Great Saturday Garden

Today is Great Saturday or Holy Saturday, the day between Jesus' death and his resurrection. In the Church, it's celebrated with watchful expectation and funeral hymns.

I'm celebrating with a morning of catching up with friends, house tasks, and gardening.

Garden this week:

1. April garden tasks

2. Hardening off

3. Planting

4. Sharing with nature

5. Build healthy soil

6. Cover everything with plants

1. April garden tasks:

I'm using the Second Breakfast Garden monthly guides to update my checklists, because they are in zone 8b. In early April my priorities are to:

1. Harvest kale and bok choy.
2. "Stale Seedbed" Weed Control: I've prepared beds for planting - loosening with a fork, adding compost - and weeds are sprouting like crazy. This method decreases the bank of weed seeds in the soil by coaxing them to germinate then scuffling them under repeatedly. Just run a hoe over the beds, keep them wet, and hoe again when weeds pop up.
3. Plant indoors: I started zinnias last week, and this week we will start sunflowers!
4. Clean up: Since our temperatures are rising above 55 degrees, most of our native insects, including our beloved mason bees, should have emerged by this time. It is now safe to do a thorough yard cleanup. Cut back any old stems and other chaff and leave about 1/2 height for this year’s bugs to use. When your plants spring up, it covers the old stems.

2. Hardening Off: 

Most plants will go out later in April, but this week I've been getting my lettuce babies ready for the rigors of life out-of-doors, by exposing them little-by-little to sun, wind, and rain. This will trigger them to reinforce their cell walls, making them stronger and more resilient.

Hardening off calendar:

Lettuce: March 29 - April 4

Bok choy: April 5- 11

Collards: April 12- 18

Peppers and leeks: April 19-25

Hardening off instructions: Check the weather forecast and aim to begin on an overcast day. A good rule of thumb is to increase the time a plant spends outside by one or two hours each day, working up to overnight exposure. If you have the luxury of time or nighttime temps aren’t quite warm enough, spend twice as many days in each phase and transplant on Day 14. Set seedlings outside in a sheltered area, off the ground (to protect from snails), that receives indirect sunlight - use an umbrella or shade cloth.

• Days 1 & 2: Leave the plants outside for a few hours of morning sunlight, but bring them in before noon.
• Days 3 & 4: Set seedlings outside midmorning in a less protected area so they are exposed to a gentle breeze. Leave the plants outside until early afternoon to build up their tolerance to direct sunlight. 
• Days 5 & 6: Set seedlings outside in the early morning and leave the seedlings out all day and overnight – they’ll be just fine! 
• Day 7: Weather permitting, it’s time to plant those properly hardened off seedlings! If possible, plan to transplant on an overcast day with rain in the forecast, and cover the transplants with frost cloth or cloches for extra protection, though not required.

3. Planting:

It's three weeks before our last average frost: Time to plant root crops  outdoors!

Beets (Beta vulgaris) are descended from the sea beet, a wild seashore plant growing around the Mediterranean and along the coasts of Europe and North Africa. The native sea beet was primarily eaten for its leaves rather than its root, which was like a skinny carrot.

Beets are a year round crop for me: I make two plantings each year, now and again in the fall, for an all season harvest. They prefer to be planted in moist soil that has reached 50°F. Beets grow well with onions and garlic, lettuce, radishes, strong-scented herbs, and the cabbage family. Don't plant them near to pole beans, field mustard, or chard. Beet leaves are composed of 25% magnesiums, so be sure to compost any you don't eat.

Carrots (Daucus carota) originated in Persia around the 10th century, initially cultivated for their aromatic leaves and seeds rather than the root. Early domesticated carrots were purple, yellow, or white. Dutch farmers in the 16th/17th century bred sweeter orange carrots by crossing different varieties, partly as a tribute to William of Orange.

4. Sharing with nature: 

Part of being a good neighbor is to share the food wealth. It goes against normal gardener-nature to share with slugs and snails, but when you practice nature-culture, you need to begin to think like a neighbor. That doesn't mean you need to let  those who share the garden take everything! Just stop thinking of it as a war.

This spring the snails ate my baby spinach as soon as I put it out (and I think the Jays ate my pea seeds...) - that's not really sharing! It's time to do some damage control, but I remember the goal is to bring snail numbers down, not total eradication: I collected all of the leftover mulch and put it into the compost, let the ducks into the garden for an hour or two for supervised hunting, and then sprinkled Sluggo sparingly, about 1 pellet every six or so inches. My spinach recovered nicely.

5. Build healthy soil:

Before I plant I need to prepare the soil, using regenerative concepts and practices. The first one to think about in the spring is to disturb the soil as little as possible to keep carbon in the ground. That means no more tilling or digging if at all possible. Digging destroys the soil structure, the fungal networks, and the sticky soil organisms that hold soil together.

In the olden days, I would go out every spring and dig up all my beds, removing all the weeds, and turning the soil over to expose all the weed seeds. I don't do that at all anymore. First, I remove the mulch and put it in the path or on the compost, then I break off the weeds at the ground if they are threatening to go to flower, leaving most of the roots, and then I loosen the soil with a fork.

Using nature as my guide, I know that to establish annuals like vegetables, you have to loosen the soil; in nature the earthworms and microbes do that work all on their own with biological tillage (earthworms dig tunnels and provides aeration and drainage while their excretions bind together soil crumbs), but I help a little in my garden with a garden fork - just poke it in and gently rock it, disturbing the soil structure as little as possible.

The second regenerative concept to consider in the spring is focus on the soil health more than the crop. This is a big shift in thinking for those of us raised to produce a big crop at all costs. If the soil health - the health of the Earth - becomes the top priority, then many of my spring preparations need to change.

How does one improve soil health? First, by leaving soil structure intact (not digging) and second by feeding the soil microbes. Soil microbes will do the work of improving the soil structure and sequestering carbon, but they need food, and one way to feed them is with compost and manure.

Basically, our job is to improve the living conditions for the soil microbes so they will increase. After I loosen the soil, I spread on 2-3 inches of compost, either from my own compost bin or from a bag. Good compost supplies both the organic matter for soil-building and the fertilizer for the crops; most importantly, it’s packed with soil organisms that trigger biological activity. It inoculates your soil with microbes that will digest nutrients present in the soil and feed your plants.

Solid food like compost and manure is good, but it's really not the most efficient food for microbes. Read on!

6. Cover everything with plants
The third regenerative practice to think about in the spring is to keep the soil planted to maximize photosynthesis and carbon sequestration.

The very best way to feed microbes is to grow more plants - cover all the ground with plants all the time, because they will feed the microbes with their root sweat (called exudates). This is the best source of microbe food because it's easier to digest, and more carbon stays in the soil. More plants means more roots, means more exudates!

That's why I don't pull weeds out of the ground anymore - even weed roots are better than nothing. Perennial plants are best, but annuals, cover crops, and even weeds are better than bare ground.

And the fourth concept is focus on plant diversity for a beautiful garden that attracts beneficial insects.

My planting goal each spring, then, is to cover all the soil with a great diversity of healthy plants, to maximize the exudates and variety of microbes, and to attract a wide variety of wildlife. I do this by:

• Interplanting- Fill every bed with plants, and stop worrying about crowding.
• Cover crops - Have a container of mixed seed ready to sprinkle whenever you harvest.
• Plant health - Water and feed to increase root growth.