If the compost bin is the heart of an organic garden (it is), it's important to get it right if you want high quality organic compost. Don't buy costly high-tech compost bins from a garden centre. Forget about building bins, with great labour, out of lumber. Instead, let Nature do the work.
Here are some great green gardening tips for making compost organically.
An organic compost bin on legs
Many folk sink a large plastic bin, such as a water butt, underground as a compost pit. The lid repels rain and it will compost even fish and meat scraps, free from pets and scavenging rodents. But to hook out the finished compost from five foot down is a back breaker.
A solution is to raise the plastic bin above ground on bricks. Fit a tap or place a tray underneath the drainage holes and you can draw off liquid compost - a concentrated plant food that's more balanced and beneficial than even that garden miracle, comfrey tea. (The black smelly gunge that emerges from decomposed comfrey leaves.)
The laziest compost bin for this purpose is an old metal incinerator. When the compost is ready, just knock over the bin.
Using a compost bin on bricks, you can make 'weed tea' that serves a double purpose. The rotted weeds will give you a liquid feed plus solid compost. The ideal ingredients are comfrey (high in phosphorous) and/or nettles (rich in nitrogen). Any garden weeds that don't contain seeds will also add useful trace ingredients.
Just layer the bin with fresh leaves and stalks. (If you add tree leaves, shred them first by running a lawn mower through them a few times or by piling them in a barrel and working them with an electric strimmer.) Collect the nutritious compost tea from the base of the bin and dig the remaining rot into your soil or lay it on the surface as an organic mulch.
Tyres make organic compost
Five stacked tyres make the perfect organic compost bin. They absorb heat so the bin 'cooks' quickly. That's important if you want to destroy weed seeds or blighted foliage. The tyres are easily tipped over when you need the compost. To re-assemble them is a snap.
Washed tyres are safe in the garden. Laboratory tests have shown they import no toxins into your soil or plants. You can get all the old tyres you need - giant tractor tyres will furnish a raised bed all by themselves - free from garages or tyre replacement outlets.
Make sure the garbage in the bins is damp then top the tyre stacks with an old carpet. If the high stacks look ugly, disguise them. Lead degradable strings down from the crowns to the soil and grow beans, peas, tomatoes, achocha, little squashes or climbing flowers up them. In fall, when your compost is ready, just cut the strings. Toss the plant residue, string as well, into a new empty stack of tyres along with the garden waste.
Turn perennial weeds into compost, safely
The most irritating advice I read, when taking instruction on compost, is: 'ensure your compost bin reaches a temperature of 135°-150°F. That way it will cook all weed seeds and disease organisms'. I live in a temperate clime: zone 8. The day my compost bin tops even 100°F for three days running, I'll go bake an egg on it. It just doesn't happen, does it?
Just as irritating is the advice to turn the heap every three days. We just don't do it, do we? Lazy solution: you can make perennial weed roots harmless, without turning the heap, by putting them into a sealed plastic bag with lime and grass clippings in summer. Add some other plant waste, if you wish. Tie the top loosely or the resulting gases may pop the bag. This process cooks them in three months or, in a tropic summer, three weeks. You get a slimy, black, anaerobic, imitation cow manure. But it's wondrously fertile!
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Truth About Companion Planting in the Organic Garden
Does 'companion planting' really work to repel pests and grow more organic vegetables, without chemicals? Is it one route to sustainability in the organic garden? Or is it a lunatic's nest of fable and anecdote? Answer: all these things! Many a gardener has overturned the myths of companion planting from personal observation.
I have successfully grown beans among onions, and fennel alongside tomatoes. I've personally twined runner beans up sunflowers with excellent results. Yet all these partners are said to hate each other, according to authoritative books on companion planting.
Conversely, some gardeners have also planted nettles beside carrots to attract beneficial insects, as some gurus advise, but have then seen the crop wiped out by carrot flies, sheltering in the nettles. Or they've reared pollen-rich flowers to attract beneficial insects to their vegetable blossoms, then been puzzled when the insects feast on the foxgloves - but disdain the runner beans. Or vice versa.
Does companion planting hinder or help?
Those very few scientific tests that have been done on companion planting, have raised serious questions. For example, setting aromatic plants among brassica, a popular recommendation, actually increased damage from caterpillars in some trials. It was found more effective simply to lay green plastic, even astroturf, beneath Brussels sprouts, to make the plants invisible to the cabbage white butterfly.
Growing basil or nasturtiums with beans sometimes encouraged, rather than deterred, aphids. Potatoes grown with marigolds, horseradish, peas or garlic showed no benefit whatever and intercropping potatoes with broad beans - a legendary combination - often depressed the potato yield. In any case, horseradish is a risky companion for any vegetable plant. Future plots will never be free of it.
There was no measurable increase in yields, or drop in pest damage, observed when mixing cabbages and tomatoes, or runner beans and tomatoes, or radishes and cucumbers - all favoured companions.
Where companion plants did reduce pest damage, this was often offset by lower production. If tansy was grown thickly enough to reduce aphid attack on peppers and squash, or marigold was set among cabbages to deter flea beetle, the companions competed so vigorously they stunted the food plants. And so on.
Experts are poor companions
Gardening gurus also contradict each other. Bob Flowerdew's Organic Bible claims that brassica do well with tomatoes, yet Louise Riotte in Carrots Love Tomatoes says 'tomatoes and all brassica repel each other and should be kept apart'.
Robert Kourik in Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally states 'sunflowers produce chemicals that act as growth inhibitors to a number of plants', and Bob Flowerdew counsels they should not be grown with runner beans. This will surprise those of us who gain bumper crops, by intercropping sunflowers with lettuce, indeterminate tomatoes, dwarf and climbing beans - including runners.
Mr Flowerdew is right to caution us but only because, in my experience, sunflowers massively dehydrate the surrounding soil, much as conifers do. But keep the area amply watered and there's usually no problem.
Indeed, shamefully little scientific research has been done in any area of companion planting. And so different are everyone's soil, micro-climate, pest and weed populations (and growing methods) that no single combination or prohibition, howsoever sensible it seems, will work as it should every time. If it does, distrust the evidence. Your crop may now be growing 'better' (or worse) because some quite different factor is at work!
Yet while any influence on pests, crop yields or weed control may be unpredictable or arguable, companion planting still merits study - if only because it makes the best pragmatic use of the soil.
Sensible companion planting
Companion planting can often work well, but for reasons that are not obvious. Simply, it makes the best available use of the soil and available light. Chinese cabbage and Brussels sprouts, or roots and lettuces, or beetroot and kohlrabi are good companions because they like similar soil but draw nutrients from it at different depths. Dwarf beans and cucumbers, or leeks and celery, or runner beans and bush tomatoes all enjoy rich, moist soil but they take advantage of light at different levels.
Squash, courgettes and pumpkins provide moisture-retentive ground cover to sweet corn, while suppressing weeds. Lettuces draw lightly from the soil and grow well under runner bean trellises, even in moderate shade, so making productive use of an otherwise barren area. And so on.
Will companion planting work in your garden. Yes! But only if you replace superstition with common sense!
I have successfully grown beans among onions, and fennel alongside tomatoes. I've personally twined runner beans up sunflowers with excellent results. Yet all these partners are said to hate each other, according to authoritative books on companion planting.
Conversely, some gardeners have also planted nettles beside carrots to attract beneficial insects, as some gurus advise, but have then seen the crop wiped out by carrot flies, sheltering in the nettles. Or they've reared pollen-rich flowers to attract beneficial insects to their vegetable blossoms, then been puzzled when the insects feast on the foxgloves - but disdain the runner beans. Or vice versa.
Does companion planting hinder or help?
Those very few scientific tests that have been done on companion planting, have raised serious questions. For example, setting aromatic plants among brassica, a popular recommendation, actually increased damage from caterpillars in some trials. It was found more effective simply to lay green plastic, even astroturf, beneath Brussels sprouts, to make the plants invisible to the cabbage white butterfly.
Growing basil or nasturtiums with beans sometimes encouraged, rather than deterred, aphids. Potatoes grown with marigolds, horseradish, peas or garlic showed no benefit whatever and intercropping potatoes with broad beans - a legendary combination - often depressed the potato yield. In any case, horseradish is a risky companion for any vegetable plant. Future plots will never be free of it.
There was no measurable increase in yields, or drop in pest damage, observed when mixing cabbages and tomatoes, or runner beans and tomatoes, or radishes and cucumbers - all favoured companions.
Where companion plants did reduce pest damage, this was often offset by lower production. If tansy was grown thickly enough to reduce aphid attack on peppers and squash, or marigold was set among cabbages to deter flea beetle, the companions competed so vigorously they stunted the food plants. And so on.
Experts are poor companions
Gardening gurus also contradict each other. Bob Flowerdew's Organic Bible claims that brassica do well with tomatoes, yet Louise Riotte in Carrots Love Tomatoes says 'tomatoes and all brassica repel each other and should be kept apart'.
Robert Kourik in Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally states 'sunflowers produce chemicals that act as growth inhibitors to a number of plants', and Bob Flowerdew counsels they should not be grown with runner beans. This will surprise those of us who gain bumper crops, by intercropping sunflowers with lettuce, indeterminate tomatoes, dwarf and climbing beans - including runners.
Mr Flowerdew is right to caution us but only because, in my experience, sunflowers massively dehydrate the surrounding soil, much as conifers do. But keep the area amply watered and there's usually no problem.
Indeed, shamefully little scientific research has been done in any area of companion planting. And so different are everyone's soil, micro-climate, pest and weed populations (and growing methods) that no single combination or prohibition, howsoever sensible it seems, will work as it should every time. If it does, distrust the evidence. Your crop may now be growing 'better' (or worse) because some quite different factor is at work!
Yet while any influence on pests, crop yields or weed control may be unpredictable or arguable, companion planting still merits study - if only because it makes the best pragmatic use of the soil.
Sensible companion planting
Companion planting can often work well, but for reasons that are not obvious. Simply, it makes the best available use of the soil and available light. Chinese cabbage and Brussels sprouts, or roots and lettuces, or beetroot and kohlrabi are good companions because they like similar soil but draw nutrients from it at different depths. Dwarf beans and cucumbers, or leeks and celery, or runner beans and bush tomatoes all enjoy rich, moist soil but they take advantage of light at different levels.
Squash, courgettes and pumpkins provide moisture-retentive ground cover to sweet corn, while suppressing weeds. Lettuces draw lightly from the soil and grow well under runner bean trellises, even in moderate shade, so making productive use of an otherwise barren area. And so on.
Will companion planting work in your garden. Yes! But only if you replace superstition with common sense!
A Clever New Way to Use Companion Planting in Your Organic Garden
Can companion planting work in our organic gardens - to repel pests and diseases and grow more vegetables without chemicals? It depends upon our individual soil, light, weather and many other factors.
A tip that may work for one gardener - like growing aromatic plants around cabbages to repel flying pests - may work in one garden. But other growers might find they have to sow those companion plants so thickly around the cabbages to deter pests that they depress the growth of the cabbages.
So how do you know if a specific companion plant or method of companion planting will work in your garden?
Simply, grow the companion plants in pots! Then you can move the pots around your beds to test if a particular plant deters flying pests or not - and, if so, how many plants you need. Using pots, you can even take the perennial plants indoors in winter.
Aromatic herbs work well as companion plants in pots
This method works well with aromatic herbs like borage, which - in some gardens - have been known to keep cabbage white butterflies off brassica. It might work even with parsley, onions or chives which are said, if very thickly set around carrots, to repel carrot root fly.
But, of course, the method is effective only against flying pests. For example, the pungent flowers of Tagetes minuta (Mexican marigold) deter whitefly, aphids and cabbage white butterflies but the plant is far more useful for its root secretions. These are said to suppress nematodes, couch grass, creeping elder and bindweed by working in the soil itself.
Nor are companion plants in pots likely to help peas and beans to attract pollinating bees. Research suggests that bees focus on just one type of pollen-rich plant at a time and, once they find it, the hive will not be distracted by other plants. This will be a blow to those gardeners who hopefully intertwine their climbing beans with nasturtiums and sweet peas. Beauty may be guaranteed but not, it seems, bean set.
A clever way to test companion planting as a pest repellent
Companion planting in the conventional way is hit-or-miss as a pest repellent but you can still test some plant combinations very precisely - using essential oils. For example, soak the leaves and flowers of Tagetes - a fabled pest repellant - in alcohol for a week or two. (A ready source of cheap, undrinkable alcohol is own-label supermarket vodka.)
Then spray this infusion, diluted in water in a 1:20 ratio, or at whatever strength is apt to your pest problem, directly onto any plant that's at risk from flying insects. Spraying plants also overcomes the problem of growing, in an annual crop rotation, perennial companion plants which stay in their place for several years.
You can see for yourself
Using this method of 'companion planting', you can see for yourself what works in your garden - and what doesn't. For example, the UK's Southampton University found that extracts of hyssop, rosemary, sage, thyme or white clover, sprayed on cabbages, did help protect them from diamondback moths and white cabbage butterflies.
Yet the same companion plants grown beside the cabbages in pots had no effect. The companions themselves emitted too little repellent odour unless they were crushed.
Another idea, even simpler, is to soak non-degradable cloths in the essential oils and prop them around the plants you want to protect. (Old nylon socks and balled pantihose, even pads of fibreglass roof insulation, work well.) The downside to this method is, you have to renew the pads every few days. (The upside is that such pads, soaked in hot chilli sauce, are a very effective humane repellent for cats.)
You could test the pot method using any aromatic oil derived from a companion herb or spicy plant. Why not try sage against carrot fly, or rosemary against bean beetle, or garlic oil against everything? Try whatever combination you wish. Just take the plants' essential oils where they are needed, when they're needed!
A tip that may work for one gardener - like growing aromatic plants around cabbages to repel flying pests - may work in one garden. But other growers might find they have to sow those companion plants so thickly around the cabbages to deter pests that they depress the growth of the cabbages.
So how do you know if a specific companion plant or method of companion planting will work in your garden?
Simply, grow the companion plants in pots! Then you can move the pots around your beds to test if a particular plant deters flying pests or not - and, if so, how many plants you need. Using pots, you can even take the perennial plants indoors in winter.
Aromatic herbs work well as companion plants in pots
This method works well with aromatic herbs like borage, which - in some gardens - have been known to keep cabbage white butterflies off brassica. It might work even with parsley, onions or chives which are said, if very thickly set around carrots, to repel carrot root fly.
But, of course, the method is effective only against flying pests. For example, the pungent flowers of Tagetes minuta (Mexican marigold) deter whitefly, aphids and cabbage white butterflies but the plant is far more useful for its root secretions. These are said to suppress nematodes, couch grass, creeping elder and bindweed by working in the soil itself.
Nor are companion plants in pots likely to help peas and beans to attract pollinating bees. Research suggests that bees focus on just one type of pollen-rich plant at a time and, once they find it, the hive will not be distracted by other plants. This will be a blow to those gardeners who hopefully intertwine their climbing beans with nasturtiums and sweet peas. Beauty may be guaranteed but not, it seems, bean set.
A clever way to test companion planting as a pest repellent
Companion planting in the conventional way is hit-or-miss as a pest repellent but you can still test some plant combinations very precisely - using essential oils. For example, soak the leaves and flowers of Tagetes - a fabled pest repellant - in alcohol for a week or two. (A ready source of cheap, undrinkable alcohol is own-label supermarket vodka.)
Then spray this infusion, diluted in water in a 1:20 ratio, or at whatever strength is apt to your pest problem, directly onto any plant that's at risk from flying insects. Spraying plants also overcomes the problem of growing, in an annual crop rotation, perennial companion plants which stay in their place for several years.
You can see for yourself
Using this method of 'companion planting', you can see for yourself what works in your garden - and what doesn't. For example, the UK's Southampton University found that extracts of hyssop, rosemary, sage, thyme or white clover, sprayed on cabbages, did help protect them from diamondback moths and white cabbage butterflies.
Yet the same companion plants grown beside the cabbages in pots had no effect. The companions themselves emitted too little repellent odour unless they were crushed.
Another idea, even simpler, is to soak non-degradable cloths in the essential oils and prop them around the plants you want to protect. (Old nylon socks and balled pantihose, even pads of fibreglass roof insulation, work well.) The downside to this method is, you have to renew the pads every few days. (The upside is that such pads, soaked in hot chilli sauce, are a very effective humane repellent for cats.)
You could test the pot method using any aromatic oil derived from a companion herb or spicy plant. Why not try sage against carrot fly, or rosemary against bean beetle, or garlic oil against everything? Try whatever combination you wish. Just take the plants' essential oils where they are needed, when they're needed!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)