A Long Hiatus Ends

Two years have gone by and we've scarcely stuck a trowel into dirt.

I blame these fallow periods on California's lack of seasons. It's even worse with a four-year-old drought on. Planting time seems to begin earlier and earlier and there's always something else to grab our attention.

The oregano, thyme and mint that we moved away from the main vegetable plot are still going. There are brown paper bags hanging from my balcony with drying herbs. They should be ready to put into jars tomorrow. The biggest challenge is harvesting before they go to flower.

The mint died off and has now come back. It's indestructible, it seems. It makes wonderful tea when added fresh to black tea. We need to work harder on summer recipes that use mint with yogurt, quinoa or cucumbers. Perhaps with the Fourth of July holiday coming up we can spotlight some dishes featuring mint.

All that's left in the main vegetable patch is a tenacious yellow chard. We cleared away the knitted trellis and put it in storage for awhile. The bamboo stakes that make its framework were splintering and breaking. The vivid colors of the construction twine have faded, but it's still functional.

Our big challenge in restarting the garden is water. There's some irrigation in the vegetable plot, but not enough. We've always used soaker hoses to good effect, but one has now sprung a leak and with the addition of the herb garden, we need to branch the hoses to hit different areas.

There's always the possibility of doing a drip system, but it takes some expertise in making sure you don't have backflow of water if something gets stopped up. It's labor-intensive and is best done after you have a plan. That way you know where the drips should be. We tend to be more impulsive gardeners.

Karen spent a lot of time digging, which means the plot is cleared of a lot of tree roots and we didn't have to resort to mechanically tilling, which disrupts the creatures great and small in the dirt.

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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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