Nurturing Soil: Getting The Most Of A Summer Hour

Summer Garden
My ‘Green’ Children

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Ignore Parenting

It’s my style of rearing kids through the unscheduled summer days. It spills over into how I care for my vegetable garden as well. I’d like to think that I fall somewhere between helicopter parent and free-range parent, the two extremes. I prefer nurturing — rather than micro-managing or ignoring — the ground beneath my plants. It’s not my natural habitat, and I don’t want to inadvertently mess things up.

With kids, as it is with soil, I find it best to get out of the way and let plants be plants.

Learning From My Mistakes

Child-rearing and gardening are two things I’ve done only for a few years. I don’t have decades of experience or a mentor who helped me, I don’t save seeds, and I certainly don’t have extra time (yet) for a greenhouse experiment. What I have settled into is something of a stewardship with the soil on my property, so that nature is doing most of the work for me.

So far, it works. In fact, it really works.

It’s nice to no longer be chasing my tail. In the long lesson of switching to not micro-managing the garden, I few things stand out:

1. Mechanically turning and churning the soil destroys not only earthworms but also the fungal mat beneath the soil I’d worked so hard to create. These are real workers in healthy earth; they need to be left alone.

2. Store-bought chemicals and remedies are out for one thing and one thing only: return customers. Use them and plants will become little druggies and I, their ‘pusher.’ It’s best to prevent rather than ‘treat.’

3. The root-microbe relationship is the foundation to healthy plants. Healthy Roots = Lots of Fruits. For not only human health reasons, organic is the best approach to achieving that end.

4. There is rich, expensive organics literally pouring out of every human household. Most people toss this stuff as ‘waste’ to the curb (*gasp*) to be buried in a landfill or recycled elsewhere. This is a resource to be tapped.

5. When the right conditions are met in your planting zone, and the right plant is grown during the right season (important!), hard work is replaced by lazy, minimal work and maintenance. I really like this.

6. A no-till, weed-free garden is very possible, but it takes time and patience. The end game should always drive the effort.

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What 90 degrees and 90% humidity looks like.

We are now entering triple digit temps in southeast Texas, the time of year when autumn can’t come soon enough for us. It’s hot — really hot, and really muggy — but there’s that one last hoorah if a fall garden is to happen.

In the morning with kids and activities filling up the days, I’ve only an hour to do it.

Today’s hour lesson in the lasagna ‘compost pile’ garden is in switching seasons from summer to fall, replenishing organic material, and getting beds ready for seedlings to be direct-sown.

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Pulling The Spent Vines – 5 Minutes

Four tomato annuals have served me well and were worth the $3-per-plant I spent at the nursery. The two Roma variety acted as pest attractant so that the two Cherry variety could feed our faces, bug-and-disease-free. Both were great producers for three solid months.

The cucumbers also must go. Showing signs of stress — I’ve not yet had success with a fall crop of tomatoes — they will all get pulled to become food for the turf grass.

I start by getting tools off the pegboard. You will straight away notice that there is no roto-tiller or shovel in that pile. I gave away the tiller and I rarely use the shovel, usually when I’m (guess what?) digging big holes. These are also worm-and-fungi killers.

The pitchfork is minimally invasive and used only to loosen the soil at the root base,aerating as a bonus. The 6-foot-long plants are too woody for the compost pile, so they will be tractor-mowed during the next lawn maintenance.

The cherry tomato out of the keyhole center basket is shown below for scale. The tap root is 18″ in length and the plant sprawled to six feet. I think it’s safe to say that the ‘soil’ in the thrown-together keyhole was working just fine!

One, Big, Bad Cherry

Two tomato volunteers remain in the garden as they are still cranking out fruit, or are just beginning to. Even I can’t believe it’s August and we’ve been eating tomatoes from the garden for nearly four months now. So worth the ‘work.’

RIP, maters and cukes. See you again next year.

Removing Weeds and Grasses – 10 Minutes

There is practically zero regular weeding with the no-till-layering method, unless you call a tomato volunteer or an avocado tree a weed.

Grasses are easy to remove from the rich, fluffy substrate. It’s difficult to imagine that we had gumbo clay in this area before. Organic matter is the healer of soil!!

Again, rocking a pitchfork back and forth in the area loosens the roots, and a screwdriver serves for close hand-work as a ‘trowel.’ This method helps keeps earthworms and the fungal mat underneath the surface in tact. These are the lasagna garden’s true heroes; tilling erases the board every season.

The entire system of nut grass — nobby root nodules, thin stolon connectors, tops of plants — comes up all at once and is thrown aside to be mulch-mowed as food for my preferred turf grass. In Texas, that’s St. Augustine, a great protective barrier against other competing grasses — Bermuda and Torpedo — coming into the garden space.

A quick edge with a sharp butcher knife will successfully cut any stolons at the surface. Edging done.

The Grass Smother Method – 5 Minutes

On areas where there is heavy foot-traffic, nut grass takes better hold. Used here are two black contractor trash bags and some T-posts and bricks for weight. In a couple of months, the bags will be removed (to get re-used later) and the area amended with more organic matter to soften.

This empty void will serve as space for pumpkin vines to sprawl. In the meantime, they will serve as an alternate path for the wheelbarrow since a tomato volunteer blocked the path from the other side of the garden. Bloom where you’re planted, Little Fella. I’ll find another way.

Layering Stolen / Bought Materials – 30 Minutes

Each bed with plants still growing in them — bell and jalapeno pepper, basil, eggplant — will get a few layers of Green-Brown-Compost.

I always run out of fresh compost mid-summer, so I bought some at the garden store. My criteria for purchase: 1) must be organic; 2) does not contain manure (as a vegan, I avoid products from factory farmed animals); and 3) does not contain peat (robbing from peatlands has other unintended environmental impact).

Vote with your dollars, folks.

From the last collection effort, plenty of green and brown in the form of grass, leaves, and shrub clippings are ready for use. Thank you, Generous Neighbors!

Eat your veggies, Little Children.
They’ll make you big and strong.

No tools needed. Just an old-fashioned butt and shoulder burn. (And to think some people pay money to do this.)

Clean-up, Hydrate and Cool-off – 10 Minutes

It is so hot outside when the shade disappears in the morning that the only way to cool off is to stand underneath the water hose fully clothed.

Very refreshing.

The thermometer now reads 94 degrees. I finish by rinsing off any garden tools and putting them away. I’ll want to make sure I’ve accounted for all my tools — particularly the screwdriver and butcher knife that I could ‘find’ later with the tractor mower. Not a good idea.

I stand back and admire my [not-so-hard] work with space now created for the next season’s greens and fruits. Like the basil hiding underneath the bushy, jumbled tomato plants, I discover other little treasures while I’m puttering.

Isn’t the little devil cup-marker ironic for the heat?
I love blue jay feathers.

After drinking a big glass of cold water and chasing that with a big glass of Gatorade, I cool off in the shade and hope for rain, which I can literally smell all around me. Nothing as yet.

An hour’s enough. Time to go keep a look-out for fall migrants and boss the kids for chores that need to be done indoors. There’s always something that needs to be done.

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PS – It took an hour to do the work, and two weeks
to write this post. Sheesh!

Have you found methods that have made
your gardening easier?