memories of mid-century Texas gardening
Red, White & Grew - Victory Gardens and More!: This Letter Came in the Mail Last Week
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Garden Girl on June 29th, 2008 | File Under slow food, locavore, victory garden, gardengirl | -
June 29th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Warning from UK about pesticide residue in manure and straw.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/29/food.agriculture
[Reply]
I feel for those gardeners– growing organically is such a challenge & nothing is ever really completely “clean” since so much of our environment is laden with toxic chemicals.
Coconut coir mulch doesn’t have the renewability & environmental issues of peat &, afaIk, has no contamination issues.
But there’s the expense… & organic gardeners tend to mulch a lot to help hold in the nutrients in compost.
Straw is cheap, but look at where it’s sourced & one can see how problems would arise.
I do what I can with the budget I have.
My soil here isn’t quite the dense dead clay that a lot of E. Austin has to deal with, but this is still land in recovery from being used hard as conventional farmland up til maybe 25 years ago.
So I used raised beds with sheet mulch made of newsprint. & I plan to feed & amend like crazy.
Even there, some of the compromises I must make because of my budget make me sigh– newsprint isn’t exactly toxic but I’d rather not have it in my garden. My soil is very nitrogen poor (see my above comment about hard used farmland), so I use foliar spray with fish in it (& I don’t like that– both because I know how polluted fish stocks are & because I don’t like to support the fish farms that I suspect the small fish used in the foliar spray come from).
I could cover plant clover & sow it under, but I’d like to garden by this Fall.
I’m hoping that once I bring the condition of the soil up a bit I’ll have a self sustaining system that will only need my home made compost to function, but in the meantime, I make the best choices I can given my limited newbie knowledge of organic gardening & my meager budget.
[Reply]
Cover crops are an inexpensive way to build up your soil. Here’s an article that provides an overview, as well as links to more detailed articles:http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/covercrop.html#web
I find buckwheat to be an excellent spring and summer cover crop here in central Texas. It seems to germinate the minute it hits the soil — cotyledons emerge 2 or 3 days after planting. And it can tolerate heat and drought. It grows very quickly, so produces a lot of organic matter for the garden in a short time. You can even use the seeds to make flour to add to pancakes and bread.
[Reply]
MMm buckwheat pancakes– now there’s a cover crop I can get into! Thank you, Barb