Everyone Seems To Be In The Garden…

…and that’s a GREAT place to be!

Wow – it’s been over 7 weeks since the last newsletter – apologies!!!!  It’s been a wild May and June! So much has happened - so very many plants have flowed through the Side Yard Nursery at The Good Earth! The Summer Solstice has come (and gone! – but only by a day as of the writing of this newsletter). We’re now coming out the other end of the insane planting season and are ready to look ahead with a bit more clarity J

In order to Celebrate the Summer Solstice – WE’VE PUT ALL OF THE VEGGIE PACKS ON SALE!  Buy one get one for free, or to put it a different way, it’s a 2 for 1 sale. Yup – that means that filling in the odd hole here and there – or starting a veg garden from scratch are all possible.  Lest you think these plants are ready for the compost pile – they’re not. They’ve been fertilized right along and have had a foliar inoculant (Tainio’s Micro 5000 - https://tainio.com/product/micro-5000-foliar-fertilizer-spray/  and Neptune’s Harvest Tomato Veg -  https://www.neptunesharvest.com/tv136-1.html ) sprayed on to maintain super healthy leaves.

The great thing about the timing of this sale is that the weather and the soil conditions are finally stabilizing.  My sister and I just got our tomatoes and peppers planted yesterday and the squashes will go in on Wednesday.  We’ve been known to plant as late as July 4^th (just the way life goes!) and still have a decent harvest for sauce and relish by early September.  One thing about the skewing in the climate is that springs are colder longer but the falls are warmer longer. Handy for those of us who just can’t get things in to the ground when we’re “supposed” to!

Since I mentioned that reality of stabilizing conditions, let’s take a quick look at water in the region.  As I write this, we’re actually getting some rain – and the region is still in drought.  As of this immediate moment, we’ve only seen about 1/8” with hopes (from the forecasters) of at least an inch before we’re done sometime tomorrow.  I mentioned that we were planting yesterday – and the soil was BONE DRY in the beds and containers that we were working in.  Our soil conditions are great though and quickly absorbed water as we transplanted. The reality is that a lot of gardens DON’T have great soil structure so that the water has a tendency to flow away rather than seep in.  Since that’s true, it might be helpful to look at some “gardening hacks” that can make a difference.

Hack 1: If you’re planting a single larger plant (6” or bigger), think about pre-charging the hole(s) with water.  This means digging the hole, filling it with water, add a quick squirt of soap, letting it sink in (time how long it takes since that will tell you A LOT about your follow up watering needs), fill the hole again with clean water, let drain and plant.  This does two critical things. First – the soap is a surfactant and can help to work through hard pan soils that often develop under modern construction techniques.  Second – the deep water persists long after planting is complete and helps to both cool the soil as well as ease the water stress from not enough water coming in from the top.  One quick aside – I never cared about the kind of soap but the new Dawn Ultra is a tricky product – great for dishes, pots and pans but NOT for soil and roots!  Use anything else.  I use Palmolive original formula because it’s cheap ($2 at Ocean State) and does the job well.  It’s also good to note that if you want the best for your soil system – think about using Foxfarm’s Sledgehammer - https://foxfarm.com/product/bush-doctor-sledgehammer/ It’s a great product full of natural saponins (surfactants) and will support microbial colonization as well as opening up the soil – very useful product!! 

Hack 2: Measure the amount of water that you’re actually putting out in to the garden.  A lot of people THINK that they’re watering well, but aren’t really accomplishing what they think they are. 

• Check the soil manually - take a trowel and dig a hole 6” down at least every 2-3 weeks to see how much moisture is actually in the soil.

• Place a rain gauge, or an empty tuna can out if you’re using overhead irrigation and make sure that you’re actually getting some water down to the soil not just syringing the leaves of the plants.

• Measure how long it takes to fill a 5-gallon pail or a 2-gallon watering can from your hose so you know your water flow rate.  Create a count in your head for how long it takes (song lyrics can work well for this!) and USE that count to put down appropriate water amounts.  You might be really surprised at how long it takes to put down meaningful water.

Hack 3: Make sure that overhead watering is done just before dawn and that enough goes down at one time (1/3”-1/2” measured in that earlier mentioned can).  Use a timer and adjust once a month as daylength changes – first longer and longer and then shorter and shorter.  Just before dawn is when dew coalesces out of the air and pools onto the leaves – and the leaves are PRIMED to suck that water in – and so is the soil colloid!  Especially when the soil has enough of a carbon sponge to really suck that water in.  This is how a healthy farm field can resist drought for quite some time even in the teeth of a drought.

Hack 4:  Make sure the water you’re putting on a new tree or shrub goes from the trunk to the outside – not vice versa.  This is a classic mistake!  That root system that was in the pot is going to take some time to move into the new soil around it and that new soil is GUARANTEED to be quite different than the planting mix that the tree/shrub was in at the production nursery.  When water is only applied just to the outside of the root ball, it often does NOT seep back in to the root ball and that leaves the new transplant in desperate need of water at its core – just under the trunk.  Take a pail of water and SLOWLY seep it in to the area just under the trunk at least once a week during the first summer of transplant.  

Moving on to a new gardening term:  Your soil carbon sponge (SCS)! Did you know you had one?!?

Never heard of the SCS you say?  Well, no surprise there!  Here’s a definition: “The soil carbon sponge (SCS) is a porous, well-aggregated soil rich in plant roots, diverse life forms, nutrient availability, air, and with the capacity to hold lots of water.” Peter Donovan. It's an analysis of the best soil system where water and carbon are intrinsically linked through soil biology and it’s that linkage that creates the soil carbon sponge. 

Think of a SCS this way - the condition of the soil surface, and what's growing on it, controls the land’s response to the pressure of rainfall. The quality of the soil underneath that surface controls the penetration of rainfall into the soil system itself.  This makes a lot of sense if you take a step back.  That’s why there are forests around all of our reservoirs – to help water move cleanly and smoothly into the ground and then move steadily down to water that we then draw on for our urban supplies.

If you think about it, our man-made world is hard, dry, impenetrable (and we kind of like it that way – no mud!!!).  We use hard-surface as much as we can, concentrating the force of water, creating massive heat islands, and “making our lives easier”, but those first two statements carry an enormous cost with them.  Think about flash floods that are now the norm.  Concentrated water has a massive force component attached to it and strains ALL systems when the water can’t be quickly pulled down and into the soil system.  And that heat island???  Physics 101 tells all of us that hot air rises and cold air sinks – the basics of weather patterns of course. 

But what does that mean in real time?  Every time we establish a heat island, that rising air (high pressure zone) pushes away cooler, moister air (low pressure zone).  You’ve heard of blocking high pressure?  That’s when a high-pressure zone becomes so strong with rising heat that it diverts low pressure around itself (instead of being moved along in a normal pattern) and drought develops underneath that high pressure zone and flooding often forms on the outside edges.  You remember when Hurricane Harvey stalled?  That’s when the low-pressure system weakened so that it couldn’t move – it had to wait to be picked up by upper atmosphere winds – so it dropped all of its water…

What does this mean to you – the property owner??  Well – if all of the rain that falls on your property can penetrate easily and then be stabilized for future use, wouldn’t that take the pressure off of both flood and drought?  Your yard wouldn’t wash away in a flood. You’d need to use less water to maintain your gardens and lawn and you’d get maximum value from any irrigation that you did decide to use.  Prove this for yourself. Take a five-gallon pail of water and dump it onto your lawn.  How far does it have to spread before it starts to sink in?  If it keeps moving until it’s a thin skin then a hard rain is going to create wash and erosion and you, most likely, have an element of heat island inherent in the soil’s inability to absorb water.

Here’s another visual – take a tuna can and make it a tube by removing both ends.  Place the tin on the ground firmly so that water can’t ooze out the sides and fill it up with water. A tuna can is about 1” high and many of our strong storms now are dropping ¾”-2.5” of rain at a time.  What happens to the water you pour in?  Does the water hang out? go down fast? go down slow? Just knowing that kind of information can help you make decisions.  You should run this test everywhere you manage – your gardens, your shrub borders, lawns etc.

Most of you will either have a fast-draining system (built on builder’s sand/gravel essentially with a skin of loam) or it won’t drain much at all (due to compaction and clay-based loams).  Neither answer has a viable soil carbon sponge.  But you can build one…and you should!

It’s possible to improve your own small piece of the planet to such an extent that it becomes a contributing part to stabilizing your local ecology.  And think about this – if you can get your friends and neighbors to help out and stabilize their small part of the globe – even more can be done. You won’t be “climate proof” you’ll be “climate resilient” though and that’s more than enough to go on with.  The larger your local area of soil carbon sponge becomes the more moderated your local climate becomes.

Here’s a strong visual that Didi Pershouse (https://www.didipershouse.com/understanding-soil-health-and-watershed-function.html, page 9) came up with:  Take a cup of dry flour on one plate (with a rim!) and a piece of bread on another plate.  Grab a Dixie cup and punch about 10 holes in the bottom of it – you’re imitating rain.  Measure out two cups of water in two containers and, holding the cup over either the flour or the bread, pour in the water from one measured unit and watch what happens.  The flour will allow almost all of the water to run off (there’s your flash flood and erosion -watch the sides).  The bread will absorb most if not all of the water and any excess will ooze gently out of the bottom of the bread.  The only difference between those two visuals is the action of the yeast and correct action (in this case kneading – in the plant world roots) on the flour (soil elements) to create a structured product we call bread (and that is analogous to the microbe created soil carbon sponge).  Got to LOVE the ability of microbes to do a job, huh??? (there is also beer and wine – just to broaden the joyful awareness of microbes…)

OK – that’s enough thinking for one newsletter!!  Sheesh – bet you thought it would never be wrapped up!  (and, of course, it’s not really!). 

But, it is time to mention that two upcoming summer workshops:

July 11: Troubleshooting the Garden, 1:00-2:30pm You’re back from July 4th vacation and problems have arrived (or are about to!).  This is the time when the expected energy drop in the garden occurs and problems of all kinds becomes amazingly clear. Now’s the time to get on top of whatever is going wrong.  Bring your questions (and any leaves or insects – well contained!) and we’ll see what we can do.  $15.00/person – limit 10

August 8: Managing Gardens For Health and Production-Working with Foliar Sprays, 10:00-11:30 am Here’s where the rubber really hits the road – or should I say leaf??  Foliar sprays can kill insects and diseases directly, but they can also be used to prevent problems from developing and can directly increase the base line health of your plants.  If you’re planning on eating anything from your plants then you’ll also see an improvement in flavor.  limit 10 – and includes enough foliar support for you to spray a gallon when you get home. ($30/person includes leaf inoculants) 

 We’ll see you at the store –

Come for the information.  Come for the conversation. 

Come to bring changes to your farms, gardens and your community.