New Season, New Garden

Last year was a fallow one for us, but new things are sprouting in the garden in 2013.

We rearranged the garden, for starters. While we hardly have an over-cultivated plantation, we like to plant our regular favorites in different places each year. Our plot gets intense sun from mid-morning until nearly 7 p.m. We've shifted our bean trellis so that it cuts across the garden diagonally. We've added a new and colorful knitted trellis for growing beans on. We're hoping that will provide a little bit more shade or filtered sun across the hours of the day.

Our most ambitious addition is an herb garden. Seeds have been started and purchased plants have even been transplanted to larger pots. The gardener is clearing lawn from a strip along the western cinder block wall. Karen has started exploring border devices to see the plot off and provide a little bit more raised bedding.

I've been clipping the oregano we had more often. I've also trimmed the thyme I purchased and mint. I'm discovering the herbs do much better when trimmed. I have a pile of herbals and instructions for drying, distilling, decocting and infusing with herbs.

In the front of the house, we planted seeds for hollyhocks, nasturtiums, zinnias and daisies. So far only the nasturtiums have come up. There's some interesting double-leafed sprouts coming up, but it's hard to tell at this stage if they are planted seeds or volunteers.

Photos to come with the next post.

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Know Your Soil For Best Garden Results

I've always taken soil for granted. It was there. You put seeds into it. You put water on it. Plants grow and produce flowers, fruit or vegetables. Gayle Weinstein, author of Xeriscape Handbook; A How-To Guide to Natural, Resource-Wise Gardening , takes a different view: “Soil . . . acts as a highway between life and death, land and atmosphere, plants and animals.” It stores water, air and nutrients and makes it possible for an exchange of elements and chemical reactions to occur, she adds. She describes soil as being animal, vegetable and mineral combined. Here are six tests Gayle recommends for getting to know your soil. Grab a shovel and a quart jar. Dig up two cups of dry soil two-to-six inches deep from the areas you want to test. Gather a glass of water, dish washing detergent and paper towels. A soil pH kit, a meter or litmus paper will be needed for the final test.

Order in the Garden

The first year that Fink Farm was in operation, we devoured Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening . A 10-foot by 12-foot plot isn't much. We pegged off one-foot measures on two adjoining sides, and rolled some pebbled pavers into position to give us places to stand amongst our soon to be thriving garden. But then things started spinning out of alignment. For starters, it became clear that running string across the dirt in one-foot increments was going to create one nasty arrangement for digging on any scale at all. All I could envision was a broken ankle from hopping over all that string.

Water saving ollas

When you're saving water, the first step is to get the water where it's needed in the most direct way possible. No sprinkler heads rising like swans in a ballet to spew water 18-inches above the ground, splashing sidewalks and gutters. No sprinklers nodding back and forth sending sprays of water as tall as a child. Nope, it's irrigation dripping directly at the base of a stem or water bubbling at dirt-level. You can't get much more direct than an olla (pronounced oy-ya ). In the irrigation world, an olla is a clay pot, usually with a round bottom and a longish thin neck that is planted in the dirt next to plants that need water. The dirt is mounded around the pot so that only the end of the neck shows. Water is poured into the opening to fill the buried pot. The clay absorbs water that in turn is absorbed by the dry earth surrounding it. The plant gets a slow steady supply of water. Because the pot is buried, there's little exposure to the air and evaporatio...

The Fink Farm Dirt

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