Eden Garden Update-Year 2

Lettuce and spinach reseeded itself among the broccoli

 It's been two full seasons since we completely converted our garden plot in the fashion described by a movie called Back to Eden. (See blog post Experimenting with Eden.) We have learned a lot since we started (See blog posts First Eden Experiment Update and Eden Garden Update-Year 1 Lessons), and we can now count the project as mostly a success.

As soon as the snow melted this spring, we began seeing signs that the lettuce and spinach seeds that we sowed in Fall and believed to be long gone were not only still viable, but had indeed germinated! This was our first positive sign from our previously unimpressive mulch bed.

I got a slow start on planting the rest of the garden due to a death in the family and a catastrophic knee injury that resulted in a 3 month lay up and surgery. It was all I could do to crutch through Home Depot to pick out vegetable starts in late May, and if Home Depot didn't have it, well, it didn't get planted this year.

I coerced the Hubby into putting my store-bought starts in the ground, and I laid, with icepack on my elevated knee, staring out my bedroom window at the rising tide of bindweed spilling into the garden from the pasture. I emailed friends and acquaintances my desperate pleas for help pulling weeds in exchange for harvest rights, at least until I could sit in a chair and pull them myself.

Summer came, temperatures rose, and I finally ditched the crutches. Other than the spring greens, which had by this time bolted and gone to seed, the only thing that was doing really well was the bindweed. "Physical therapy" became a euphemism for weeding the garden, and was actually pretty effective from a mobility and muscle development standpoint, and my surgeon was rightly impressed with my muscle tone by my 3-month post-operative visit.

By July, I'd removed at least 1000 pounds of bindweed from in and around my vegetables. I was ready to burn the entire garden to the ground because my paltry vegetable plantings were failing to provide food in proportion to the amount of work I was putting into keeping them happy and weed-free. I decided I'd pull out the remaining bindweed and then rake the mulch down to the dirt to rip any tiny shoots that may be running undetected beneath the ground cover. Then we got a good rain.

About a week later, I went out to evaluate the effectiveness of my bindweed destruction plot and discovered something very interesting. Volunteers. Dozens of baby tomato plants were thriving in the part of the garden I'd abandoned because of last year's vole infestation. And the lettuces and spinach that I let go to seed after they bolted, had re-seeded themselves everywhere. I even found them in my pasture where I'd pitched the dead plants when I replanted the row. Of course, some mulch made its way to the other side of the fence as well, along with the dead piles of bindweed.

Tomato volunteers

I now believe that all of those viable seeds were trapped somewhere in the mulch beneath the bindweed, and that by vigorously raking the mulch, I reunited the seed with the soil, and aerated the entire environment at the same time. This caused a flurry of growth in a way I hadn't seen to date in the garden.

Lettuce in the pasture

I discovered that last year's less-than-impressive mulch bed is now practically a living, breathing organism all on its own. Colonies of pill bugs are evident, along with all of the beneficial companion bugs that help compost and break down soil. Worms are abundant and healthy and the soil just an inch down is moist and dark black with organic matter. What a marvel!

Pill bug colony (I think)

Later research revealed that my nemesis bindweed is actually renowned for restoring fertility to an area. The website Home Remedies For You claims:

"Bindweed finds other uses in restoring the fertility of agricultural land that has been subject to the extensive use of chemicals and pesticides. It is researched and believed to eradicate chromium, copper, and cadmium from the soil.Bindweed also exhibits properties similar to that of nitrogen fixing plants. The presence of calystegins in the roots of bindweed act as a source of carbon and nitrogen to the rhizobacteria that is responsible for nitrogen fixation. Thus, the fertility of the soil is enhanced for agricultural use."

So to recap, the Eden Experiment does not work as advertised. It is not a solution to the problem of weeding, at least not in parts of the country where bindweed grows. It is, however, an excellent way to return fertility to your soil, create an optimal environment for plants to grow, and minimize water usage throughout the season.

Eden Garden Update-Year 1 Lessons

In our first year of implementing the Eden Garden program, (See blog post Experimenting with Eden) we experienced some ups and downs.

Successes
Year one's garden produced a humongous harvest. My cucumber yield alone was nearly commercial in scale as I was harvesting 10 pounds of pickling cukes per day. I was able to give hundreds of pounds away in addition to canning 3 cases of dill relish, 6 cases of garlic dill pickles, 2 cases of spicy dill pickles and a case or two of my new invention, "burger stackers". I also had great watermelons, peppers, and tomatillos, and a satisfactory harvest of potatoes and slicing tomatoes. I made several cases of different salsas and tried a great peach, pepper jelly recipe that I'm determined to repeat.

Failures
The corn was a total bust as we got corn smut (didn't know it was a delicacy until after we threw away the infected ears), and we wound up trapping 5 pillaging raccoons, but by then, they had consumed every ear of good corn left. The zucchinis never survived the squash beetle infestation and the monstrous cherry tomato plants turned into habitat for voles, which threatened to take over the rest of the garden. It's hard to tell at this point in the experiment how much of our failure was due to the 80 degree temperatures starting in March and the historic drought conditions, and how much was related to growing pains in the new system. We do know that we definitely made a few mistakes that affected our success rate. This is what we learned.

Mistake #1: Installing the new mulching system in the spring.
While it kept the weeds at bay, the new mulch began composting at the soil surface and robbed the soil of the nitrogen it needed to feed our seeds, thus, most of the seeds we sowed directly did not germinate. In hindsight, we should have plowed our old garden under in the fall and installed the irrigation and mulch then. That way it would have had the entire winter to compost under the snow and perform its necessary nitrogen exchange, leaving the ground fertile by springtime.

Mistake #2: Mulching over the seed.
After sowing our seed, we covered the newly planted seed with the mulch, not even considering that the same mulch layer that inhibits growth of weeds would surely be a barrier to our new vegetable shoots as well. To combat this problem in later plantings, we left rows open until the shoots were above the mulch line, then pushed the mulch around the new greens.

Mistake #3: Over and under-watering.
With the mulch present, it's difficult to tell when the plants need water, because you can't just observe the dry soil. When we planted our starts, many of them shocked right away so we gave them plenty of water. They snapped out of it, but then looked droopy the next day so we watered again. We just kept watering any time one of the plants looked limp and droopy, and ultimately, many died. When we dug the poor plants up, we discovered they were sitting in a pool of water. We finally bought a moisture meter and used it each time we thought we should water. Mostly, we were completely wrong about when the garden needed irrigation and when it didn't. The majority of the plants snapped back when we used science, rather than passive observation to determine if the poor buggers needed water.

End of year one
At the end of the year, we put the garden to bed by pulling the large dead plants, and letting anything that fell off join the mulch to compost naturally over time. That means that frost damaged tomatillos, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, etc, were left on the surface of the soil to decompose throughout the winter, and the plants got pitched over the pasture fence.

Exhausted from an epic year of planting, harvesting, canning and freezing, we sowed just one row of lettuce and spinach in the fall, and built a row cover for the top, but one blasting windstorm ended our row cover, so we just left the poor seeds on their own until spring. Hopefully year two will reveal more success from the Eden Experiment.

Pickles coming out of my ears!

So I've been slacking a bit in the blogging department because, well, the garden has taken over my life. I love this crazy time of year when the weeding has all been done and the garden no longer takes, it gives. And this year, mine is giving back to me ten fold.

Picture taken 7.2.11

Every year, I long to make pickles. I plant a few pickling cucumber plants and harvest a paltry few cukes, and usually end up running down to the farmers market to supplement my yield enough to can 3 or 4 quarts of pickles. So this year, I vowed to plant more cucumbers than I thought I needed in the hopes that I would end up with just enough.

I also tried another trick and I stuck all 5 plants in the same bed with 2 rows of corn. I thought the cornstalks might give the vines something to trellis on, and the cukes might in turn shade the corn's roots.

Well, it worked.

Picture of same bed taken 7.29.11

Since the 4th of July, I've harvested about 30 pounds of pickling cucumbers from my bountiful vines, and I bet if I go out there now, I've got about 3 more pounds waiting for me, despite having harvested 7 pounds this morning. Let's just say that I finally have enough to experiment with all of the pickle recipes I've ever wanted to try.

My favorite pickle is a crisp, sour, garlicky, dill pickle. Next best are the snappy, spicy pickles, and then there are the sweet slices of pickles that perfectly complement a deli sandwich on rye bread. All have their place at the table, and I plan to make a batch each of them before my vines quit for the year.

Here's the recipe I used to make my first batch of crisp garlic dills:

Brine: 1 cup distilled vinegar, 1 cup water, 1 Tbsp pickling salt, brought to a boil. Maintaining the proportions, make as much brine as you need. I think it's better to dump some extra down the drain than to run out mid jar.

To each hot sterilized quart jar I added:

• 1 tsp dill seed
• 1 sprig fresh dill weed
• 2 cloves fresh garlic, coarsely chopped (don't worry if your garlic turns blue or green after canning...it's just the acid reacting with the oils)
• 1/2 tsp either mustard seed or whole pepper corns...we'll see which tastes best
• Pickling cukes (which I first soaked in ice water for 2-3 hours) 

This year, I also learned that adding a grape leaf to the bottom of your jar before packing it with cukes helps keep them crisp (something about the tannin in the leaf helping to preserve the cuke's texture), so I incorporated that tip into a few jars. To the others I added the commercial pickle crisper, which my hubby informed me is the same chemical the snow plow distributes on the road in winter to melt the ice...hmmm...I hope the grape leaf works best.

Then I processed them for 20 minutes in my waterbath canner. I think at sea level, you'd be fine to process them for 15 minutes, higher altitudes need longer in the canner.

One more quick note: A shrewd canning friend taught me to keep my waterbath canner boiling on my barbecue burner outside to help keep the kitchen cool for canning. Mine now gets set on the barbecue burner in late June and doesn't come in until all the produce has been put up at the end of September.

So now the pickle jars are supposed to sit for a few (6-8) weeks for best flavor, but my friend Cathy couldn't wait and already popped the seal on the first batch. She said they were delish! I'm gonna wait for mine.