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Hello I am a new gardener and not very good at it either. I guess you could say I have a brown thumb. But nonetheless I love gardening and expecially fresh veggies.
About a month ago, my husband built me 2 beautiful raise beds and so I went to lowes and home depot and decided to buy their organic manure and compost. After reading the book lassange gardening I decided to take some of the ideas from the book and implement them to my gardening method, so I went ahead and just layered the compost the cooffee grounds the manure and peat moss, unfortunately I did not have old leaves or straw to place in my beds but I decided that I would just use what I had in hand.
I was so happy with my new beds that I started planting right away, in one bed I placed some Kentuky bush beans and beets and in the other my poor cucumber plants which did not look too good and some chard, and so my lets say experiment begun. It's been raining constantly here in Mobile AL for the last month or so so no need of watering, in fact I think my plants were over watered.
About a couple of week later my beans seemed to be doing well and so I was very happy with the results, my cucumbers were doing poorly they never got really big at all and my swiss chard and beets never came out. About a couple of days later I was horrified to watch half of may beans beign devoured by something, some of my beans leaves had maybe a leaf left and nothing else just stems, I started looking for the pests that were doing this damage and nothing I could not find a single cattterpillar in sight, so I took diatomaceous earth and started sprinkling the dust all over my beds, unfortunately like I mentioned before it was raining constantly so the diatomaceous earth just did not do the job killing the pests, then I decided to use BT a organic encyme that kills all kinds of catterpillars amongst other bad stuff, that seemed to work a little, but by the time I prayed, my plants looked extremely bad.
Before I started gardening I decided to purchase a couple of DVD's called organic gardening made easy just so I could learn a little more, practickly the Dvd's talk about how to plants vegetables in a small space using organic methods of gardening only. He always makes the point that if you feed the soil first and have a good heatlthy soil with good microorganisms and worms that can make castings that your plants will end up growing strong and that will help the plants deter any bad critters that can damage the plants, oviously he does use organic methods of killing bad critters but he also does point out that thanks to the healthy soil he is able to use a lot less pest controll.
This time I decided to take his advice and do exactly what he said on his DVD. So I practically pulled out all my plants out of my raised beds , thru them in my compost pile.
The first thing he recomends to feed the soil is to put alfalfa hay or meal in the beds and dig them into your raise beds, this will help put good bacteria and will create more food for the worms and therefore will decompose in your garden. Step two is to plant a cover crop such as legumes which will help add nitrogen into the soil and add other beneficial bacteria, once the legumes grow tall but just before you are getting the flowers is when you have to chopped them down and dig them into the soil as well.
I just purchased my cover crop seed from peaceful Valley I love this web store they practically have everything you need as an organic gardener. I already digged the alfalfa hay in the beds about a week ago and I am planing to start my leggumes in September, I would imagine it will take a good 3 -4 months for the legume to get to a good height and then I am planing to chop this down and digg it to the soil, then let the soil rest for a couple of weeks put some bone meal, fish meal and kelp meal down (NPK) this will add additional nutrients to the soil and start planting your crops, by this time the soil will have all the nutrients and added beneficial bacteria necesary for healthy plants.
I am just starting with all this and I wish I could tell you whether or not it works but hopefully I will be posting my results later on the year. You obiously don't have to buy his DVD's to learn his method, in fact his website provides tons on info and he does personally answer e-mails even if you don't buy his product, but for me it did help me see it first hand, I guess I am just a very visual person. His website is organichomegardener.com if you are interested in learning more about his method.
Another thing that has helped me is to catalog all my seeds acording to growing dates, I was able to find a really good site that tells me when to plant what in my area, sometimes the seed packages don't have a lot of info on them.
I would love to hear from anybody that has tried this or other methods of feeding the soil and that had good results with it. I will be posting pictures as the experiment continues. Also if any of you want to start this method of feeding the soil please let me know your results as well.
This message was edited Aug 20, 2009 8:06 PM
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