5 FREE Soil Amendments that you can Easily Find!

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Creative Ways to Help Your Garden

by Sandy Swegel

One of the problems with gardening is that you just can’t rush Mother Nature.  If you don’t get those tomato seeds planted early enough, there’s just no way to trick the plants into growing overnight. Compost is the same…you can’t just mix everything up today and use the compost tomorrow.  But there are things you can scavenge that you can add directly to your garden that help your garden a lot more than those sterile-looking bags of manure or compost they sell at the store. And they’re free!

1. Leaf Mold

Better even than regular compost for improving soil texture, leaf mold is what you end up with after a pile of leaves has rotted down to a dark earthy mix with only a few leaves still recognizable. This can take one or two years depending on how wet your climate is.  You can find leaf mold that’s been breaking down for months or years anywhere leaves collect:  where the wind blows them behind the garage or along the shady side of the fence.  Your neighbor’s yard is a good place to find it, or along stream beds or in shady woods.  Dig in to get the dark damp leaf mold next to the soil and leave the dry leaves for another year. Spread the leaf mold over your garden, at the bottom of planting holes, or along the trenches for your potatoes.  This is pure gold for your garden.

2. Coffee grounds

Coffee shops are often willing to give you their used coffee grounds for free. Starbucks packages them up for you in empty large coffee bags.  No need to do anything special with the grounds…just sprinkle them across your soil or at the base of plants.  The plants like the boost from caffeine almost as much as you do.

3. Weed Tea  

When I’m weeding, I keep two buckets with me…one for the green leaves (and roots) of weeds like dandelions, thistle, dock, lambsquarters and one for the seed heads or other garden debris I’m cleaning.  All those long tap roots that are so hard to dig out have been pulling up minerals and micronutrients from deep in the soil.  Once my bucket of green leaves is mostly full, I fill the rest with water and leave the bucket out to “steep.” After four days or longer, (ideally until it starts to smell bad), I use this nutrient rich water to water the garden. The leaves get thrown out or into the compost. Plants that get this water turn a nice dark green.

4. Grass Clippings

If you (or your neighbor) have a lawn (and you don’t use weed killer), the grass clippings are the perfect mulch for your garden.  Layer the clippings thinly on the surface of the soil near your plants. Keep adding it every week and it will keep breaking down at the soil line into compost.

5. Newspaper

Most newspapers are printed now with soy ink and safe to use in the garden.  Lay three or four sheets of newspaper over the soil in your walkways or between rows and cover with mulch.  The newspaper helps block weeds from coming up, and reduces evaporation.  Worms LOVE the taste of newspaper and will help break it down into rich soil.

How to Transplant your Veggie Starts

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Avoiding Plant Transplant Trauma

by Sandy Swegel

You’ve done all the work of getting little seedlings started.  Maybe you’ve already hardened them off.  Now, planting them in your garden has a few tricks that can make a big difference in how many vegetables you get to eat.

“Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner” was one of the things I learned from a “mature” gardener who took pity on me when he saw the pitifully few tomatoes I had in my first garden.  This was something taught by the great biointensive gardener, Alan Chadwick. His idea was that if you raised little seedlings in nice light soil with fertilizer, like most of our seedling mixes, and then put it into hard not too fertile garden soil, the plants did poorly.  Instead, he advocated starting seeds in a flat with a good planting mixture, “Breakfast.”  Then he transplanted into a second flat of fresh soil for “Lunch.” Finally, he treated his plants to “Dinner”  when he put them in his loamy, fertile intensive beds.  The plants got over their transplant trauma because they were so happy about all the yummy things in their new home.

Transplanting your veggie starts like this actually stimulates new growth.  So before you plant your loved and coddled transplants, make sure the soil in their new home has compost and fertilizer and the soil has been loosened up so little roots can find their way.  And make big holes. No fair hurrying up to get the plant in the ground and just carving out a spot only as big as the pot you’re planting. You can see in the photos how big vegetable roots can be…you need to make sure that the whole root zone has good soil with nutrients.

Lots of food and minerals in well-composted soil will make your vegetables give you bountiful food!

For more info on “biointensive” gardens, I recommend the garden bible I use every year: “How to Grow More Vegetables” by John Jeavons.  His techniques really work.

Two Secrets to Great Compost!

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Composting Tips

by Sandy Swegel

How to make bad compost:

You need the right proportions of greens and browns to get the metabolic process going.  Too much brown and nothing happens.  Too much green and you either get slime or the greens just turn brown.

You need the right amount of water. Too little water (rainfall is not enough in Colorado to make compost) and everything is still whole and undigested a year later.  Too much rainfall….in Louisiana we had to cover the compost to keep the rain out…and it’s just putrefying sludge.

Air is important too. I had a burly housemate who made a huge pile and stomped on everything to make it fit.  Dry compressed leaves and debris were in pile two years later.

Weather conditions change how the pile works….my cold compost pile…you keep throwing things on top—quit working during last year’s drought pile.  No rainfall most of the summer and frugal amounts of chlorinated water weren’t enough to keep the pile going.  Everything just dried out including the worms.

So after so many failed piles and attempts to do things right, I have found two sure-fire ways to make great compost.

One.  Eat your fruits and vegetables.  Nothing keeps compost going better than little nests of your household food scraps put into the center of your pile every few days.  Don’t scatter it all over…just a little metabolic engine of food decomposition at the center of the pile helps everything else compost.  You can keep putting your weeds and debris on top…but just add food scraps to the middle when you have them.  Variety seems to help.  One year I thought I could keep the pile happy with all the zucchini bats….nope…the microbes and worms want variety—some banana peels and eggshells, maybe some moldy bread and coffee grounds.

Two. Use a good starter.

Never completely empty your compost….always leave some at the bottom of your pile to provide the microbes for the next batch.  But if your pile still isn’t thriving, it might need some starter from somewhere else. Occasional shovels of soil from the garden helps, but sometimes our soil isn’t as rich in microbes as we’d like.  Then you need a generous friend with a great compost pile.  A bucket of good active moist compost from a living pile will inoculate your entire pile.  It’s like making sourdough or yogurt….you need the starter.  And somebody else’s compost is better than any dried up compost starter you buy in the store.

Another Reason to Love Dandelions

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We Aren’t The Only Ones Who Love Dandelions

by Sandy Swegel

I may never pull another dandelion again.  Well, at least not in my yard.  But it was an utter joy to learn something new about dandelions yesterday while enjoying my morning coffee and looking out the window.  We’ve had a very late Spring with heavy snows and everyone is worried about the bees having enough food.  Dandelions started blooming seriously last week and I sat drinking coffee and watching at least forty bees feed on the patch of dandelions in pasture grass outside my window.  And then came the delight. A tiny house wren…one of those little birds that live by the hundreds in tree or thickets…flew down and delicately started pulling on the puffball of a dandelion seedhead.  With great industry, the bird pulled off two or three of the seeds at a time (and dandelion seeds are tiny) and teased them from the hairy chaff.  He stayed pulling off the seed and threshing them for several minutes.  Naturally by the time I got the camera he was back in the tree chirping away.

There’s so much beauty and bounty around us every moment.  All these years I’ve been gardening and I never noticed how much little birds depended on finding weed seeds.

 http://www.birdsinbackyards.neth

Soapy Water: The Answer to Most Problems

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Easy Solution for Small Garden Pests

We’ve been grateful all week for pollinators of all shapes and sizes and how crucial they are for feeding us and for making a beautiful world of flowers and trees.  We know you understand our first priority to help pollinators by which is to create a habitat with the plants they like.

The next most important thing you can do for pollinators is to not kill them accidentally when you are trying to control other pests in the yard.

That’s where soapy water comes in. A simple squirt of castile soap – Dr. Bronner’s is most people’s favorite – in a spray bottle will take care of most small garden pests.  (It doesn’t help much with the bunnies and raccoons.) Add in a tablespoon of baking soda and you can take care of most fungus too.   Soapy water works on what it’s sprayed on but doesn’t hurt most pollinators who come later to the plant. So many commercial products get into a plant “system” and kill good bugs who visit the plant later.  Or they get into the soil and kill soil microbes.

The simple recipe for insect control is:

1 teaspoon Dr. Bronner’s soap, any variety. 2 cups water. Spray bottle.

Turns out using soapy water to save pollinators is a lot cheaper too.  One key to using soapy water or any pest control is you have to repeat the process in another week or so to get the next life cycle of the insect.

Another use for soapy water in the garden is to have a bucket of soapy water for putting the big pests like squash bugs and cutworms that you collect by hand.

So thanks for loving our pollinators and creating beautiful, safe habitats for them!

Links: Entomologist Whitney Cranshaw on soap:http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05547.html

Why you don’t add vinegar to soapy spray: http://lisa.drbronner.com/?p=292 

Natural Recipes for killing pests and fungus: http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/organic/2002081329023823.html

The Not-So-Dangerous Bee Swarm

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Why to Respect these Valuable Pollinators

It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies and spine-chilling stories — a swarm of bees attacking everything in their path. Mad, ruthless, and vicious buzzing creatures covering whatever strikes their fancy (usually a person) until they succumb to the deadly stings! This is how a swarm of bees behaves, right?
Well, not exactly.

First of all, let’s discuss what a honey bee swarm is and exactly why they’re swarming. A swarm is an entire colony of bees looking for a place to start up housekeeping. It includes a queen and up to 30,000 of her pals, the worker bees and drones. They do this without any anger, aggression, nor any plans to sting people.

Usually, a young queen is born into a colony and she takes the place of the old queen (no one said life as a queen was easy). The old queen sees the writing on the wall and starts packing for greener pastures. Don’t worry, she has some loyal subjects — she ends up taking about half of that colony with her to hang around a new castle.

The entourage is led by the queen bee and her pheromones — which has them following her beyond all reason. When the queen finds a comfy bush or tree branch, the swarm will settle there, as well. Ultimately what they’re looking for is an unoccupied cavity in which to call home. This is the time when a savvy beekeeper will place a beehive below the swarm to attract them. If the colony approves (and by “the colony”, I mean the Queen) then someone just got themselves a brand new hive, pollination team, and honey processing plant!

Let’s back up a bit. There’s a thick, black, buzzing cloud going through your yard and you’re supposed to believe that these guys don’t have your name at the top of their tiny, bee hit-list, right? That’s exactly right. And the reason that they don’t have stinging on their mind is that honey bees typically defend two things: their young (in the hive) and their honey (also in the hive).

They tend to get irked when you mess with these things — as well they should. In the honeybee’s defense, if you’re going to go into a hive and take either of those things, well…that actually makes you the aggressor.

That said, personally, I wouldn’t grab a broom and start flailing it around trying to swat at the swarm. I mean that probably falls under the definition of provocation, am I right?

If you find that a swarm of honeybees has landed at your home, garage, or porch and you not only don’t believe a word I’ve written here, but are getting ready to sue me because these bees are certainly going to kill you in your sleep…all I ask is that instead of taking matters into your own hands, please contact a local beekeeper to have them gently removed. Honey bees are one of our most valuable pollinators and they’re having a terrible time staying in existence.

Trivial Note: I’m not a honey beekeeper. Although, I am a Western Blue Mason Beekeeper, which isn’t of any importance to this article at all. I only mention it for the record.

Early-Risers, Hardworking and Charming Personalities!

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No Longer Ignore These Pollinators

Blue Mason (Osmia lignaria) or Orchard bees who have previously been all-but-ignored by the general public have recently enjoyed a newfound popularity. And why shouldn’t they? The non-aggressive little pollinators are not only top-notch pollinators, but they’re also early-risers, hardworking and some of the friendliest bees anywhere. Mason bees are docile by nature and the females are the only gender that has a stinger — and she isn’t very interested in using it.

Part of their relaxed demeanor may be due to the fact that they don’t make honey. In fact, they’re quite solitary and don’t even live in hives. With no hive dripping with the sweet stuff, there’s not a whole lot to protect. As an educator, I feel very comfortable letting kids get up-close-and-personal with these attractive little fellows. Kids enjoy watching insects as they go about their insect lives and bees can be especially fascinating.

These native bees live all over the United States and throughout Southern Canada. Orchard Mason bees are 1/3 of an inch long, blue-black in color, and have a metallic sheen to them. They have two pairs of wings and the boys are smaller than the girls and have a hairy-white face. While you may have seen them buzzing around flowers over the years —  you may not have recognized them as bees.  They tend to look more fly-like than bee-like.

There are a number of things that make Blue Mason bees stand-out both for home orchards as well as commercial types. The first thing is that these bees pollinate earlier in the season. They’re early spring pollinators and will fly around doing the pollination dance in cooler temperatures while honey bees hang out in their hives waiting for warmer weather. This makes Mason bees ideal pollinators for early blooming fruit trees.

In fact, they’re most attracted to the stone fruits such as cherries, plums, and peaches. But are great for apples and nearly everything else. The fact that the pollen is collected all over the mason bee’s hairy little bodies is another reason that they’re such effective pollinators.

If you’re considering purchasing (or attracting) mason bees for your home garden or orchard, you’ll want to provide them with a special mason bee house of straws where the female can deposit her eggs for next year’s bee population. The native mason bees around your home may or may not have an acceptable place to call home, so you’ll want to provide them with one.

Why are they called “mason” bees? Well, when the female lays her eggs in a straw (or another cavity in nature) she collects some mud and makes a wall at the back of the straw. Then she flies off to gather pollen and nectar and makes them into a little “loaf.” This loaf is placed onto the straw and an egg is laid on the pollen-nectar loaf. She makes individual cells by partitioning off the egg and pollen with another mud wall. After the straw is filled, she makes a final mud plug to protect her future kids that sleep inside. “Mason” seems to fit this industrious little bee.

While I’ve been going on and on about the spring Blue Mason Bees, it’s interesting to note that there are over 125 different species of mason bees out there just waiting to be invited into your yard or garden. So enthralled was I to learn about these endearing dudes that I decided that I had to have my own little colony at my home.

Last December is when my mason bee adventure began. To learn more about mason bees and possibly get some for yourself, check out what the experts have to say at Crown Bees.

*If you or a child is allergic to bee stings, take the same precautions that you would with any bee. Sweet-natured mason bees do very little stinging, however, the potential is there.

Armies of Cutworms are on the March!

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How to Control These Pests

In Colorado and the high plains, pest specialists say it’s going to be a banner year for cutworms and their adult form, miller moths.  Most nongardeners think miller moths are a nuisance because they fly in every open door and window on summer evenings, hovering around all your lights.  Gardeners, however, know cutworms as the horrid creatures that spend their late Spring nights decapitating your young garden plants. They especially like broccolis and cauliflowers but are happy to eat through the stem of your young tomato plants and peas too.

The easiest way to control cutworms is to pick them up and throw them out to birds to eat or dispose of them in some way.  These larvae are quite large and light colored so they are easy to see if you happen to be crawling through your garden.  They are most fond of overwintering under broadleaf weeds in your garden….so weeding your garden thoroughly in Fall is a good deterrent.

If you’ve had problems with cutworms in the past, you may want to grow broccoli and cauliflowers indoors to transplant rather than direct seed in the garden.  When it’s time to plant out into the garden, a  small collar around the stem of the plant is all it takes.  Saving all those empty toilet rolls is the most common collar, although plastic collars cut from water bottles or yogurt containers are also popular. Simple Dixie cups with the bottom cut out works well. Why do collars work? The cutworm doesn’t just start eating at one end of the stem and eat through…it wraps itself around the stem and then chews.  All you have to do is keep it from wrapping around the stem and your plant is safe.

If, alas, you go out and find some plants decapitated, take a moment to look through the top inch or so of soil around the plant.  You should find a nice fat cutworm resting from its big meal.  Pick it out so that at least that cutworm won’t be a threat to the neighboring plants.

A video from Oklahoma on controlling cutworms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1T3wUp1AwE

Extension Slide Series http://tealeafgardens.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/a-toilet-roll-in-the-garden/

How to Outsmart Your Weeds

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Our Favorite Weeding Tips

by Sandy Swegel

It’s Spring.  Your plants are tiny and growing. Your weeds are huge and growing.  If you want a nice garden, you really do have to outsmart your weeds and deal with the weeds that are gobbling up your soil nutrients and drinking your water.  Weeding doesn’t have to be a horrible task if you address the problem areas early and try to learn to understand how weeds behave so you can be smarter than they are.

Prioritize.

Here’s the order I go in…tackling the worst weeds first and then moving on.

  1. Noxious Weeds – for your state’s noxious weed list, go to  http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxiousDriver. These are the weeds known to be a problem in your area.  You must ban them from your garden.
  2. Weeds you know to be a problem for your garden bed. These are the weeds that come up every year and make the same problems every year.  Time to stop that cycle.
  3. Weeds that are in the areas that really matter to you—the flower beds in your front yard, your vegetable garden.  There are no doubt weeds everywhere but start with the ones that spoil your gardening.

Know your Weed and Have a Strategy for Each Kind of Weed.

Weeding isn’t just an aerobic activity to do in a frenzy of spring energy. Different weeds require different methods of dealing with them.  I see four different kinds of weeds in my garden:

Weedy Grasses

Weedy grasses are easier to get very early in the year.  In late winter, the weedy grasses often green up first, making them visible a block away.  Dig these up thoroughly getting all the runners when possible.

Annual Weeds

These are the weeds that grow from seed every year.  Killing them is usually very easy when they are young because they have a very small root system and you can sometimes just pull them by hand, or run a hoe across them to slice off all their heads.  Small annual weeds also die when burned with a propane torch or soaked with boiling water. Approach when they are small and win!

Perennial Weeds

Yikes, these are the deep-rooted weeds that have grown in the same spot for years.  My strategy for dealing with them is to be more aggressive each time I see them.  I try to dig out the weed completely.  If it returns, I dig an extra four inches down to make sure I get it. If it returns again, I dig even deeper until I get the bottom of that weed or I exhaust its ability to regrow. Burning or boiling water only work if you repeat it for three or more days in a row.

Pernicious Weeds  

OK, so there are bindweed and weeds with subterranean runners. More than just perennial, these weeds seldom die by pulling alone. But you can control them by aggressively blocking out their light and reducing their water.  A sheet of cardboard or multiple layers of newspapers laid directly on the weed and soil and covered by mulch blocks out water and light…two crucial items for growth. Keep the area well mulched and you will eventually win. But you must be thorough and consistent.

You’ll notice I don’t have chemical controls on this list. I certainly try to limit the toxic chemicals I introduce into the environment, especially with things that might kill bees. But the real reason I don’t use chemicals is that the chemicals legally available aren’t always that effective.  Take Roundup, for example.  It works because you spray the Roundup on the foliage and the plant takes the chemical down into the roots.  But in the Spring, plants aren’t taking energy down to their roots, they’re sending it up making new leaves.  Roundup just doesn’t work that well in the Spring. And the time you spend standing over the weed dousing it in chemicals could have just as well been spent digging.

Front Yard Vegetable Gardens

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Heirloom Vegetable Seeds

I’m fortunate to know lots of gardeners.  They are a quiet bunch for the most part and sometimes rather eccentric.  But they are on the forefront of an environmental movement that is making a big difference in our community: turning front yards into vegetable gardens!  It begins as the gardener runs out of room in the backyard to make more garden beds, and starts looking wistfully out the front window at the expanse of green lawn. Going from backyard to front yard is like going to a different country.  The vegetables out back are grown organically with manures and compost. There are honey bees and birds and butterflies attracted to the flowers growing among the vegetables.  The front lawn is a pristine deep green thanks to synthetic fertilizers and weed killers but lacks the vitality and delight of the backyard.

For most people turning the front yard into a vegetable garden takes some negotiating with a significant other who likes the lawn, but the idea of not having to mow week after week often tilts the balance.

So what happens when you turn your front yard into a vegetable garden? In the beginning, neighbors eye you suspiciously, worried you’re going to lower property values.  By mid-June, as you’re starting to get some good produce and butterflies are flitting about, people are a bit curious and start to walk by on your side of the street.  A neighbor kid on a bike asks “Whatcha doin’?” when you’re out shoveling compost onto the new beds.  By mid-summer, tomatoes are coming in strong, and the guy next door is hanging out watching you build a vertical wood structure to handle the squash that wants to grow out into the street.  Finally, come Fall and pumpkin season (hey look, Halloween decorations are already growing right in the yard) you realize you know the names of some of your neighbors. And you’re going to have to plant a bigger garden next year to plan for sharing the bounty with your new friends.

It is a lot of work converting a front yard into a vegetable garden.  There can be serious digging involved. You have to change your practices from lawn management to building safe and healthy soil. You have to keep things tidy and attractive. The rewards of front yard vegetable gardens are many. More food, more space to garden, more people who understand the relationship between food and the environment, and best of all, sharing late summer produce with friends and kindred spirits right in your own front yard!