Prairie View

Sunday, March 25, 2018

Second Spring Break Blog

Hiromi has spent most of the day in bed, sleeping.  He also spent a long night in bed, sleeping.  He went to bed early this evening to sleep.  When I got home from church and took his temperature, he registered a fever, so I called Dwight and Karen's house to tell them that we wouldn't be able to come after all for the Sunday dinner invitation we had accepted yesterday.  Yesterday he was unusually tired and had a deep cough.  The cough is still present.

******************

On Saturday we planted onions.  That sounds like an abysmally small gardening accomplishment, but the first gardening efforts in spring are always like the first of many efforts.  Getting started is the hard part.  Gathering the supplies from wherever they've been stored, and doing the preliminary planning, measuring, and marking are all time-consuming, perhaps especially if you have Hiromi's and  my combination of obsessions and passions. 

Hiromi and I usually work together peaceably and harmoniously, but gardening together sometimes does not fit this pattern.  Maybe if I write about it I can figure out how to avoid more dramatic exchanges like the one we had yesterday.

Hiromi never complains about doing the measuring for the garden layout.  "Just tell me what you want," he says.  That's the first little hint of trouble brewing.  What that means is that he is not the slightest bit interested in helping me remember where we planted what last year or the year before that.  He's also not going to help me figure out how much of anything to plant.  He isn't interested in grouping the early things together or the things that will need watering throughout the year.  He doesn't know what plants are already growing in the seed house and what seeds have been ordered.  I'm supposed to have all these things figured out so that he can get right to the measuring. 

What we have figured out over the past few years is that the Mittleider Gardening method has many benefits (except that we make significant alterations for tomatoes and vine crops), so we usually lay out our garden in a pattern of beds 18 inches wide by 15 feet long.  Each bed is separated by 3.5 feet of unplanted space, with five feet at the end of each bed.  Our garden is 105 feet long (or wide, north to south), so that gives us five ranks of 15-foot beds. Along the north side of this area is the shop.  Hiromi measured out five feet from the side of the shop and marked the end of the first bed.  He kept on measuring along that whole 105 foot length, marking the beds and the paths.  So far, so good.

Then he began to extend the 5-foot paths to the west.  I arrived on the scene after this, and was dismayed to see that the paths angled off toward the south instead of heading straight west, according to my sense of where that was. I find this very disconcerting.  He patiently explained to me that the shop is not parallel to the sheep barn, and that the raspberry rows were aligned with the sheep barn and the new beds were aligned with the shop, so it couldn't come out right.  My suggestions on how to make it "righter" (like letting the path next to the shop be wider at one end than the other so that the rest of the paths would look straight) fell entirely on deaf ears.

Besides the fact that one asparagus row runs from east to west roughly in the center of the garden, we have other complications.The other north-south perimeter of the garden is much messier.  For starters, the remains of an old barn occupy the southwest corner.  Because it provides a windbreak, we planted the raspberries on the north side of it. The raspberries make the "take-out" corner bigger.  The northwest corner has a bit of bindweed growing there.  The weed is difficult to control, and Hiromi takes his control duties very seriously.  He has banned the use of that area for gardening while he takes care of the bindweed.  This is not the first year of the ban.  I hope it's the last.  That leaves only one section of the far side of the garden that is available for cropping.  The strip is too wide for one bed and not wide enough for two--unless we alter the length of the beds and allow the five-foot end paths to jog to accommodate this space most efficiently.  Hiromi wanted none of either of these options.

My garden mapping plan had that far west section designated for the early crops--so that we wouldn't have to stretch a hose to water there when the weather is hot and dry, as it usually is during the summer.  That's why getting things figured out for that area seemed important for now.  I soon began to look for alternatives when I saw how complicated things would be with that plan, and because Hiromi had already proceeded with another plan. 

When I got home from school on the day the garden was worked, besides doing the afore-mentioned measuring, Hiromi had cut a roll of welded wire fencing into four lengths for enclosing the perimeter of the five beds he had created near the shop.  He had decided that this is how we would protect the early transplants from the rabbits and the chickens.  Oooooookaaaay.

I had my onion plants in hand.  I also had potatoes ready to plant.  In the seedhouse, I had transplants ready of cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi, and lettuce.   I had seeds for peas (English, snap, and snow), spinach, beets, chard, and carrots.  I had planned for small amounts of most crops, but I saw right away that not everything would fit inside the fenced area.  Reasoning that the onion plants were not likely to be attractive to the chickens and rabbits, I decided that they would go outside the fence in the next rank five of beds.  When those were planted, only one remained empty, and we had run out of time.

The major disagreement occurred when Hiromi proceeded to begin making the first onion bed with nothing marked except the center of the beds at both ends.  I protested and he replied that "it doesn't have to be precise."  I was adamant that we place two strings exactly 18 inches apart to mark the bed--for reasons that had become very clear to me while I was introducing this method to my food production class at school.  In short, I saw that some of the problems we had with the beds in past years was because we had made the beds too narrow, and because we had not first raked soil into the 18 "area.  Hiromi was all set to perpetuate these problems, and I wasn't about to settle for that this year.  I wish I had been able to convey that in calm conversation. 

After the strings were in place, the planting could proceed in an orderly way. 

Before I go further, I should explain just a bit more about the Mittleider Method.  I believe I did so a number of years ago, but we've learned more by experience now, and I'll incorporate some of what we've learned in the explanation this time.  You should know that it involves the regular addition of very small amounts of minerals and other plant nutrients, and regular watering by flood irrigation between the two (usually) rows in each bed.  The rows are one foot apart, positioned at the base of ridges all along the sides of the beds.  The ridges are formed by raking soil out of the center of the bed (which was raised slightly earlier by raking soil from the paths into the beds).  The techniques were refined by those involved in a Morman charity, and have been utilized for teaching people in many parts of the world to grow good food crops in almost any climate and soil.  I'll begin with a list of the advantages:

1.  Water and fertilizer* can be applied where it benefits the garden crops and is not wasted on areas between rows.

2.  Aisles and paths are wide, making it possible to inspect, tend, and harvest the crops easily.

3.  Productivity is  maximized.

4.  Weed control inside the beds is very simple after the crops reach enough size to shade the area between the rows.

5.  Weed control in the aisles and paths can be done in a variety of ways--by hand or by machines, or by mulching.

6.  Adding fertility by means of compost is not required.

Since fertilizer is applied every week after plants are up and growing, till the crop nears maturity or the end of the growing season approaches, large spreading crops like tomatoes or sprawling vines like melons, cucumbers, and squash are a problem in the Mittleider Method.  They recommend trellising.  We tried doing so for tomatoes, and didn't find it satisfactory.  We had guineas at the time, to help eat the grasshoppers that were threatening the garden, but they took a shine to the low-growing (and very visible) tomatoes on the trellised, pruned plants, and pecked them and made them unsaleable.  When the plants higher up on the vines started ripening, they often got sunburned.  We've gone back to growing tomatoes in cages.  We still usually plant one row to each Mittleider Bed as we have always done, and try to do regular fertilizing, although it's not easy.  They're watered with drip lines connected to a header line.  Mulching between rows usually happens. 

We allow the vine crops to sprawl.  We also start these plants by planting them along one side of the beds and try to fertilize them as long as we can manage.  Watering happens by drip pipes as it does for tomatoes.  Ten-feet on-center spacing for vine crops is more nearly right than five feet.  Mulching is critical for weed control.  I've done some experimenting with growing cucumbers in cages.  It was successful enough to try again, although the vines eventually range beyond the cage. 


*A package of Micro-nutrients purchased from Mittleider headquarters is combined with locally available N-P-K fertilizer and Boron (from Borax) and Magnesium (from Epsom Salts).  Various N-P-K ratios can work--usually with equal amounts of all elements or with K (phosphorous) lower than the others. 

Before planting, a three-part mix is applied.  This contains either lime or gypsum (depending on rainfall--gypsum for areas of low rainfall) and again, Borax and Epsom Salts.  This is a one-time application for each crop.  This is mixed into the soil of each 18-inch-wide bed. 

While using a petroleum-based nitrogen source does not seem ideal, Dr. Mittleider argued that it is actually made from plants that have decayed over eons of time.  The other elements can all be described as powdered forms of what can be mined from the earth. 




 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment



<< Home