Things are growing fast at our Greenbelt Garden on the coast of Mendocino. Everyone is working hard to try and keep up! There are many things which make our Biointensive Gardens flourish, and perhaps the most important is a big beautiful compost pile! Our wonderful intern from Nicaragua,Tania María Espinoza Benavides, builds the best compost piles I have ever seen. Its clear she recognizes how a properly built pile, with a good mixture of mature and immature plant materials, a little bit of bed soil and some water can produce the high quality compost that keeps our soils alive and rich in nutrients and organic matter. The second photo is of a bed of marigolds and parsley which was a good attempt at companion planting. The marigolds help keep garden pests away, and the parsley enjoys its company. In addition, we will let the parsley go to flower which will bring in all sorts of beneficial insects. Companion planting like this makes the garden a resilient and beautiful place. In the next photo, you can see some borage in the foreground, quinoa to the right, a bed of barley in back with some tomatoes in a minigreenhouse to the right. The borage is a bee-magnet, swarms of them! The quinoa is interplanted with vetch to help fix some nitrogen, and is itself an important calorie and compost crop. The barley is also an important compost and calorie crop and getting tomatoes on the coast is a rare and exciting thing! We are growing cherokee purples in that minigreenhouse and had our first round of harvests last week! The final picture is of Tania and Susana Hernandez from Mexico. They are filling flats with our flat mix which is one part finished compost, 1 part old flat soil and 1 part bed soil. We like to sift it so that it has a soft, fine texture. Sifting also helps us screen out and insects which might take out the baby seedlings. This mixture of flat soil keeps the nutrients cycling through the garden and makes the best use of our soil resource. We do not import potting soil. With the mix of 1/3rd of each, we take advantage of the native soil organisms, the remaining nutrients in the old flat soil, and the fresh vitality of the finished compost. It works great! I hope that when you finish this you are eager to get back in the garden, or more ready to start one up! Get outside, enjoy the day and get your hands in the dirt!!
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 18:58:59 +0000
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