October preparations for spring

This is the time of year to take two steps to start (or continue!) a garden next spring.

(1) Collect leaves! People kindly put them on their curbs, and it is legal to relieve municipalities of the expense of carting them away. Fred brings me home about 100 bags of leaves each fall. At 20 lb. a bag, that's a ton of leaves that have disappeared into our property each year for over two decades. They are a major source of what we eat. :) The only other off-site items that I have used for more than a decade are grass clippings, wood chips, and commercial seeds.

(2) If you are going to start gardening next spring, now is a good time to double dig the promising plot. Remove the topsoil from a plot about 2' x 2' and put it on a piece of plastic. (I use old plastic bags in which we have taken others' leaves.) Then dig a second layer, adding organic matter --leaves if you don't have compost. Then you move along, putting the topsoil of the next spot on the "empty" spot where you just worked (instead of on a plastic bag) so you can dig the second layer there.

The books say to drag that first clump of topsoil to cover the last place, but I go around in circles so it's easy to dump when you get back "home." A much more detailed description of "double digging" is in John Jeavons' book HOW TO RAISE MORE VEGETABLES THAT YOU EVER THOUGHT ON LESS LAND THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE. It should be in your local library; if not, order it. Or maybe you want to buy this excellent paperback book.

Excavating in Montclair has its interesting aspects. There are plenty of stones, of course, of varying sizes. About a foot down below my yard was a nineteenth century cement floor, which I dug into the soil to combat its acidity. I was told that ours was the depot for milk delivery at some time, but a map of the 1870's doesn't show that. Maybe earlier? Tools, vases, and toys are other occasional artifacts.

These days there are 2"-5" holes amid my plants. They are dug over night. Bob, the more experienced gardener across the street, tells me the diggers are skunks and I should be grateful because they are eating slugs that I don't need. Mostly the diggers are very considerate of the plants I cherish, but they goofed one night this week and dug up some small green lance seedlings that I had put out from my greenhouse windowsill. Maybe they seemed too small to be worthy. Everyone makes mistakes.

It's harder to explain why the lettuce I sowed two weeks ago outside with 2007 seeds has not germinated. The lettuce I sowed from the same packet a month earlier in the window germinated fine and thrives outside now; we ate some for dinner last evening. Gardening is full of puzzles. I suspect we are not supposed to know everything. "We see through a glass darkly," says the Good Book, a sentiment I find consistent with my observations. Still, I miss that non-germinated lettuce! My own patience seems not to be unbounded, as hard as philosophy and religion try.

Good news includes the fact that Fred and I each enjoyed 13 raspberries this morning for breakfast -- not as many as two weeks ago, but still delicious.

Pat

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Lawn Care Without Poisons, Chemicals, Power Machinery or Watering

Michael Pollen wrote that a lawn is land "under totalitarian control." We Americans are control freaks, and one thing we can control is our lawn. It never talks back.

Still, I find myself wondering why I, like almost all Americans, care about my lawn so much. Why not just let it grow wild? Someone asked me shortly after I moved here how nice I wanted my lawn to look. I heard myself say, "A little bit better than the worst lawn on the block." I was raising children. Why should anyone with such an important activity care about raising a lawn?

Then the kids left and I felt a calling to demonstrate how good a lawn can look without poisons, chemicals, power machinery, or watering. Now, why would I feel THAT calling? Anyway, if you want a carefully thought-out summary of my approach to lawn care, or want a flyer to disseminate my suggestions, you can click on "lawns" on the homepage of my website, most easily accessed via a Google search on "Pat Kenschaft," The short version is mow high, let the grass clippings drop to fertilize the lawn, and NEVER use power machinery or water the lawn. When there are doubtful places, hand-scatter compost that you have made yourself. I've found that fixes the problem; I don't have to ask questions or do tests.

There are socially acceptable alternatives to lawns. Maxine Hoffer, my wonderful creative writing teacher at Nutley High School, had a ground cover through which marvelous daffodils arise each spring. "I fertilize it by never raking leaves," she told me. She died a few years ago at a venerable age, but I see that her successors have not destroyed her good property care ideas, so you can see it at 27 Stuart Avenue in Nutley on the corner of Passaic Ave. In her waning years the property required no care, and it continued to look spectacular every spring.

During my empty nest summer, I took my garden cart to the front yard after dinner in August and hand-pulled weeds. After three weeks of filling a garden cart each evening, the yard was weed-free, but a bit empty. I bought "lawns alive" from Gardens Alive, and that's the only time I've put anything commercial on my lawn -- 20 years ago! Those seeds thrived.

Since then I have spent about five minutes several times a year removing dandelions from my front lawn, and that seems enough -- less than a half hour total per year. Once you get them out, they don't come back...much.

Not watering means that the roots go deep. The lawn survives dry spells better than most. When a water ban arrives, my lawn still has a bit of green. When the rain finally comes, mine is the first to be truly green.

The United Nations predicts that 21st century wars will be fought over water, and I've read that 30% of the household water in eastern U.S. is used to water lawns.

Children and dogs that play on lawns with pesticides have higher rates of disease, especially cancer, than those who don't. www.beyondpesticides.org can provide you lots of alarming statistics if you want to read about them.

Leaf blowers destroy lawns, and give landscapers an excuse to charge more money to repair them. Shrubbery needs leaves as natural fertilizer; it especially distresses me to see people blowing under shrubs. I've been told that the main reason they are used off season is to increase the number of hours for which the landscapers can charge the property owners for "care" but one can't be sure of other people's motives; it's hard enough to know one's own.

A distinctive problem this year has been the many baby trees planting themselves around. Fortunately, they come out far more easily than dandelions. Working with two hands, I can remove often two per second, which is more than 100 a minute. Apparently, I've removed thousands in the past couple of weeks, with thousands more to go. Anyone know WHY we have this new abundance this year? I hear it's not just my property.

I spend far less time on my lawn most weeks than the landscapers spend on my neighbors' lawns. Mowing the front lawn typically takes 12 minutes with my human-energy-powered push mower. This week it took only ten minutes.

Someone borrowed it last May and found it took her LESS time than her power mower because she didn't have to be so careful going around the edges. It provides healthy exercise, is safe with children around, and you can talk with passers-by as you mow. When I was a child, Daddy's lawn mowing time was also child time. Human-powered lawn mowers cost about $100, and don't involve the time, money, and global warming acceleration of fuel.

It's a beautiful time of year. Enjoy caring for your lawn...if it's worth having a lawn!

Pat

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Savoring Leaves

How do we use the abundance of leaves that arrive on our lawns each fall (well named)? The easiest activity is raking those near a ground cover into the ground cover. The periwinkle at the back of my property is nourished by leaves from above and leaves that I rake into their midst. You can do the same with ivy, packasandra, or strawberry ground cover. Indeed, for many years, until folks began making Halloween straw available free, my strawberries had to make do with leaves for their winter cover. (Now they are mulched each winter with straw, as their name indicates they should be. Strawberries bear more fruit when winter mulched with straw.)

The most needed thing to do with fallen leaves is to rake them under bushes and shrubs. My decorative mountain laurel and Andromeda and my raspberry bushes are fertilized by leaves. The all do well. They need more than just the nearby leaves, so I put lawn leaves into a garbage barrel and pour them on these, and I also take bags of others' leaves and pour them abundantly around shrubs and bushes.

It amazes me that I sometimes see people taking leaves AWAY from the roots of shrubs, especially if it's on my township's property, using up my tax money for both the taking away of nature's fertilizer and for buying chemical companies' substitutes. The latter pollute our ground water; Montclair draws some of its drinking water from wells. How do others feel about people putting poisons on their property that will eventually get into our drinking water? Shouldn't we insist that people nourish trees and shrubs only with fallen leaves? Is it just their own business when they do otherwise? (It also bothers me especially when I see this happening on the property of religious institutions, polluting the only planet that God is likely to provide for the human race.)

I also rake leaves onto my front yard flowers. I raised the chrysanthemums from seed 20 years ago, and they still thrive with only fallen leaves as fertilizer. About twelve years ago the tree in front between our street and front sidewalk was planted, along with the one across the street and across the driveway. Because I have been raising flowers under ours, I have put leaves and compost under it. Originally it was by far the smallest and weakest of the three; it leafed out two weeks after the other two the spring after they were planted. Before long it was startlingly bigger than the others. Norman Pierson, the late arborist of Montclair, remarked before he died about five years ago that it was a dramatic example of the effects of natural fertilizing.

I save leaves to interweave with "green" matter (kitchen and garden waste) in my compost heap during the next year. I use the compost both in my garden and hand-scattered on my lawn when it looks a bit hungry. That is all the fertilizing my lawn has had since I planted it in 1987. It is lush and nice without those expensive items the corporations want to push on us.

Fred brings me 100 bags of others' leave each fall. At about 20 pounds per bag, that's a ton of leaves that have disappeared onto our property (not counting our own considerable leaves) each year for about 20 years.

It amazes me that others waste their abundance by putting them into bags and having them taken away. Waste not, want not. Besides, it's great fun to collaborate with nature's plan.

Pat

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Zucchini sex and more Rabbit tales

Zucchini flowers have appeared in the early morning, pretty and tasty, either raw or mixed with eggs. Late in the morning they have gone. Youth is fragile and fleeting.

They come in two sexes, and God's plan is that bees take the pollen from the males to the females while doing their own thing. Sometimes humans want full-grown zucchini faster than bees accomplish. Such a human can pick the male plant, nibble around the petals, and make sure the female has her male satisfaction. This human just did that today.

How do you tell which is male and which is female? There are generally more males than females, and they come sooner. They bloom on simple stems. The females have fetus zucchini sitting behind the blossom and they look – well -- more female. It takes about five days after sex therapy for the adult zucchini to be harvestable. I'm excited!

My tiny rabbit was (I think) considerably larger when I saw her about ten days later. She was in the inner garden again! I chased her around, and this time she ran up to the fence several times and turned back, the picture of panic. Finally, she squeezed between the fence and the "gate" that I had not firmly fastened at the bottom. I carefully fastened it to the fence, and I haven't seen her again. The "gate" is a foot high, so I step over it, but rabbits aren't supposed to be able to do that.

Meanwhile, while I was sitting reading on an old-fashioned chaise lounge with plastic webbing outside the garden, I saw a HUGE rabbit at a distance. It was about a foot long, not counting the head. I watched it in amazement, until I thought it was watching me. It's hard to be sure you are having eye contact with a rabbit. I tore my eyes away because I wanted to accomplish what I had set out to do.

It began coming toward me. Now I was sure we were looking at each other. It walked within a yard of the chair, and I felt a slight fear at this large critter -- a fear that amused me at the time. Then it hopped to maybe ten or fifteen feet away, turned around, and began coming toward me at a startling speed. I was even more amused at my even heightened fear. It ran under my chair and hit my bottom in an emphatic bounce upward that I could clearly feel through the plastic webbing.

Then it turned around, started to speed toward me again, and this time went under my legs, bouncing upward toward them so that my legs could feel the rabbit "hitting" them. I waited for more, but it turned around briefly to say goodbye, and then disappeared into a neighbor's yard.

The Easter bunny was back yesterday, looking startlingly normal compared to her small and large relatives. She just sat and looked at me from about six feet away for over ten minutes. I was surprised at how sad I felt when she left me. Rabbits are fun.

Pat

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March activities: peas, seedlings, robins, preparing soil

It's peas-planting season! I usually start on March 4, but we had a snow-cover then, so I started a week late. I keep planting first Sugar Ann's and then Sugar Snap peas until early or mid-April. They taste mighty good come June (or late May)! Sugar Ann's are earlier and don't climb, so you just put them in the soil. Sugar Snaps are even sweeter, but they need a fence or poles to climb, so that is work if you don't already have a climbing place. Some people have grown them on decorative trellises near their front steps.

I have a plethora of broccoli seedlings, so I put three out on March 11 under floating cover. The great wind removed the cover, but when I came home from my trip to New England, they were still alive! I planted three more without the floating cover this past Saturday, but I fear they won't "make it." Perhaps they need a start in greater warmth -- or maybe the new ones will make it after a rocky start.

Indoors, my Malabar spinach finally germinated after about a month of meditation in potting soil. Also eggplant and peppers in a slightly less leisurely way. The sweet 100 tomatoes I planted in early February are four inches high and looking promising. It's a good time for reasonable gardeners to start any of these. I'm pushing the season since we seem to be getting earlier.

Meanwhile, robins are eating the holly berries right outside my study window. Pretty!

If you want some exercise, this is a good time to dig in compost -- or ashes from your winter fires. It's also a good time for double digging, especially if you are starting a new garden.

Now I will go outside and plant some more peas! One, two, three... each separate about two inches apart and about two inches deep. It's a big job to plant as many peas as I do, and it takes several "sittings." But they freeze very well and taste great both in June and in the winter. Besides, isn't it fun to get your hands into the soil in March?

Pat

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