June 3, 2009 – Swiss Chard and Garbage Can Composting

Plant Profile: Spotlight on Swiss Chard

A lot of people are scared of Swiss chard. A member of the beet family, Swiss chard is kind of like the beet without the beet. You can put baby chard leaves in salads, but normally when you buy or pick chard, it is a gigantic leaf that looks like it would be closer to home in a flower arrangement than on the dinner table.

Additionally, even though greens are some of the healthiest vegetables you can eat, many people don’t know how to cook them, and thus stay away. Greens are jam-packed with vitamins and nutrients, and are great for people trying to lose weight-greens are low in calories! Swiss chard provides the following nutrients: potassium, vitamin C, calcium, vitamin A, and beta-carotene.

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Money-Saving Tip: The Garbage Can Compost Bin!

We all want to be greener, healthier and wiser, but we don’t have to break the bank to do it. Here’s a home-made garbage can composter submitted by a friend and visitor. It’s simple, chic and wallet friendly, not to mention, a good family project.

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All about Basil

Basil is an annual herb in most climates, with over 40 known varieties. The most common variety grown is Sweet Basil. The varieties can grow to 2-1/2 feet high and wide with leaf colors ranging from light to deep green and others purple. Summer blooms are white or lavender.

Basil can be planted in an herb or flower garden. They can be featured as borders plants, in raised beds or even in hanging baskets. Basil does well in containers both outdoors and indoors.

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5 Tips for Organic Vegetable Gardening Success

Organic vegetable gardening doesn’t have to be any more difficult than “conventional” vegetable gardening. To have the most success with your organic vegetable garden, make sure to incorporate these five tips

1. Plant your vegetable garden in a full sun location. That means, select a spot that gets at least 8 hours of unobstructed sunlight per day. Vegetables just don’t grow well without a lot of sun. Trust us, we’ve tried it in part shade, and it was a sad, sad experience.
2. Prepare the soil before planting. Test the pH and make sure that it is in the optimum range for what you are growing. (Between 5.8-7.0 works for most veggies.) If you can’t add very much compost to the soil, at least fork it up and turn it over to loosen it. If possible, add four to six inches of compost, and let it sit for about a week before planting. Then, STAY OFF the soil. This is very important. When you walk on the soil, you compact it, which basically undoes all of the hard work you put into making it nice and loose for the veggies.
3. Plant flowers in your organic vegetable garden. The flowers will deter pests from munching on the vegetables and encourage pollinators to visit your vegetable flowers and pollinate the vegetables, too.
4. Rotate your crops, especially when practicing square foot gardening. There are some soil-borne diseases that linger for years after the crop is harvested. Of particular importance: don’t plant anything in the broccoli/cabbage family in the same place more frequently than every three years. You might be able to get away with using the same place during one growing season, but then the cabbage area needs a rest from cabbages. There are some particularly nasty diseases lurking in the soil that will affect plants in the cabbage family.
5. Experiment with new vegetables! This is not necessarily limited to organic vegetable gardening, but is one of the great joys of any type of vegetable gardening. If you’ve been too afraid to eat beets or kale, one of the best ways to encourage yourself to try these new vegetables is by growing them. After you grow them, you aren’t going to want to just give them away without a taste!

Square Foot Gardening Techniques

Everybody is planting vegetable gardens this spring. That’s a good thing. If you want to succeed at your new vegetable garden, you might want to try a few techniques from the immensely popular book Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew, or The All-New Square Foot Gardening. The newer version has some different information, and more updated pictures. Each are equally great resources. If you’re pressed for time, or really want to get a jump start on your garden, try these square foot gardening techniques to grow a bountiful harvest this summer:

• Don’t make your vegetable beds any wider than you can reach from the path-on each side. The square foot gardens book recommends 4 foot by 4 foot squares, with paths in between the squares. Why? Because your vegetables (and flowers, and other plants, for that matter) will grow much better, with less watering and less care, if you don’t tromp around on the soil in which they are growing and compact it.
• Plant tall things on the north side of the bed. This is useful information for any garden planning, but especially when you’re gardening in a small space. The sun will come from a southern exposure, which means that shadows from tall plants planted on the north side of a planting bed will fall on the grass, or path, rather than on other plants.
• Mix a few squares of flowers like marigolds or calendula in with your vegetables. The flowers will attract pollinators that will also visit the vegetables, and will help keep pests away.
• A key element of Square Foot Gardening is planting seeds according to the spacing needed by the mature vegetable or plant. This saves time thinning. It also helps keep you from ending up with 50 ripe radishes at one time.

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Your Organic Gardening Questions

Question: When do I prune my spring blooming shrubs?
Linda

Answer: If you have shrubs that have just finished blooming – lilacs, serviceberry, azaleas, gardenias, forsythia and more, you need to prune them immediately after they stop blooming. Spring blooming shrubs bloom on “old wood,” which means that they grow during the summer, and develop flower buds during the summer, which spring into life when the weather warms up in the spring. If you wait too long to prune your spring blooming shrubs, you will cut off all of the flower blooms for the next year. So, the time to prune spring bloomers is NOW!
Katie

Question: Can I put worms in my compost tumbler?
Tammy

Answer: We get this question a lot. If worms are good and compost tumblers are good, aren’t worms in the compost tumbler a good idea? Actually, no. There are two reasons why you shouldn’t put worms in the compost tumbler:

1. Worms like to move about on their own accord. If you have a worm bin, there are specific layers that the worms will inhabit, and layers they will leave. They have bedding, temperature requirements, etc. If you tumble the worms, they will become not only annoyed, but confused as to their location and habitat, and won’t be healthy.
2. Worms can only survive up to certain temperatures. Anything over about 100 degrees is too hot for them. That makes a dark-colored compost tumbler with really hot compost a completely inhospitable environment for worms. Tumblers are designed to heat up fast to speed up the decomposition process. Microbes will thrive, but worms won’t.

Now, all of this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try worm composting! It just means you should compost in a composting structure or pile made just for worms!

Chris