gardening on the cheap -- creating healthy soil

Have you started your vegetable garden yet? In our smack-in-the-middle Midwest Zone 6, we get the green light on Mother's Day. Since the weather is 70+ degrees & sunny this week, most of us are busy prepping the garden bed in eager anticipation of Sunday.

My grandparents graciously gave us their walk-behind tiller two years ago. Two years ago, I started with a tiny plot about 4 foot by 4 foot. Last year, I more than doubled the size. This year, I plan to do the same. We have always broken new ground with our tiller, so I have been looking forward to prepping the new ground in under 30 minutes. But, as chance usually has its way at just the wrong time, our tiller last month refused to start. This led me down the path of figuring out alternatives, and as it turns out, the broken tiller was a blessing in disguise as I've learned to look at gardening as less a hobby and more a process of nature.

As we all know, while hobbies can be quite expensive, living in sync with nature is about as free as you can get. So, this year I have even healthier soil as well as several tips to help keep your vegetable garden from busting the budget.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty details, picture this in your mind: you are hiking in the forest. You stumble upon a log overturned on the path. On the one side, you see where the tree has uprooted. There is lots of debris around the spot -- dead, rotting leaves, rotting bark, bugs galore. But, you also notice that there is also very lush new growth from ground plants in that same area. There is a low ground cover and many other taller plants, probably flowers.

Our goal is to recreate this scenario in our own home gardens to help our vegetables thrive as much as those flowers are on the forest floor.

So to begin our summer gardening series, let's look at how we can cheaply create the soil that will feed our plants.

Healthy Soil
The picture I laid out above is a perfect example of healthy soil because it contained lots of decaying plant matter. To recreate this in a home garden, many people like to use compost. Remember that compost is simply decaying plant matter. The easiest way to start a functioning compost pile is to designate a back corner of your property for yard waste & start dumping in there. You don't have to turn the pile over to create compost, but if you do turn it, you'll acheive the desired result faster. Do remember that anything that goes in your compost pile will eventually make it back into your garden, so don't dump anything with chemicals on it (such as pesticides or weed killers) and don't dump any diseased plants back there.

To prepare your garden bed, till only when you're breaking ground for the first time and maintain the bed by using an overwintering ground cover or mulch. In our forest floor scenario, nobody tilled anything. Contrast that with the scenario of new home building. If you've ever had a home built, you'll know that only very hardy weeds thrive on the disturbed soil. The function of soil on this earth is to allow plants to thrive and it does its job quite well without our intervention.

If you have a motorized tiller, use it on new ground, then cover the bed with something that blocks the sun, such as a tarp or heavy layer of newspapers for about a week. If you don't have a motorized tiller, you can simply cover the ground for at least a week, directly over the grass & weeds before tilling. Since covering it will weaken & begin to kill the growth underneath, this will make the ground much easier to till.

After the week is up, uncover the bed. If you're tilling by hand, you can now till the new ground. Concentrate on getting only hardy weeds & grass tilled up. If you have an existing ground cover in that area, you till it less aggressively or leave it alone altogether.

Next, apply about 1/2 inch of compost across the whole bed. If you don't have a compost pile yet, you can find compost under decaying trees in almost all wooded areas you might have (legal) access to. After applying your compost, you can lightly till new ground a second time to mix in the compost. Plan to plant on or after a rainy day.

Mulch helps retain water & prevents water run-off. In layman's terms, you can water your garden less and your plants will be healthier & more resistant to disease & bugs if you use some sort of mulch. Options for traditional mulch include newspapers, cut grass, dead leaves, wood chips, sawdust, shredded non-glossy black & white junk mail, and pine needles (which will acidify your soil, so be prepared to make soil amendments). Living mulch or ground cover can be very effective since you can plant it once & be done -- no need to continually add more.

At the end of the growing season, be prepared to put in a few hours work on your bed to help it build itself while it overwinters. Plan to apply another 1/2 inch of compost across the bed and cover it with a mulch of some sort. Many people like to use newspapers, as they still let in air & water, but block the sun. Others like to sow in a crop like winter rye that will feed nutrients into the soil during this downtime.

Next time, we're going to talk about planning our garden for the most effective use of space as well as each plant's preferences.