Cornell University runs a Master Gardener program. Do the coursework, volunteer on the gardening hotline, and you can proudly append the title to your name. I’m glad the program exists, and I don’t doubt for a moment that it does tremendous good. But, personally, I would be terrified to call myself a master gardener. It would feel like I’d fallen into a Greek myth and told Demeter how to conduct her business. I’d spend the rest of my life expecting a bolt from the blue or at least a frost in July.
I know it’s possible to grow plants with remarkable consistency year after year. There are plenty of people who have veggie farms as businesses, and they seem to able to keep the flea beetles off the kale and the sweet corn sweet. Doubtless some rarified home gardeners, perhaps those generous individuals answering phones for Cornell, have the same sure touch. I’m just saying that for me the whole thing has always been a bit mysterious and always will be. Or maybe it’s just that my thinking is shaded by the current state of things.
The garden got away from us before it was even planted. In the best tradition of anyone trying to grow something, I mostly blame the weather. The past month was so rainy that even when the sky cleared for a few hours the ground remained too muddy to work. The lawn grew so long that the only way to cut it, after it finally dried, was to nibble away, never biting off more than half a mower’s width. Even with daily moves the cows have been beating up the pasture. This week it suddenly became obvious that the garden should go in, but a sober assessment determined that the grass and dandelions had been working just as vigorously in the veggie beds as in the pasture and the lawn. And this is where honesty compels me to admit that, in addition to a rainy spring, management may have contributed to the state of things.
And garden management, it turns out, has been a journey.
The Early Years: Extensive Beds, Lots of Tillage
When we first started the garden, before we had kids or built houses or owned a single cow, we established a garden on a small rise in a field the previous owner used for grazing goats. Our neighbor Don, seeing us struggling to break the thick sod with nothing but shovels (we didn’t yet own a tractor) took a break from plowing his corn field to take a pass. In a few minutes he converted grass into a blank brown rectangle.
We established beds and planted extensively. At first we followed Steve Solomon’s book Gardening When It Counts, which, despite the alarmist title, is a useful and pragmatic guide to growing veggies. (Even if you prefer a raised bed system, his discussions of fertility, compost, and plant spacing are worth thinking about.) Solomon calls for surface hoeing to control weeds, and so we dutifully hoed. We made fertilizer to his specifications. The result was good crops of basically everything. We tracked beds and rotated, and for a few years the system worked as intended, with one exception.
As the years passed the silty loam soil, which never had much structure, noticeably degraded. We simply did not have enough compost to maintain acceptable levels of organic matter. We still used fertilizer and minerals, and so plants still grew, but having a garden with worsening soil health, even as rotational grazing improved all the rest of our land, felt strange. And even if the garden wasn’t a disaster, healthier soil would presumably yield healthier veggies. We never tilled our pastures, so why not apply that same principles to the garden?
No-till Mulch Gardening: Lots of Hay, Lots of Slugs
The biggest challenge in most gardens is weed management. Veggies are the weak, coddled princes of the plant world, and grasses and thistles and purslane have a mercenary instinct. When they sense bare, fertile soil they move in, and if no one stops them they will strangle any seedlings they come across without remorse. It is the gardener’s job to maintain order, to place desirable plants where they will have an advantage and to keep the ground clear of competition. A weeding hoe, plied with any regularity, cuts off weeds at the root before they get a foothold. But when the hoe is set aside, other tactics must be used.
One common approach is mulch gardening. Applying a layer of loose hay or something similar blocks the sunlight weeds need to get going, and any that do manage to poke through can easily be pulled by hand. The bed beneath hardly needs to be touched, and as a bonus the decaying mulch layer steadily adds organic matter to the soil. It seemed like a perfect solution, especially since old hay bales lie thick on the ground in farm country.
But once again, after a few years problems presented themselves. First, while it’s easy enough to brush aside the hay and drop a robust seedling into a bed covered in a layer of mulch, direct seeding, which is a necessity for crops like storage carrots, is less compatible. The same shade that blocks weeds from growing will also block veggies. It’s possible to pull back the mulch layer in a wide strip until the seedlings are well established, but in the meantime weeds will take advantage, requiring extensive hand weeding. Annoying, but manageable.
The slugs, however, were not. All that damp shade and decomposing plant matter formed a perfect habitat, especially since we were kind enough to plant succulent cabbage starts and other tasty treats directly into the bustling slug metropolis we had created. A row of broccoli plants would go in one afternoon and be reduced to nubs by the following morning. The pole beans would hardly emerge before being grazed down. Eventually the slugs were so numerous that they even took some half hearted bites at storage onion plants, which I haven’t seen happen in any other garden. It was time for something else.
Stale Seed Beds and Light Tillage: A Perfect Balance?
For a variety of reasons our garden expanded significantly over the years, which meant we only needed about half of the total area at any one time. So when we heard about a technique called stale seed bed gardening we decided to give it a try.
The basic idea is that you put a tarp over an area before planting it. The sun heats the ground, which germinates a lot of weeds, but the heat and dark kill them, leaving bare soil without requiring any tillage. Though some weeds will turn up over the growing season, a minimal amount of hoeing keeps them in check. And because we didn’t need our whole garden every year, we could let half of it fallow each season, then tarp over it, which added significant organic matter to the soil.
What made it all work despite the large size of the garden was an abundance of billboard tarps. If you’ve ever wondered how an image is applied to a billboard, the answer is that it is printed on a tarp, and that tarp is then stretched across the blank billboard. When one these has served out its functional life it gets taken down. If you are polite the companies that manage the whole process will give you a whole stack for free. A a result, tarping thousands of square feet every year didn’t cost anything.
But, though billboard tarps are durable, they do degrade over time. Even though it’s impossible to say whether it was really a problem, we began to feel uncomfortable with a system that relied on putting a layer plastic over the soil for large parts of the year. Meanwhile, Ed has been making huge amounts of biochar, which we thought would improve soil structure even in a system the involved tillage.
This Year: Extensive Beds, Lots of Tillage
In a way we’re back where we started. Ed borrowed a rototiller, which converted the overgrown sod to dirt. We will make it into beds and plant it, using hoes to control weeds. We’ve been fallowing ground consistently enough that the soil will have decent structure for a while, and hopefully all the biochar will help.
But Ed pointed out something interesting; the rototiller is four feet wide — a good width for a bed of veggies — which means it would be easy to use it in a garden with a permanent layout. Perhaps, when we leave part of the garden fallow, instead of just letting whatever shows up grow, we will try planting field peas or oats as a cover crop, then till them in, instead of having to battle with grass each time we move back into an area. (And even with machinery, converting grass to bare soil is a battle.)
Whatever happens next year, I’m sure it will be a bit different from this one or the one before. But even though nothing is perfectly consistent, for the most part things work out — we end up with onions and potatoes in storage, and all summer long we enjoy fresh lettuce. Hopefully squash will do better this year than last, but even if it doesn’t the garden will be enough of a success to be worth it. At the very least, it’s always good for something to think about.