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.

First Eden Experiment Update

About 6 weeks ago, I filled you in on a new gardening concept from a movie called Back to Eden. You can read all about it in my post Experimenting with Eden. Since then, we've noted some interesting aspects of this gardening style, some that are good, and some, not so good. Here's the list.

1. As promised, the soil does stay much moister now than without mulch.

2. The worms LOVE the new layer of mulch, and are now evident in astounding numbers. In fact, I can scarcely sink a trowel into the earth without uprooting a half dozen fat crawlers.

3. The weeds are no where near as bad as last year, with the exception of our old friend Perennial Bindweed. This European invasive weed has been known to bubble asphalt driveways, so it's no surprise a 6 inch layer of mulch hasn't slowed it down. Even the bindweed is easier to pull though in the mulch.

Potato patch

4. The potatoes and onions are happy and prolific in the mulch. The movie claims that no mounding is necessary for potatoes using the "Eden" method, but that remains to be seen. I was pleased to discover though, that my potatoes are strongly out performing the ones at the nearby demonstration gardens.

Yellow onions from sets

5. Only a few rows of my direct-sown seeds have emerged. Of those, only one or two are thriving. The others like the beets & lettuce died instantly, and the radishes stalled in their maturation and are the same size now as they were 3 weeks ago. We have speculated at length about why this is happening. The theories include bad seed, predation, cold evening temps, longer germination period because of the added layer of insulation, or that the deep mulch too heavy for seedlings to push through. It is clear, however, that I will either have to re-sow many of the veggies I planted, or buy starts from the nursery to catch up on production. Fortunately, we started so early this year, that I should be able to keep up with prior years' production even after replanting.

The dill seems happy!

6. Several transplanted starts have stressed badly and burned up their leaves. This is another mystery. I picked up a bunch of starts from the greenhouse, hardened them off over a few days and put all but one of them in the ground. The soil was moist and I planted them close to the drip line. Within 3 days, the starts I planted in the garden shocked badly, but the one I kept out and didn't plant was fine. The survivor was still in the 4-inch pot so it would have been even more affected by the evening temperatures or daytime sunlight if that was the problem, so I am frankly totally baffled...

Watermelon in shock

Basically, this continues to be a learning experience as we determine what works and what doesn't. Periodically, when I'm feeling frustrated, I look over at our parsley plant, and am encouraged. Parsley, you see, is a single season annual here in our climate, and is notorious for being temperamental about reseeding. However, its placement here in the mulch by our patio has allowed it to be productive beyond our wildest dreams, and it comes back larger and with renewed vigor every season. It's the parsley that reminds me that this is a good system designed by God, and I just have to learn how to work with it, not against it, and remember to give it time.

Food swap

Last weekend, my good friend Cathy invited me to a Food Swap. I had never heard of such a thing, so I pressed her for details. It turns out, the Swap is a gathering of foodie locals who bring their home-grown or homemade delights to TRADE amongst themselves. No cash is permitted at the event, but there are no restrictions on the types of foods people can bring to swap. Samples of your wares are encouraged and definitely help seal the deal for some traders.

I agreed to go and brought with me a loaf of fresh-baked cinnamon raisin swirl bread and several jars of Wild Plum Jam I canned last fall. The flavor of the jam was divine, but I should have pureed the plums, as the skins were a tad bit tough for spreading on soft bread, so rather than have them sit in my larder indefinitely, I traded them at the swap. 

Upon arrival at the rural street-side produce stand, the venue for this month's swap, each trader was given a chance to set out their goods. Once most were set up, the facilitator announced that there would be a half hour to walk around, try samples, and list which item you wished to trade for which. Then, at the end of that time, the facilitator called out "TRADE" and everyone scrambled to make deals with other traders for their most highly prized items.

The food selection was outstanding. There were fresh herbs, baked goods, fresh chimichurri sauce and salsa, homemade cheese and ice cream, herbed butter with wild garlic, and jars of pickle relish, almond butter, flavored mustards, and jams and jellies galore. Any preconceptions I had of people trading their farm fresh eggs for a few stalks of rhubarb were blown away in the first moments of our arrival. I wasn't smart enough to bring a camera to photograph the bounty, but others were, so be sure to check out their blogs too.

The conversation at the swap was as exciting as the food items offered, as each person brought a unique set of culinary strengths and insights. One woman talked about foraging for wild garlic and mushrooms in the foothills, while another chatted about making cheese from raw, unpasteurized milk. I got the scoop on how to use fresh lemon balm for cooking, as I had only understood its medicinal uses before I sampled a delicious lemon balm pesto on a piece of dense artisan bread.

In exchange for my bread and jam, I received a bunch of fresh tarragon and fresh lemon balm, a container of fresh cut salsa, one jar of sweet pickle relish, one of strawberry-rhubarb jam, and one jar of cranberry-rosemary mustard, which was to die for.

Now I'm hooked. I can't wait for the next swap and have already begun planning what I will bring and in what quantities to maximize my trading power. Not only is a Food Swap the perfect venue to discover new foods and new ways to use the same old foods, its totally free of regulation, taxation and intrusion by the government, making it my new favorite way to spend 2 hours on a weekend. Freedom, food and friends...FANTASTIC!