Do's and don'ts for a healthy Veggie garden

The Serendipitous Gardener

Do's and don'ts for a healthy Veggie garden

All you need is good timing. Once you know when and how much, you're nearly there.

Good veggie gardens are beautiful, It is a pleasure to wander in them, admiring it. The tassels on the corn turning gold, the pumpkins winding through the tomato trellises, there is enough tomatoes there to feed us through the winter (if preserved of course) as well as zucchinis, eggplants, cucumbers (which will be pickled), herbs to dry, as well as plenty of beans and peas.

The garden is fertilised with mulch from last year's weeds, and with the compost from the kirchen scraps. It is the basis of all our meals all year round, food that is fresh and unsprayed, with a flavour you will never find in the stale supermarked food.

Most of all it is a healthy garden, there is no need for sprays, no need for fungicides or pesticides. Healthy soil means healthy vegetables. If I have to use a pest deterant, I use my own chilli and garlic spray.

Minimum work no-dig gardens

Weed mat garden

Lay a weed mat over your mown lawn or weeds. Weigh it down. Cut out small holes. Plant seedlings in them. Water well. Feed once a fortnight. Pull up the weed mat in autumn and plant thickly with onions and broad beans or peas. In spring, throw down the pea and broad bean debris and put down the weed mat again.

Newspaper garden

Mow your lawn. Plant your seedlings in the short grass. Surround them with newspaper. Weigh the sheets down with rock or bits of wood. Now proceed as with the weed-mat garden. But feed a little more, as the newspaper will temporarily lock up nitrogen whilst it decays. Top up the nespaper if necessary, use other mulch as well.

Tyre potatoes

Pile 2 tyres on the lawn, put a few spuds onto the grass, throw down some weeds, and leave them. They grow by themthelves as the weed gradually rott into soil and the grass below the potatoes dies. Keep throwing in more weeds to keep them mulched almost to the top of the plant

Grow potatoes in tyres in early spring and autumn. The rest of the time they grow faster in the ground.

Or, toss them on the grass and cover them with mulch. The more you mulch potatoes, or hill the soil around them, the more spuds you get. Cover the poatoe branches also, as potatoes form on branches.

Tyres also work well with corn

Watering

Water when the soil is dry just below the surface or under the mulch. Mulched plants need less water, deep rooted prennials also need less water and their leaves will shade the annuals. Mulch with anything, even rocks and newspaper, to cool the soil and keep in moisture, install a drip irrigation system if you have the money.

In hot weather, if you are going to be away for a few days, try upending abottle of water with a small hole pierced in the lid, next to fragile plants or seedlngs. Moisture will trickle out of the hole slowly.

Fertilising

Feed your vegies with mulch, dry lawn clippings, old leaves, straw, hay, dry manure. Use liguid manure, hen or cow manure etc only if there is nothing else. With mulches like comfrey, lucerne hay, seaweed, lawn clipppings and compost you won't need much else.It is almost impossible to give vegies too much mulch, just make sure the leaves are not covered by it

Home style liquid manure

Take a bucket or drum with a lid. Fill it with as many of the following as you can: weeds, manure, human urine, hay seaweed, fresh lawn clippings comfrey, nettle etc. Cover this with water, put the lid on, and leave a few days. Dilute to a pale yellow colour or it may be too stron. Then dip out the liquid for fertilizer.

Pest Control

Don't worry about pests and diseases just grow more plants, to compensate. The more productive and varied a garden is, the healthier it tends to be anyway. As a last resort you could try glue spray; mix one cup of flour with one cup of boiling water, then add cold water till you can spray it. Glued-up pests stop eating, and are easy prey for birds and other predators which gobbles them up.

If you want to kill your garden pests neaty. instead of suffocating them use a pyrethrum spray

Trench garden

An ancient method of growing vegies in areas where there is not much moisture is trench gardening.

Dig a trench, as long as you like, but nor more than one metre wide or you won't be able to reach across it. Let is slope a bit, so moisture doesn't just sit in the one spot, but runs down the trench. You can leave the slopes bare or, better still, line them with plastic. Weigh the plastic down with rocks, cover with a second layer of plastic and secure with more rocks at the edges. At night the moisture in the air between the layers will condense and seep down into the garden.

Line it with a couple of centimetres of compost. Plant your vegies and mulch well.

Don't bother with a sprinkler, on a hot day, up to 90% of the water will be lost anyway. Just stick the end of the hose under the mulch at the uphill end of the trench, or at several points along it. If you think the trench soesn't slope, trickle water down it and see.

This method can also be used to plant trees in dry areas.