GARDENING : In Spring, Dirt Is Central to the Plot
In spring, it is more interesting to discuss growing, living things in the vegetable plot than something as dull as dirt. But the gardener who overlooks dirt, or rather the need for good garden soil, is doomed to fail.
There are many opportunities during the year to work on soil; spring is one of the most popular. By now, the organized gardener will have done most of the initial ground preparation--rototilling, digging, adding nutrients. Procrastinators can avoid this soil work to get crops in on schedule, first planting and sowing and then following a respectable plan of soil enhancement throughout the season. This assumes, of course, that the gardener is not planting directly into soil that has never been worked before.
Even the diligent gardener, who was out there a month or more ago turning sod and preparing beds, will want to continue improving the soil as the plants develop.
Soil preparation is different from soil conditioning. Tilling and preparing the garden generally involves adding fertilizer and compost and removing rocks and weeds. Conditioning requires less initial soil work but a continuing effort to improve the top layer of soil and to lay a cover of mulch.
All these endeavors are aimed at the same goal: getting the best soil to produce the best garden.
You need compost to improve the soil, mulch to protect plants and fertilizer or composted manure to feed them. These are available from garden centers or can be home-grown. The primary garden tool for this is the rake, although a shovel, spading fork, hoe and wheelbarrow will prove invaluable the more you get into it.
If you don’t have a compost pile, start one. Compost is just organic matter that has decomposed. You buy it under a fancier name: humus. Its dark, friable consistency suggests great richness, but compost is not high in nitrogen and other essential nutrients; it is terrific for lightening heavy clay soils, adding oxygen and creating an environment that permits nutrients to be released to plant roots. It should not take the place of fertilizer, and neither should fertilizer fill in for compost.
Organic matter takes about six months to decompose sufficiently to be called compost, a shorter span if the pile is dutifully turned and moistened. If you have no humus, you can buy some while the homemade brew is getting started.
A compost pile can be as makeshift or as elaborate as the gardener chooses. It should be accessible to the garden and the kitchen and at its most efficient is confined inside a circular or square fence. Fashioned from wire, wood or even cinder blocks, the compost frame is typically about 5 feet long by 3 feet wide. The dimensions depend on the gardener’s interest and supply of ingredients. The key is that you ought to be able to get to it easily with a shovel to turn it and a wheelbarrow to load and unload it.
Excellent mulches can be made from leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, sawdust and chopped straw. These materials break down gradually to improve the soil even if, like compost itself, they add few actual nutrients. During the summer, mulches can be piled up fairly heavily as plants grow and flourish. In addition to improving the soil, they preserve moisture and stifle weeds, thus reducing labor.
Fertilizers help plants grow and condition the soil. A good, all-purpose organic fertilizer should contain a formula in which the numbers for nitrogen, phosphorus and potash added together do not exceed 15. Commercial organic fertilizers are no longer rare, but if they are not available, a manure-based fertilizer--or simply “composted manure”--is at hardware stores. Getting manure can take effort and ingenuity. Dairy farms might be vanishing from the landscape, but horse stables offer dung for free or cheap. Or people in the classified ad sections of newspapers deliver--for a price.
Sources of organic fertilizer include bone meal, blood meal, fish emulsion, greensand, rock phosphate and kelp, used alone or in combination. All organic fertilizers have the advantage of being exceedingly forgiving--you almost can’t hurt plants by overfeeding--as long as manures are allowed to rot before applying.
Placing fertilizer around plants as they grow is called side-dressing. Once a month during the growing season is a reasonable schedule. Clear mulch from around plants, add granular fertilizer (one trowelful per plant) and replace the mulch. With fresh manure, brew a manure tea by adding a shovelful to a five-gallon bucket of water, let it steep overnight and douse plants, a gallon apiece. If the manure is well rotted, it can be added dry. The optimum dose: one shovelful per plant.
If a plan to condition soil is in place, the dull dirt will yield beauty.
