iron—15%, and it has other things in it such as toxic by products of the mining process. 

“Grow Power” produces a mix that is high in nitrogen and is especially good for grass and use a little on your lettuce.

Epsom salts (magnesium) is especially good for beets.

Miracle Grow—especially on flowers!

Alfalfa has nitrogen fixing properties.  It has long roots that loosen the soil and have nitrogen fixing nodes on them.  But it is not easy to get started.  (When the alfalfa is mature, you can turn it under and let it rot to give great nutrients to the soil.  This is called “green manure!”)

SOIL pH

The best pH for the soil for growing vegetables is 6.7 to 7.0.  Our soil is alkaline, which is pH 7.0 to 10.  You can test the soil and balance it with nutrients. 

The taste of vegetables usually depends on the pH of the soil. 

PESTS

Plant extra plants because the bugs will get some of them!

“Safer Soap” is the commercial stuff to safely spray on plants.  In the 1950’s, Rodale found that spraying a mixture of regular liquid dish detergent on plants eliminates a lot of pests.  Mix detergent with water in a proportion so that the mixture is still kind of “greasy” and clings to your fingers.  Good for mites, aphids, squash bugs, etc.  Because aphids feed in the morning from 9-11 and again in the late afternoon, spray them then.  If you find lettuce “limped over,” it may be due to aphids.

You can also use lots of lady bugs to eat pests such as aphids.  However when cool weather comes, lady bugs leave to nest about a month before the aphids do.

Cook cayenne or chili pepper in water, and cool to make a spray that burns pests.  Or buy this kind of mixture commercially—about 1 T. to a gallon of water.  Also use garlic with water in a spray.

Findhorn method of pest control—pray to the devas of each pest—animal or bug, and tell them that there is plenty for them to eat in the areas adjoining or outside the garden.  So the gardener won’t kill any “pests” in areas that are not in his/her garden.  Within about 3 days, the pests would disappear.

“Insect Barrier” is a light weight gauzy, non-woven fabric to lay over plants.

For grasshoppers, he uses Nolo Bait—not heavy application, but every few weeks.  Water on the Nolo Bait neutralizes its effectiveness.  It takes a little while for the grasshoppers to be affected.  Birds such as chickens and guinea hens also eat grasshoppers and other bugs.

Thuricide is a spray for use on cabbage worms.  It won’t hurt humans.

THINNING SEEDLINGS

Thin some plants because they need lots of room between them to develop and grow.  Beets and lettuce definitely need thinning.  Carrots don’t need it because they arrange their own space in the earth.

VEGETABLES

Chili, Indian melons and Mexican squash do well in our native soil.

Daikon—good to loosen the soil.

Chard—can plant anytime and early.

Carrots—plant short one (6”-8”), but not stubby varieties of carrots.  The long ones don’t do well here.  The cheapest seeds are the best and sweetest.  Make rows 6” apart and you don’t have to thin them.  They grow where they find space.

Radishes—plant new seeds every week or so to keep crop coming in.  Plant around squash and zucchini to shade them and repel squash bugs.

Corn—best planting local varieties, which they have at Country Farm.  Don’t plant early corn.  Plant it at the end of June and the beginning of July.

Squash—keep planting every 2-3 weeks, even during the squash bug season.  Some will survive for you!

Acorn Squash, not spaghetti squash and not watermelons.

Pumpkins are good, but take a long time to grow.

Cucumbers are good but they are weak, they wilt easily from lack of water.  Use Safer Soap on cucumber beetles.

Red potatoes, fresh grown are really yummy!

Vegetables like lots of heat, although don’t need as much sun if they get the heat.

Some plants wilt in mid-day sun because they draw their moisture into their roots, and then let it back out to the leaves at night.

PLANT THESE AFTER JULY 4 so they won’t go to seed in the hot weather. 

Since these are good under shade, you can also plant them under zuchinni:

Mustard—all varieties and colors, arrugala, Chinese greens (bok choy), collards, kale, broccoli (the short growing time variety), spinach—which can also be planted in October. Once established, spinach can go dormant over the winter and develop for spring harvest. Lettuce if you plant it in shade.

GOOD TASTING LETTUCE

The good taste of lettuce requires huge amounts of nitrogen to make it sweet, plus watering it at proper times, i.e. swamping it with water in the evening.  If you see that the lettuce is wilted a little from lack of water, the lettuce has already turned a switch to start making seeds, using the sugar in the leaves to do that, and producing bitter tasting lettuce leaves.

PROTECTION AGAINST FROST

Hari Prem brought his equipment to make small hoop houses over rows of low vegetables.  He had “hoop wire,” a thick wire formed into semicircles about 2’ high, and 3’ across.  He pushes the two ends into to ground on each side of the row.  Then he places these hoops about 4’ apart down the row.

Under the center of each hoop, he places a stake just the right height to support the apex of the hoop and uses duct tape to connect them.  Then he strings a line of pliable wire between the tops of each hoop/stake, securing it around the top of each stake all the way down the row.  All of this armature is used to support a long length of plastic sheeting that goes over the hoops along the row creating a mini-green house!  This will protect the plants down to 7 to 8 degrees and will hold up even under heavy snow!  You have to lift the plastic to water and work the plants—weed, aerate, fertilize, harvest.  But if the plant lies directly against the plastic, that part will freeze.

However, lettuce and leafy greens are fine without this protection down to 19 to 23 degrees! 

Or you can use glass “cold frames” made from old windows as well.

When he asked an old farmer when to put out plants in the spring or stop planting in the fall, the question was, “When did you loose any to frost?”—meaning keep planting as long as you can and don’t worry about loosing a few.

PROTECTION AGAINST SUN

Use “Remay” or “Shade Cloth” that looks like a heavier form of the Insect Barrier.  You need to keep it above the plants so that they won’t cook. Check it often and water under the covering.  This can also protect against frost.  But to protect against bugs, it needs to drape down to the ground.

FLOWERS

Hari Prem feels that flowers increase the electro-magnetic field, and are most sensitive to the incoming Aquarian energy.  They have subtle properties.

SEEDS

You can keep them for years and they will probably do all right.  It’s the law that says you can’t sell seeds that are older than last year’s crop.

Seeds can be “inoculated” against fungus that may destroy them in the soil.

He gets his from:

Country Farm in Espanola

Johnny’s Seeds catalog, 207-437-9294

Seeds of Change—“Heirloom” seeds, (old varieties)  800-957-3337, www.seedsofchange.com

GURUPREM KAUR has developed some great methods in her garden!

TOMATO PATCH with natural shade cover;

She got a number of tomato cages and arranged them in a circle about a foot or two apart around the perimeter.

Then she hung chicken wire against the cages on the outside of the circle to hold the width of chicken wire up, making a circular fence of it.

She filled the center with old rabbit droppings and straw as mulch and fertilizer.

During the summer, she let everything grow, including the weeds.  And since the weeds grew tallest, they shaded the tomatoes and gave her luscious tomatoes!

OTHER VEGGIES

She is also growing radishes, all kinds of lettuce, and red cabbage under shade cloth that is weighted directly on the ground.  This also keeps the grasshoppers off.

Her lettuce is in the shade of a tree and she waters by flooding it 2 or 3 times per week.  She keeps picking the lettuce so that it more grows.

IRRIGATION

Since she has a ditch that runs along the back of her property, she has set a basement pump in the ditch that is connected to a hose that waters her garden.  The pump automatically quits when there is no water in the ditch, insuring that the pump will not burn out.  Also, she has strung a long electric wire from the house to the pump to operate it.

MANURE

Since she has so many animals—rabbits, foul and lambs, she uses either old manure on her garden, or she heaps fresh manure up on top of mulch in the garden so that it will safely age in her garden.

KEEPING WEEDS DOWN

Last year, she had an extremely weedy patch.  So she flooded the area and fairly easily dug the weeds up, and in May she roto-tilled it.  Then she planted her garden there. 

In the fall, she covered the entire surface with straw, so there are no weeds there this spring, and the straw has decayed and left nutrients in the soil!