One of the things that I have needed to do is plant garlic for next year...we could frost now at any point, although summer seems to be clinging hard this year. It's still up close to 80 degrees during the day, and anywhere from 40 to 60 at night. I planted ten heads of garlic we saved back from this year's harvest...more than 70 cloves!
If they all grow (or even just most of them) I will have enough garlic for a head a week next year, plus more to plant, and some extra to give away. Now I'm just crossing my fingers and hoping we don't have our first freeze for several weeks yet, to give it a chance to root.
Now....for something ugly. I'm almost ashamed to post these pictures, but this is what my garden looked like earlier in the week...are you ready for it?
This is the mulched half of my garden...I'm experimenting with a cross between lasanga-style gardening and the Back to Eden garden method, which are both no-till, and involve layering mulch and compost on top of the soil, and allowing it to decompose without tilling it in. In the part of the garden pictured here I used triple or quadruple-layered newspaper as a weed barrier, topped with paper I've been saving out of my shredder (finally a good use for all that junk mail!), and ankle-deep straw. I really liked using this method...once I laid the paper and straw down, my weeding time in this bed was maybe five or ten minutes a week, tweaking up anything that happened to sprout, and laying down a little more straw where it compacted and thinned over time. I've already pulled out most of the tomato plants in the foreground, but I didn't pull any weeds before taking this picture. In all, I think this garden bed produced very well this year, considering last year it was part of the lawn.
In comparison, this is what the section of my garden that I did not mulch looked like the same day:
Quite a difference, eh? This is the east side of the pea fence, which contained lettuce, carrots, and onions. My onions rotted in the ground because of all the strange weather we had this year. I planted them on time, but we had several late freezes, followed by several weeks of rain that left them standing in water. It's no real surprise they rotted, but I was disappointed anyway. I pulled them about the end of July, salvaged what carrots I could, and just let it go. On the other side of the pea fence was where i grew my bush beans (already pulled), and you can see my broccoli and brussels sprouts. None of my broccoli, cabbage, or cauliflower plants produced anything this year. They just grew, and grew and grew. The seeds are from different stores and different brands, so I'm a bit stumped as to why none of them produced. At any rate, I left them in hopes that they would be more attractive to bugs than the green beans next to them, which seems to have worked out well. In the upper right corner you can see my sunflowers.
I mulched on the far side of the pea fence, but I used cardboard as a weed barrier instead of newspaper. I like it better because I didn't have to weed before laying it down like I did with the newspaper. It also seems to hold up better to rain and repeated watering, and I can get it easier than I can newspaper. I planted next year's garlic in this mulched area.
So what's the plan from here? Well, aside from pulling out the rest of the plants (harvesting anything I can get as I go), I will also pull up the pea fence, and till the unmulched part of the garden for the last time. Then I will cardboard and straw it to match the rest of garden. We fought against powdery mildew this year...it invaded the entire yard about a month and a half ago. All of the tomatoes, the roses, the lilacs, the trees...it's everywhere. If the plants had been healthy at this point, I would pull them up and lay them across the top of the straw to decompose over the winter, but I don't want to give the mildew or any other disease a chance to work down into the soil below the mulch so they get carted off to the brush pile instead.
After everything is papered and mulched, I will spread a thin layer of fresh horse manure on top, maybe two, three inches thick, tops. I will also add the leaves I rake up out of the yard, plus grass clippings, and let it sit and work all winter, occasionally spreading thin layers of ash from the fireplace on top. If possible, I will top the whole mess with another layer of cardboard and more mulch (wood chips this time) to help keep the heat from the decomposing manure trapped in. If I can't, I will do it in the spring before I start planting.
In theory, this method builds up the soil slowly while nurturing the plants you grow in it. The goal is to build layers of material of different sizes that decompose at different rates to keep a steady stream of nutrients available to your plants. The roots of the plants aerate and keep your soil soft and diggable without tilling, and the heavy layer of mulch keeps water in and weeds out--any weed seeds will stay on top of the mulch, far away from the moisture they need to sprout. It takes at least two years to really get the system going and start seeing the long-term effects of this method, so I'm looking at 2015, maybe 2016 to see results, but that's okay. Gardening is really a long term process anyway--it's always about next year. This is just an experiment--if it works I will drastically decrease the work load of gardening while increasing yields, and if it doesn't work I will just scrape off the wood chips and till the organic layers into my garden.
Has anyone else tried something similar to this?
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