At Common Ground, we bought a book on Biointensive gardening. It’s a method for growing as much food as possible in a small space, while also maintaining a healthy soil. Long ago, people perfected these techniques. Now that monoculture and industrial agriculture are depleting our soils, we will probably need these skills again!
We recorded this video of some digging we did recently in the backyard. Take a look!
If you’d like to try for yourself, I recommend the book we got, The Sustainable Vegetable Garden by John Jeavons. It’s a quick introduction to biointensive gardening, so you won’t be overwhelmed, and it explains how double-digging works a bit better than I can.
I want to start out this post by saying that normally I am a very peaceful, non-violent person. However, there is one thing that gets my blood boiling: SNAILS!! I am not quite sure if other gardeners have quite so many problems with snails or it is just this part of the Bay Area, but they are on a rampage this spring. You see I try and have an organic garden which means no pesticides allowed. I am lucky because in the Bay Area this is somewhat possible because there aren’t a ton of bugs waiting to destroy my crops. However, there has been lots of research done saying that the more you put on pesticides, the more you kill the good bugs and get more bad bugs, but I digress. The long and short of it is that snails love nothing better than to munch on my strawberries or my cute little lettuces or anything just poking its head out of the ground. You can also leave out beer in little plastic cups to deal with some of the snails, but that tends to work better on slugs and rolly pollies. I figure it is a rather pleasant way to go in that they just drown drunk.
According to the gardening books that I have read, the most effective way to deal with snails is to simply go around and pick them off and smash them. This sounds very simplistic, but I have found in the past if I can regularly get out into the garden, this actually does work. This year, they are all over the place. Now granted, I did leave them alone for 5 weeks to breed and grow while I was eating lots of yummy food in Europe, but still! Even before I left, I had done several sets going around the yard grabbing them from all their favorite places (in the compost, under the wood slats on the fence, in my strawberry patch! and hiding in the orange tree) piling them into flower pots and then smashing them all. Then this has to be followed up by an almost daily regimen of going back over the places and more grabbing and smashing. Once we got home, I did a thorough run through of grabbing and smashing and I thought I was doing well. However, today while I was putting around the front yard doing some pruning and watering, I discovered so many snails hidden in a lily that was on the side of the house. Now I have read that snails can travel over and under fences quite some distance to get to their food and these snails were big and fat so that meant that they had been eating lots of strawberries and such. The side of our house isn’t far from the garden. So I set to grabbing and smashing with a vengeance. Those buggers hid really well too. Every time I thought I had finished getting them all, there were more and more. I thought about cutting down the lily, but then I realized that I shouldn’t because it was a good snail attraction and I now knew where to find them. This is the bad point, when you start designing your landscaping around having snail traps……Now I need to head out to the backyard to check my traps.
This morning I woke up to find frost on the ground. In years past this wouldn’t have been of any particular note. It would have just meant a couple more layers on my way out the door, but this year I have a garden. Since this is California, I was under the impression that I could have it growing all year long. Evidently not so much.
Before we moved out to the Bay Area, my husband, Jake, looked up the weather to see what it would be like. According to Wikipedia, it was a mediterranean climate. This had me picturing warm breezes all year round. However, as the year has progressed and the temperature has sunk lower and lower, it appears that it gets cold in California too. The last couple of weeks, it has gotten even chillier. Jake found an alert on the weather channel that would text me if it was going to freeze that night so that I could tuck in my garden. Two days ago, I got just such a text. So I went hunting for old sheet and pillow cases and cleverly used clothespins to attach the sheet over parts of my garden. I woke up the next morning and there might have been a wee bit of frost, but nothing too bad. Yesterday, I got no such text, so I figured that my plants were fine. However, this morning proved otherwise. I think this is a lesson to me that weather forecasts are only so accurate and if it is cold outside, perhaps I should just cover the plants anyway.
I love pickles! Yes, I know that I said I love sweets this afternoon and I do love sweets, but I also love me some pickles. I have been very lucky lately to have some free time to do whatever I please and my to do list includes painting and lots of baking and yoga. One of the things on my to do list was to make pickles. A friend of mine sent me a wonderful Washington Post article about making pickles. On my weekly grocery shopping trip this week, I bought all the ingredients and today I made pickles! They were fairly easy to make. First you make a pickling brine and let it sit for about two hours. Then you layer dill and garlic at the bottom of a sterilized mason jar, stuff it with cut up cucumbers and top it off with more dill and jalepenos. Now the hard part begins – waiting for the week while the pickles get pickled. I am really looking forward to opening them up and trying them. Mmmmmmm…….
