Vegetable gardening is fun, good exercise and, most important, gives you assurance that the food you are eating really has been grown organically, and that it is high in food value and free of toxic chemicals. Let’s cover some instructions for the beginners and fine-tune suggestions for the experienced gardeners.
What I recommend actually gets easier the more we experiment and learn from our mistakes.
Forget completely removing and replacing the native soil. It is an important part of the bed preparation mix. Also forget the peat moss, pine bark and washed concrete sand. To have successful production the very first season, in short: Add plenty of compost, organic fertilizer, rock minerals and sugars (microbe stimulators) to the native soil, and mulch bare soil around growing plants.
Starting the project with a soil test can be helpful to fine-tune your organic fertilizing, but if time doesn’t allow, the same bed preparation specs work for all soils — sand, loam, clay or any combination. If you have time, the Soil Savvy soil test kit is excellent for home and farm use.
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Start by scraping away existing weeds and grass and tossing them in the compost pile. Don’t have one? Well, let’s start one. Just pile the material up in some out-of-the-way place. Even if you don’t maintain it well, discarded grass, weeds and other plant and animal waste will slowly turn into compost.
Do this work before any tilling is done. Tilling first drives the reproductive part of the grasses and weeds down in the ground to become a problem that lasts forever. Organic herbicides (not the toxic stuff like Roundup) can be used, but physical removal of a couple of inches of soil is still better.
Add amendments to the bare soil and till about 8 inches deep to create beds that are about 4 feet wide with 18-to-24-inch walkways of mulch between the beds. Use 4 to 6 inches of compost, organic fertilizer (2 pounds per 100 square feet), lava sand (10 pounds per 100 square feet), Azomite (4 pounds per 100 square feet), dry molasses (2 pounds per 100 square feet) and whole ground cornmeal (2 pounds per 100 square feet). This creates a raised bed, but a wall isn’t really needed. Just carve the edges down at an angle.
Moisten beds before planting — and make sure the roots of transplants are sopping wet before they are planted. If you’re planting seeds, they should be treated with Garrett Juice prior to planting. This speeds up and improves germination. Seeds can be soaked in a small dish or spritzed with a hand sprayer after being laid out on paper.
Mulch beds with 2 to 3 inches of shredded native tree trimmings after planting transplants. Never pile mulch onto the stems of plants. Plants grown from seeds should be mulched after the plants start to grow.
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March 16, 2021 at 02:29AM
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How to get started on a spring vegetable garden - The Dallas Morning News
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