If
you’ve been following along with us on Facebook, you’ll notice our springtime
vegetable garden is already beginning to take shape. It’s time to put some garden experiments to
task to see if they will hold up over the growing season!
Saving
Money on Fertilizer
 |
| Planting Buckwheat - 2015 |
Since
we don’t have livestock or poultry of our own to provide “free fertilizer” this
year we’re working on coming up with some new ideas that don’t involve us
dumping bagged cow manure from the local home store on the garden. Sure, we’ll be using up the leftover bagged
cow manure from years past on at least one of our gardens, but 120lbs of cow
manure will not be enough for all 4,200+ square feet of garden space!
Just
last week we were tilling up the ground and planting buckwheat for a springtime
cover crop to turn into “green manure” in about a month. We’re hoping it will take even though it’s
already had an onion snow upon it. The
decomposing buckwheat, once it is turned in, will add an extra boost to the
plants that go in the ground afterwards.
If
this fails? We’ll figure out Plan B when
we need it.
Blossom
End Rot
 |
| Blossom End Rot on Tomatoes - 2014 |
We
also had issues with tomatoes last year, namely this awful thing called blossom
end rot, which caused us to lose 50+ pounds of them. (Don’t feel too bad for us. We still managed to harvest nearly 1,000lbs
of tomatoes in the past two gardening years from the plants.) Well this year, after a lot of research in
what the best (and cheapest) way to fix the problem is, crushed egg shells will
become our calcium supplement.
So
since late last fall, I’ve been crushing every single eggshell we use and
putting it in a jar, prepping for the springtime garden! The half gallon jar is just about filled now,
so I can only hope we will have enough for our tomato plants.
Weed
Control
 |
| Getting Straw for the Berry Bushes - 2014 |
It’s
a toss-up as to what I hate more weeding or doing the dishes. Dishes may be a year ‘round job, but at least
you get a little shade doing them at the kitchen sink. Woe to those of us who have fair-skin and want
shade in a vegetable garden!
This
year I am officially sick of weeding,
and so almost all my wintertime garden research was devoted to how to get out
of the horrid task, but still maintain the design and integrity of our
vegetable garden (yup, no chemicals wanted here). That’s right, there’ll be no raised beds, I
don’t really like the idea of laying black
plastic landscape fabric across the
entire thing, and I’m not for dumping chemicals across every last inch of it.
So
I’m settling for the mulch solution. The
theory behind this is, if you lay your mulch thick enough in the garden you’ll
effectively smother the weeds and at the same time help to retain moisture (a
good idea since we’re already in a drought watch). According to everything I’ve read, weed-free
straw should be laid on 6-8” thick, pine needles 3” thick, and weed-free grass
clippings 3” thick. Old newspapers and
cardboard can also be used instead of black plastic landscape fabric, as they
will decompose instead of weather in your garden.
Some
of our crops will be getting one of these mulching methods to see if they do
any better, while other crops will be left to the elements and potential weeds
due to needing to be un-mulched to grow.
It’s a true experiment, and I’m hoping it works better then past failed
experiments did in the garden.
Watering
the Garden
 |
| Working on the Second-Hand Sprinkler - 2013 |
Are you experimenting with new methods in the garden this year? We’d love to hear about them. And, if you want to see how some of our past
experiments worked, check out our Vegetable Garden and Container Vegetable Garden pages on Pinterest!
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