14 Acre Farm

HOw We Grow

Sustainable Gardening, Permaculture, Natural Gardening, Organic Methods

Those are the big words, for those that like big words. 😉

Our gardening has changed over time. We didn’t garden very well, made a lot of mistakes, but learned a lot along the way. Can a bad gardener, improve? You bet! What if you ruin your soil with contaminants or with poor soil management… is your garden a lost cause? Not at all! That’s the great thing… there’s always next year!

We learned that we didn’t want to use sprays. But the weeds… and the bugs… well, there’s better ways to combat your garden problems than looking to the shelves at the local stores for how to fix it. We’ve learned from older gardeners, we’ve learned from younger gardeners… what we’re finding out is there is ALWAYS something new to learn!

Melissa’s health took a turn for the worse around 2013. She had hives, severe life-threatening food allergies, and struggled with hives for nearly 9 months. To survive any day meant watching what she ate, what she touched, trying to figure out why her hives worsened so quickly that day or trying to find out why her throat closed shut after eating out. There were all kinds of suggestions to try this or try that, take this or take that, but most medications that were to calm the hives created other problems that were worse than the hives. What eventually turned things around was eliminating almost everything processed, and avoiding foods that were GMO. She also tried eating organic as much as possible. Slowly, there was victory as her body healed. At this time, Melissa did a lot of reading to try to figure out the cause of her issues and began to learn what things are harmful in our diets. Gardening became a necessity to keep good food on the table, without worry of how it was grown, what was sprayed on it, etc.

While we had a garden since we were first married, and even had large gardens, we admittedly did things that were not very healthy to the soil… we tilled our gardens heavily but began to find you couldn’t find a worm, if you wanted to go fishing, in the garden. (Worms are a great sign of soil health!) So for years, we have been trying to rebuild our garden soil. We compost our animal manures and bedding and use it to amend our soils. We also use gardening methods meant to give back to the soil, instead of needing so many chemical amendments. We actually use a variety of methods, which work well in the different areas of our gardens. We use the Hugelkultur in our raised beds, we may till our gardens to initially prepare a bed, but after than we go to a No Till gardening method. We use the Back to Gardening Methods in some of our open areas and even in some of our high tunnel gardens. We mulch beds to give the soil much needed materials it needed to rebuild itself. We do use plastic mulch under the tomatoes, and in our walking paths in our high tunnels to keep weed pressure down. It is buried and covered with wood chips, which slowly breaks down to feed the soil. .

As for chemicals, sprays, pesticides, etc… We really try to limit what we use in the form of chemicals and rather choose something that does the same thing more naturally. While there are approved organic sprays and pesticides, we limit what we use even when it is okay to use it.

For Bugs: What we do use fairly regularly each season is a dusting or so of diatomaceous earth if and when the cabbage worms get out of hand, but first we try using insect netting until the bugs have crawled underneath the netting. If it is a large problem we will dust and let the plants have time to recover (and wash well). We have used some soap sprays on occasion for squash bugs when they get out of hand, but again hand picking into a bucket of water can ease the stress quite a bit. We have also just started using some sprays with water and essential oils that seem to deter some bugs because of the smell. Companion planting has helped a lot with the bug pressures in the garden. We also occasionally use sticky traps or bag traps to lure pests out of the garden. That being said, there are still bugs that can penetrate netting barriers, hide from the dust, or just multiply overnight like crazy… for those things we cannot control, you may have a few leaves with holes in them. Just wash and eat… they still taste good!

For Amendments: We use our home grown compost. We may use a granular organic starter fertilizer to get the plants off to a good start until they are placed in the garden. We really haven’t needed to use regular rounds of fertilizer due to our gardening methods of using compost, rotating crops, companion planting, and mulching. In the past we have used fish emulsion, gypsum rock, Epsom salts, egg shells, bone meal, blood meal, in extreme cases of deficiency, but we really haven’t dealt with that for several years now.