Garden
Stewardship
by Tanya Denckla
An organic garden is not a
machine. It is a living system of balanced forces between, for example, predator
and prey, and these forces are always in flux. Soil composition, air quality,
water, birds, bugs, weeds -- these are just a few of the forces that determine
the nature and health of your garden.
Your role as garden steward is to
encourage the balance in your favor, not to take over nature's role in the name
of achieving the goal of perfection. Efforts to control or impose a balance for
picture perfect produce can eventually backfire. Many growers have aimed for
this perfection because consumers preferred and then demanded unblemished
produce. A common result is that their land may not have pests, but it also may
not have earthworms in the soil, birds in the fields, or beneficial predatory
insects. This may seem benign, but is not. Many practices used to obtain high
yields of unblemished produce, for a variety of complex reasons, eventually
promote the loss of topsoil, loss of water penetration, and loss of biologically
available nutrients. Hence the soil depends more and more on human-provided
nutrients.
Many small and large-scale growers
are alarmed by soil-depletion and related trends, for both ecological and
economical reasons. Many have adopted sustainable agriculture as a goal.
Specific definitions of sustainable agriculture may differ, but it generally
refers to practices that are viable over long periods of time, both
environmentally and economically. It strives for such things as soil that can
produce crops without nutrient depletion and with minimal human amendments.
Sustainable agriculture is a philosophical shift away from control to
cooperation, from master to steward.
The role of backyard steward is
not hard to achieve, especially if adopted at the outset. One of its most
important precepts is to feed the soil, not the plants. It is perhaps most
demanding during the planning phase, when you make crucial decisions about where
to put your garden, what varieties of plants, when and where to plant them, how
to feed the soil, where to put the compost pile (if at all), what kind of mulch
to use, and, perhaps most important, how perfect you wish your produce to
appear.
As steward, you may decide to
avoid even the "organic" sprays such as copper-based fungicides because they can
sometimes kill the garden's best friend: earthworms. On the other hand, your
goals may dictate using some sprays for limited and highly targeted purposes.
The issue is to define your own goals in advance, the reasons for them, and
stick to them. In the absence of such goals, temptations to "zap" this or that
pest during the growing season may become habitual.
Perhaps another desirable goal
beyond stewardship for the backyard gardener is a self-sustaining garden. As
steward of a self-sustaining garden, your first job is to recognize that the
forces in your garden will never be in "perfect" balance. There will always be
some plant damage. The plants in your garden do not come with unconditional
guarantees because they do not come out of a factory.
Your second job is patience. It
usually takes several years to establish an ecosystem that operates in your
favor -- an ecosystem with earthworms, insect-eating birds, beneficial predatory
insects, soil with organic matter sufficient to both drain well and retain water
to prevent runoff, and soil nutrient levels that will support healthy plant
growth.
The advantage of a self-sustaining
garden is that it requires the least amount of money and time in the long run.
You may need to invest in a first colony of earthworms (if there are none
already there), to build or buy bird houses, buy compost and organic matter
(before your garden produces it for you), and perhaps even buy irrigation soaker
hoses and row cover material. But these investments should pay you back many
times over in several years in a healthy garden that doesn't require lots of
imported materials or time-consuming pest controls.
Earthworms, above all, are the
gardener's best friend. Through both their tunneling and nitrogen-rich castings
(excrement) they perform all the following jobs for you -- free of
charge!
-
-
-
Aerate the soil, improving oxygen
availability to plant roots;
-
improve water retention capacity,
decreasing your need to water;
-
keep the soil loose and friable,
improving plant root capacity for growth;
-
raise important minerals from the
subsoil to the topsoil where plants can use them;
-
counteract leaching out of
nutrients by improvement of water retention;
-
break up hardpan soils, which are
not hospitable to plant growth;
-
homogenize soil elements so
they're more evenly available to plants;
-
create fertile channels for plant
roots, liberate essential nutrients into a form that is soluble and available to
plants;
-
neutralize soils that are too acid
or too alkaline for healthy plant growth;
-
balance out organic matter in the
soil, so you needn't worry about exceeding the 5-8% optimal level;
-
generally enhances the soil's
environment for growing healthy self-sustaining plants.
So protect your earthworms by
tilling minimally, because tilling can disturb and kill earthworms and other
soil microorganisms through mechanical abrasion, drying out, and disruption of
their environment.
Composting and
Mulching
Compost is another major player in
the self-sustaining garden. Compost, essentially, is any organic
material, including manure, that is decayed into a simpler form by the action of
anaerobic or aerobic bacteria, depending on the composting method. Humus
is any partially decomposed organic material, vegetable or animal, that is used
to improve soil quality by mixing it into the soil. Mulch is any material
used to cover the soil, whether nutrient-poor such as newspaper,
nutrient-neutral such as plastic, or nutrient-rich such as compost. Compost can
be used wherever humus or mulch are recommended.
The process of composting reduces
the original bulk of the organic material by one-fourth to one-tenth. So where a
thick mulch is desired, you may prefer uncomposted material such as straw or
chopped leaves. On the other hand, if you have access to large amounts of
compost, it is a highly beneficial mulch because it also feeds the soil and its
creatures gently; by contrast, chemical fertilizers can kill earthworms and
other beneficial organisms. Compost lasts a long time because it releases
nutrients slowly in a readily available form. By contrast chemical fertilizers
usually provide a quick boost then peter out, creating a need for more. Compost
improves soil drainage by adding porous organic matter (humus), provides water
retention, again by the addition of organic matter (humus).
Birds and bats that eat insects
are another key aspect of a self-sustaining garden. They help keep the garden
clean of flying and crawling insects, and some will even eat grubs in the
ground. The author and expert gardener Jeff Ball wrote that insect damage in his
garden virtually disappeared after putting up bird houses that attracted
insect-eaters. What more needs to be said?
Beneficial insect-eating birds
include bluebirds, downy woodpeckers, barn swallows, purple martins, sparrows,
blackbirds, phoebes, baltimore orioles, chickadees, juncos, purple finches,
brown thrashers, warblers, chickens, ducks, and geese. Swallow family birds,
such as the purple martin, are often considered the most desirable
insect-eaters.
Bees, wasps and other beneficial
insects are friends of the garden. Bees are nature's best pollinators, making
possible the fruits and vegetables we all enjoy. Wasps, like other beneficial
insects, not only can prey on various destructive insects but they can also
parasitize eggs, larvae, and adult insects. To attract wasps and other
beneficial insects you can plant companion herbs (especially Umbelliferae),
flowers, and clovers around the edge of your garden.
To be self-sustaining, your garden
should be able to defend itself from severe damage from most pests most of the
time. Such natural defense is promoted by four major factors: sun, water, soil,
and air circulation. All of these factors are interactive, so that each is
necessary but, alone, not sufficient.
Book by this author:
The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food
by Tanya Denckla.
Info/Order book
About The
Author
Tanya
L. K. Denckla, author of The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic
Food, is a gardener and professional mediator at the UVa Institute for Environmental
Negotiation. She co-founded and serves as faculty for the Virginia Natural Resources
Leadship Institute. She is also the author of
The Organic Gardener's Home
Reference: A Plant-By-Plant Guide to Growing Fresh, Healthy
Food.
This article was excerpted with permission from Gardening
at a Glance (now out of print) by Tanya Denckla, published by Wooden Angel
Publications, Route 10, Box 245, Harrisonburg, VA 22801.
| Comments () >> |
 |
 |
