Food-Gardening Lessons From A Wartime Victory Garden

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Author: Maureen Gilmer

Maureen Gilmer is celebrating her 40th year in California horticulture and photojournalism as the most widely published professional in the state. She is the author of 21 books on gardening, design and the environment, is a widely published photographer, and syndicated with Tribune Content Agency. She is the weekly horticultural columnist for the Desert Sun newspaper in Palm Springs and contributes to Desert Magazine, specializing on arid zone plants and practices for a changing climate. She works and lives in the remote high desert for firsthand observations of native species. Her latest book is The Colorful Dry Garden published by Sasquatch Books. When not writing or photographing she is out exploring the desert on her Arabian horse. She lives in Morongo Valley with her husband Jim and two rescue pit bulls. When not writing or photographing she is usually out riding her quarter horse.

Tend Your Organic Garden

Ever wonder why some people can grow fabulous gardens and others can’t? The answer is simple: they spend more time with their plants and tend to their gardens more. Experienced gardeners know that frequent inspection allows them to see the first signs of trouble, whether it’s wilt, broken limbs, a digging dog or caterpillars. These can be remedied immediately before damage occurs, and without the need for chemicals.

It pays to tend your organic garden for best yields. Great gardeners do it each day. Sometimes it’s with a cup of morning coffee, a glass of wine after work or when the kids are down for their naps. In short, the more time you spend out there the better you’ll tend to the silent needs of the garden. Here are some basics that can make this your best garden ever.

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Divide Perennials For Free Plants

echinacea-280x255 October is a fine time to dig and divide clumps of perennials that are so old they fail to bloom like they should. Lift the plant with a fork, wash it off to see the stem and root structure, then divide perennials at the natural points with a sharp knife. Soften the soil at the new planting locations with Black Gold Garden Compost Blend to make it easier for the divisions to strike new roots for bountiful displays come spring.

Rich in organics, Black Gold® Garden Compost Blend is a quality amendment that will fortify any garden. Not only will it build soil health and structure, but gardeners can be assured plants will be supplied with needed fertility for top performance.

Black Gold Earthworm Castings for Container Gardening

Potted PlantsIf your tender potted plants have been outdoors all summer, watering them with the hose often results in overflow and lost of soil. Now is a great time to add Black Gold Earthworm Castings as a top dressing to improve bioactivity in the pot and cover newly exposed roots. Be sure to leave enough space between soil and pot rim to be able to fill it with a generous amount of water.

 

Super Organic Leaf Mulch

leaf mold bin
Fall leaves are an important source of organic matter that decomposes into soft, rich leaf mulch or mold. To harvest, create a corral using woven wire to contain the leaves. Fill with a foot deep layer of leaves, wet it, then pack down tightly. Sprinkle Black Gold All Purpose Fertilizer on top and dump in any left over potting soil from this year. Repeat layering over and over as leaves fall, adding more fertilizer to speed decomposition and increase your leaf mold fertility for fabulous results next year.
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BLACK GOLD® Waterhold Cocoblend Potting Soil

BG Waterhold Coco Blend
Waterhold Cocoblend Potting Soil is the sustainable solution for container gardens in arid climates or wherever water is in short supply.  Its unique ability to retain large amounts of water means you water less often, which helps conserve water throughout the season.  If you’ve had difficulties keeping your vegetables hydrated during the hot summer months, don’t give up on growing your own food.  Give it another try with this potting soil, which is carefully blended to provide ample moisture at the root zone. Continue reading “BLACK GOLD® Waterhold Cocoblend Potting Soil”

Cultus Succulentata, the Succulent Plant Lovers Club

These teenage barrel cacti prefer to grow in the gravelly ground of a rocky hillside.

Ten years ago I digressed into a netherworld of horticulture that is secretive, dogmatic, painful and unforgiving. Call it Cultus Succulentata, an unofficial group of succulent lovers as unconventional as the plants we cultivate. What binds us are succulent plants able to survive in the most arid climates.  But, I’m hooked on one family of this succulent cult, Cactaceae, which grow nowhere else but in the Americas. As a desert rat mentored by cactus guru Clark Moorten, at his botanical garden in the Palm Springs desert, I have been taught by the best.

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Turning, Tilling, and Amending Your Organic Garden

Gardens can be turned by hand or mechanically tilled. The results and investments of time and energy are very different. Sometimes they can be done in conjunction, other times one or the other is more appropriate.

If you don’t have a spading fork, now is the time to buy one. This unique tool looks like a pitch fork, but the tines are straight and much thicker. For anyone serious about mixing an organic garden by hand, this is your most important purchase. Do not scrimp on quality because a good fork will last for decades. The spading fork turns soil more easily because the tines break up clods automatically, unlike a shovel which actually helps to cement heavy soil together.

A rototiller an essential workhorse used for larger in-ground gardens, tilling thoroughly and deeply with minimal effort.Tillers are too heavy for raised beds and won’t turn tightly enough to be of good use. Lightweight Mantis tillers are the exception, but they are still no replacement for the fork.

At this stage of garden preparation, three mistakes are common. Gardeners often fail to get enough amendment, they don’t till or turn the soil deep enough, and they work the amendments into just the top few inches of soil. Roots need deep, fertile soil for best root development, so the deeper your soil is worked and amended, the better.

Getting Started

BG-GRDNCMPST-BLND_1cu-FRONTThe first step is rough-turning by hand or rough tilling. It eliminates compaction that built up over winter from rain and snow. Some gardeners let the ground sit open for a week after rough-tilling before going to the next step. This allows time to fully aerate the soil and exposes underground pests so they die or can be easily removed.
To get the most of the rototiller, go slow to allow it to dig down and open that lower layer of soil. When tilling by hand, till at least as deep as the length of the spading fork tines. The result will be a rough, irregular surface that allows amendments to settle deep into the nooks and crannies.

The next step is to spread your Black Gold Garden Compost Blend and other amendments evenly over the entire surface. For in-ground gardens, this is the a-ha moment when you realize you haven’t got nearly enough to cover it all at least three inches deep. Raised bed gardeners may discover they’ve overfilled the beds with soil, and there’s with no free board left on the edges to contain the additional organic matter. Be sure to resolve these issues before proceeding, and use this formula to determine the amount of amendment to add over a given area.

Amendment Application Formula

([area to cover] ft2 x [depth in inches desired] x 0.0031 = ___ yd3).

Example: If you wanted to cover a 20 square foot area with 2 inches of compost, the result would be: 20 ft2 x 2 inches of compost x 0.0031 = 2.48 yd3.

Till the amendments in as deeply as you can, then do it again in the opposite direction. This is to catch any undisturbed strips or pockets missed between previous passes. When using a spading fork, strive for even tillage, working backwards across the soil, so you aren’t standing on newly turned ground.

After tilling the last time, use your heavy garden rake to level the soil, removing the remnants of last year’s plants. If you are planting from seed, go over it again with a fine leaf rake to get the surface ready to be sown.

Because organic gardening is about feeding the soil, consider yourself the chef. Tilling in amendments is the process of serving a healthy meal. When this all comes together in a gourmet creation, the miracle of life in your organic garden begins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLACK GOLD® Natural & Organic Potting Soil

BG Natural and Organic Potting Soil
Black Gold Natural & Organic Potting Soil is so versatile it works for everything from hanging baskets to raised vegetable beds. This is not just any soil, it’s a precise blend of everything your plants need to look their best and produce abundantly. Because it’s listed by the Organic Materials Review Institute, you can be sure your organic food crops grown in this enriched soil remain blessedly chemical free.

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Raised Garden Beds In Dry Country

BG-WATERHOLD_1cu-FRONTMy desert garden is the worst case scenario, and I like it that way. When I test plants and products for gardens, they go through the wringer…literally. I want to know how far I can push things before they fail.

 

When the dry wind blows up here in the high desert of southern California, it sucks every bit of moisture out of the soil surface. The real problem is called desiccation, which is the process of wind drawing moisture out of a living leaf. Under these conditions, there simply isn’t enough moisture in the root zone to replace what’s lost. Growth slows, leaf edges brown and plants fail to thrive.

 

I decided to try Black Gold Waterhold Cocoblend Potting Soil to see if it would offer plants more immediate moisture availability. Because my soil is so porous, I simply dug a hole, filled it with Cocoblend and planted tomatoes directly into the potting soil. Nearby I mixed compost and organic fertilizer into my desert ground, which is more like decomposed granite than real soil, and planted more tomatoes there. The test plant groups were no more than four feet apart.

 

Then came an unusual with cold gale force winds from dawn to dusk. My test took the full brunt of it. The plants in Cocoblend stood the desiccation easily. The others lost their bright green coloring and took on temporary wilt. Frankly, it amazed me that differences were so immediately apparent. And this repeated itself over and over when temperatures soared or more moderate wind blew for days. I could not help but attribute the difference to the coir in the aptly named Waterhold Cocoblend.

 

densityCoir is a byproduct of coconut processing. It is the stringy brown fibers that composed the husk, and these are stripped off when coconuts are processed. When finely ground, this material is proving the most absorptive material available, and yet it won’t pack down over time to cause drainage problems. Best of all, it is recycled, not mined.
What this told me is that Black Gold Waterhold Cocoblend Potting Soil is without question the best choice for raised beds in dry climates hot and cold. Somehow the absorbency of coir is so far beyond anything we’ve seen in the past that its revolutionizing the potting soil world. When used to fill raised beds, it is the best choice for sustainability because it is made from recycled material and helps to conserve water. Virtually every drop you apply to the garden will be absorbed and held ready for roots when they need it. Plus, it takes about twenty years for coir to decompose, so you can be sure it’s as viable today as it will be in the future.

 

The combination of coir and peat moss is biologically active because worm castings are part of the scientifically blended soil. Earth worms process natural soil into castings which are rich in slow release nutrients. They also contain a whole world of microbes which are introduced to this rich organic soil. Some microbes actually make plants more resistant to drought, promote more aggressive root development and improve disease resistance.

 

Whenever you create a vegetable garden in raised beds, you must fill it with soil. There are many choices available in a wide range of prices. But remember this: You get one chance to fill those beds, and selecting poor, low cost soil means you start off lacking in water holding potential, microbial activity and nutrient loads from day one. That’s a serious problem out west in our hot, rainless, dry environment. You’ll be always running to catch up. That’s no real savings.

 

Fix Troubled Garden Soils with Coir

peppers
My desert garden after lots of amendment with Black Gold products high in organic matter.

My soil has never resembled that perfect loamy ground in Martha Stewart’s garden or a posh garden show. The first plot I cultivated for 18 years was dense clay too filled with rocks to resemble the soft soil all gardeners dream about. My second garden here in the desert is just the opposite. It’s sand and decomposed granite so porous it won’t make a clod. My two yards are probably more like yours: a battleground where I’ve fought to improve less than ideal soil structure. But one product has helped above others and that’s coir.

Organic matter is the one thing that solves both sandy and clay soil structural problems. Finely ground organic matter mixed into clay helps keep the tiny soil particles separated. The separation creates gaps that allow water, air, fertilizer and roots to penetrate more easily. Likewise, organic matter helps sandy soils better retain needed moisture and nutrients. Coir is an excellent supplier of organic matter for both these situations–better than even common organic additives like composted manure.

Clay-rich soil is surprisingly fertile, with high microbe populations that count it among our most productive agricultural soils. It’s just it’s high density that’s problematic. When I added truckloads of composted manure to that first garden, plants in it grew like gangbusters, but then all the amendment seemed to disappear by the next season. The high population of soil microbes literally ate the manure, and they’ll do the same in your soil too. (If only I’d had Black Gold’s Just Coir, which provides more prolonged, better structure to clay soils—especially when combined with compost.) Desert gardens soils have similar problems for different reasons.

In desert soil, organic matter serves a very different purpose because sand just won’t hold water in the root zone long enough for plants to absorb it. Every tiny bit of organic matter added to this soil acts as a miniature sponge to absorb water and nutrients to keep them handy for plants. It’s also important for creating an environment suited to microbes, which are few and need loads of compost and coir for healthy populations.

In the past, manures and compost were the corrective organic matter for troubled soils. But coir has gained popularity because it works. This byproduct of the coconut industry is proving to be a far more long-lasting soil conditioning material. It resists the quick decomposition of compost, ensuring an enduring benefit. That’s why it’s a component in many Black Gold soil amendments.

To improve your soil structure, Just Coir is a great solution for overly porous or dense ground. It’s a soft, finely ground amendment that is easy to mix in, holds water wonderfully and lasts longer than anything else.

To create a superior garden this year, mix in Black Gold All Purpose (5-5-5) OMRI Listed fertilizer into the soil with Just Coir to improve both structure and fertility of porous soils. Another option for clay soils is to blend Just Coir with Black Gold Worm Castings and fertilizer to feed the enormous microbe population as they go to work breaking down the organic matter.

Adding soil amendments before planting isn’t just a one-time thing, but an annual or bi-annual thing. It is an ongoing process that will gradually solve problems with soil structure, increases biotic activity and increase fertility. With Just Coir and a little time, gardeners can achieve great garden soils that may just verge on Martha-Stewart-perfect garden soil.