Lessons learned

I learned a lot of lessons this year. Here are some:

1) Lasagna gardening. By this I mean, you put down cardboard, and then you pile materials on top of that like straw, leaves, compost, grass clippings, in lasagna-like layers. Then you top it all with topsoil, plant into it, and the theory is that voila--weeds are suppressed and killed deep under the cardboard, and plants are fed, both.

Great theory. Not realistic for my situation.

If you have nothing but bluegrass or another tender grass and are converting that lawn to a veg garden, this would work really well. With the weeds I have, and with the grass I have, it was fairly disastrous. Weeds and grass pop through the cardboard and layers. Also, every source said pine straw was a reasonable organic mulch material to use too. IT IS NOT. It's alleopathic, the worms can't eat it, and almost a year later, I'm still pulling it out of my beds, 100% intact. Cardboard has rotted, leaves have rotted, compost has been incorporated, even thin branches left in the mix are half-gone, but the pine needles are going to be pine needles for years more.

Therefore, I've switched to killing via solarization, with six-mil plastic sheeting. Much more efficient. If you want to keep the worms alive and healthy, don't kill too big a patch at once. (15 x 20 feet might be about the maximum that allows worms to crawl out from under the heat, according to what I've read.) Still, at six weeks per 15 x 20 patch after the spring solstice, in a year you could develop quite a large garden out of your lawn, have your first garden patch done in time for tomatoes and peppers to go in, and be developing new beds right through fall planting time for leaf lettuce, turnips, and radishes. Weigh down the plastic well along the edges and here and there in the center (I used wood chips and two-inch-thick branches and bricks, though one could use soil, digging it up and tossing it onto the edges). When the grass and weed roots are all dead, take up the plastic and plant in, mulch with leaves (save them at the end of fall, and your neighbors' too!) and then wood chips, both free resources here, or with straw if you can get that cheaply. The plants will do very well.

2) Seed starting. I'm still working this out, timing and efficiency and which plants like being in cells first and which don't. Some issues I've worked with:

• lighting and space. Lights are expensive. If you have a five-shelf plastic unit with ten seed trays and five lights suspended above them, use aluminum foil as reflectors, and if you use those $20 LED shop lights you can get at Walmart rather than the $50+ official grow lights, you still have about a $250 set-up, but it'd work well enough. I'm sticking with my less expensive setup that allows two trays, and I'll double it to four trays by running the lights 24 hours (I'll put the trays away from light so they all get a 12-hour "nighttime" and a 12-hour day.)
• pests outdoors. While there are plants that might like being direct seeded and grown that way, the birds or slugs or whatever pests you have will eat them. So sometimes it's better to get seedlings up to four or five inches tall indoors before you put them in ground. Then birds leave them alone, slugs can eat a leaf or two and the plant will still survive.
• timing. I followed what many books and charts online said, but it wasn't really correct. Once I'd read some actual scientific research, I realized that most plants transplant better at four weeks of age. (They have fewer diseases and bear more fruit). Also, if you limit it to four weeks, you don't have to up-pot, so you're saved the expense ofextra potting soil. Example: If you start eggplant 12 weeks before frost, and eggplant doesn't want to go out for 4 weeks beyond that, that's too long. Start them inside 6 weeks before frost, and that timing works out much better.  However, that "last frost date" doesn't tell the whole story, so sometimes, the weather is perfect early and you have nothing big enough to go in ground, or you have plant starts beginning to be root bound, and the weather is too damp in late May to plant out. Dem's da breaks.

3) Pests revisited. I have, in addition to a normal range of insects, three large pests: birds, squirrels and rabbits. The rabbits, you have to fence against and make sure you aren't giving them habitat with bushes and spaces under deck or shed. Luckily, a not-too-expensive fence of chicken wire and t-posts, no concrete needed, does the trick. With birds, netting is the only solution, and wind can blow nets around. The more I secure nets, however, the harder it is to get to weeding and pruning and harvesting. Tulle is cheaper than row cover and easier to water through. I need to start tulling my tomato rows when the first color starts to show, or birds will get to my tomatoes. Squirrels are squirrels, and there's nothing to do about them that I can see. So I'll triple the sunflower plantings next year and see if they leave me any. If they don't, I accept, the way I accept them plucking an occasional cherry tomato It saves you wear on the enamel of your teeth to just accept that squirrels are who they are.

Moles, which I thought were going to be a pest, are not, beyond churning up the soil. I've not lost a single plant to them, and they eat grubs that do hurt plants and moles break up the clay soil deep down. Except for unsightly piles of dirt, I'm fine with moles.

Insects: I've sprayed neem oil (organic and edible), because squash vine borers are such a serious pest, and I've also sprayed something a bit stronger (but allegedly still not toxic to humans, not that I'd spray it on the part I'm going to eat) at sunset once a week. You'll want to wait until sunset to spray so the bees are bedded down. You need your bees! Other crops have been nibbled, but none destroyed by insects, so except for squash, I let the insects chomp away and not resent it. I planted red amaranth as a trap crop (it's so tasty to some bugs they'll hang out there first), and I'll do that again in the future.

4) Diseases. Last year, growing in bagged and thus sterile potting mix, and growing hybrids, I had no tomato diseases. This year, growing more disease-prone heirloom tomatoes in the ground, plus using what I think is infected bulk compost I had delivered by a garden center (which I won't use again!), my tomatoes have had every disease known to humans. Black spot was worst, but it was limited to the cherry tomatoes. Late blight is taking hold now on the big tomatoes, so I'm trimming out leaves and have begun spraying. They are all mulched, so I'm not getting much soil splashed up.

black spot on tomatoes

Next year, I'll definitely start spraying June 1, with baking soda or with hydrogen peroxide (1:6 in water), or some other innocuous anti-fungal spray. I hope this will prevent the diseases from taking hold. I'll also get ruthless with cutting out bottom leaves. Once a week, I'll take another 10% of bottom leaves on the plant. By July 1, all my plants will be stark naked for the first 24 inches. And I'll let one or two suckers grow from about 30 inches from the ground, but pinch the rest out, so that the trellis doesn't get too crowded and air can get through the leaves.

5) Random other lessons. Shelling peas is awfully time consuming for what you get. Probably in the future sugar snap peas will be my choice. I haven't found any green/french beans I like the taste of, so i need to try more varieties. While they'll warn you not to plant grocery store potatoes because of disease and so on, I planted three kinds and had three successes. I suspect those rumors are started by seed potato companies, which, in the US, sell potatoes for 10 times the grocery store price. I'll continue to plant Walmart organic bagged potatoes (and seed potatoes I saved from my own crop) in the future, grocery store garlic, and seeds from the herb aisle that are much cheaper than little packets of seeds.

I know I've learned more, but that's some of what is informing my next growing season.