Just in Time

Just in time for the Polar Bear Swim. I was starting to worry that the water would remain in the 40's.

Merry Christmas

I don't know what the rest of you think, but Christmas is a time of such wealth. It sounds oxymoronic, especially after I've spent a month's wages on toys for the family. But regardless of bad commercial habits, people just seem richer in other ways: kinder, slower, happier. As I harvest some greens for tonight's salad, I realize again it is a good time to reflect. And when I do so, I almost always find that I have so much.

Today, especially, I feel like I have too much: to much wrapping paper, too many cardboard boxes, too many brown paper bags from spent luminarias. With the weather co-operating and with a few extra days off of work, let me tell you what I will be doing the next couple of days. The wrapping paper and cardboard boxes will be place over the top of some of my dried tumble weeds. Then I'll put a good layer of mulch (in this case wood chips) to cover sufficiently to keep them buried. The sand from the luminarias will go into a base for short brick walkway. Paper bags and leftover candles will go into my compost bin. I have an artificial tree, but generally buy a "Charlie Brown" tree. That I will plant next to last year's.

Once again, I feel better about giving back to the earth as a way of saying thanks for all her generosity throughout the year.

Merry Christmas. Don't be strangers.

This is where I work

Jealous yet?





The drive in was so pretty, I had to call and wake Kim to tell her (not recommended by the way).

12/16/10

Ahh...Rain

Cover Crops

Here is a link to a cover crop story in Organic Gardening: http://www.organicgardening.com/feature/0,7518,s1-3-81-789,00.html


Again, anybody with any knowledge about this gardening practice, I urge you to chime in.

As an aside, I am privy to some of the goings on at the Rio Grande Community Farm regarding cover crop studies. I'll let you all know as soon as I know how things came out.

Christmas Gifts

Okay, so the Sun Mar 200 didn't tickle your fancy?
How about the Tumbleweed Compost Tumbler?



The vertical tumbling action of the patented Tumbleweed Compost Bin, designed with a stainless steel rod running through the middle, creates an aerobic action that offers a quick and odorless form of composting. It is supported by sturdy, galvanized tubular steel legs that won't rust. The steel in these legs is made with recycled metal (as available). The recycled content varies between 17 and 20 percent.

The Tumbleweed Compost Tumbler is attractive and excellent at keeping pests out of your pile.

Give us a ring if this one interests you, only three left...

Christmas Gifts

Do you have a gardener friend who is already starting to jones for spring? Why not give them a leg up on the seed starting frenzy? It's easy to make compost at home. A compost tumbler keeps your garden looking neat while turning leftover food into a great seed starting mix.

Soilutions has a number of compost bins available. Here's one:



The Sun Mar 200 compost tumbler is already assembled, is an attractive green color and hold almost a 1/3 cubic yard of material. Simply fill it with leaves, grass clipping, kitchen waste...anything organic, turn it periodically, and by Spring all that "waste" will be turned to black gold.

The Sun Mar 200 is on wheels so it is perfect for someone with a small back porch. The hinged lid allows for easy extraction of finished product.

Call us for more information about the Sun Mar 200 or any of our other compost ideas.
505-877-0220

Welcome to Winter, Baby!

It was 16F INSIDE the office this morning.



If anybody feels like dropping off some Brandy, I don't think it would be turned down.

Words to Live By

When driving home with graciously given homemade sauerkraut, ensure the lid is screwed on tightly!

Pictures of Food in Soilutions' Dirt

I am always encouraging people to send me pictures of their projects to post here. Surprisingly, I get very few. Here are a couple of photographs of some food grown by a Soilutions customer in our Topsoil Blend.

The lovely Artichoke. I don't know why it isn't grown more often in this climate. It handles the weather well and is so beautiful.




My personal favorite: Chard. It is so versatile in the kitchen, it is so easy to grow, and it too is lovely.




Who doesn't like watermelons?

Former Employee Makes Good

Here's a shout out to a former employee of Soilutions: Casey MacFarland. If it weren't for Casey's leaving, I would never have had the opportunity to work here. But he moved on to do what he loves and now he has a book out.

Check out his website: http://wildlifetrackingsouthwest.com/home and see if you can't attend one of his book signings near you. There's one this Sunday in the East Mountains.

Seed Saving Workshop

Please Join Us!!

Seed Saving Workshop
with Joshua Cravens director of the Arid Crop Seed Cache
Saturday October 16th, 2010
3:00 PM
Free
410 Atrisco NW Albuquerque, NM 87105
Just north of Central


This is our last workshop of the season. We will cover seed saving basics, with lots of hands on examples as well as more advanced techniques such as saving seed from biennials.
• Why Save Seed
• How to Save, Clean and Store Seed
• Saving Seed from Biennials


Biennial plants are ones that go to seed during their second growing season, usually in the spring. Some example of biennial plants are parsnips, carrots, cole plants (cabbage, brussel sprouts, turnips, kale and so on), celery and celery root (celeriac), parsley, beets and swiss chard. Come learn tips on how to best save seeds from your biennials.

Hope to see you there!!

Questions, please email Sarah:
sarah@gardensedge.org
505-948-8398

Lots to do this weekend

There is so much to do this weekend. I figured instead of enumerating it all, I'd send you to a great website, hosted by a great organization, featuring a great calendar. Soilutions will be at a couple of these events.

http://www.gardenersguild.org/urbangardenactivities

While you're visiting the site, go ahead and become a member.

Get out there and garden!

Weeds

By a VERY informal poll, all of you are sick and tired of pulling weeds for past three months. The rain is great but I know that, in the far reaches of my brain, I curse ever so slightly the rain because of all the inevitable weed sprouts.

I have been trying for years to document the power of mulch in terms of weed control. I have 5" or more of mulch throughout my property. Where the mulch is undisturbed, I have zero weeds; where the mulch is mixed with soil, the weeds have taken hold, but are really easy to pull because the roots are in the friable mulch; where there is no mulch, the weeds are strong and impossible to pull from the compacted soil. It really is significant enough to warrant consideration, but I weed in the morning before the sun rises so photos don't really come out well.

In the course of conversation with customers, I finally got one long time customer to send me a picture of her garden.



This picture is an excellent example of what a layer of organics can do to ease weed ills. Obviously, on the left of the path, no treatment. But on the right, she says "On the right, I mulched as follows 3-years prior to this photo: 1-2 layers of cardboard + 1" of Soilutions compost + 2" of Soilutions wood chips."

At home, I have started using the weeds as an organic layer, i.e., instead of cardboard. So I pull the weeds, lay them flat, cover them with mulch. That way I save room in my truck for the bulkier branches.


Pretty convincing. Thanks for the photo.

Portable Gardens

I love to garden. Duh.

But I would also like to live on a boat and sail around the world. Or maybe just drive around the country tasting vanilla ice cream from all the small creameries on all the small roads in all the back woods of our world.

Or I would love to live in a very hip city, Paris of course, or Portland (Maine or Oregon), Sofia Bulgaria, on the tip top of a high rise.

So, my living fantasies don't really have space for a garden, it seems, even though I would give up many, many comforts to continue to be able to taste a carrot 10 seconds out of the ground.

I followed a blog by Roz Savage as she was rowing solo across the Pacific Ocean. Enthralled, I bought her book depicting her similar journey across the Atlantic. As a composter, I kept asking myself, does she have worms on board to manage her waste? She didn't as far as I could tell, but it turns out she kept a pan of bean sprouts growing for her fresh food supply.

There was a customer a year or two back that worked in a women's health clinic. She and her fellow workers were finding that many of her patient's illnesses were related to poor diet. So she commandeered half the facility's parking lot and built a garden to help instruct women how to eat.

Gardening helps me stay active. My neighbors are well into their 60's and can work me under the table still. I attribute that stamina to daily work in their garden. But when I am old and in a retirement home or should one of my fantasies come true and find myself living atop a building in Bucharest, how am I to maintain a stress-busting garden?

So, from the scientific testing laboratories of Soilutions, Inc, comes a new gardening tool: the portable garden.



Light enough to move, small enough to fit on a roof top or in the back of pickup, yet filled with the same great growing medium you have come to know and trust from Soilutions.

I am speaking of a mesh "sock" filled with a blend of compost, soil, and composted chips. Simply lay out the sock, slit it, plant starts or seeds, water and viola!

Landlord kicking you out just before tomatoes are ripe? A portable garden will allow you to take the tomatoes with you. Too much asphalt? Not enough space? Guerrilla alley garden? Traveler? This might just be the answer to your problems.

Organic Pest Control

Here are a couple of pictures of little guys doing overtime to keep the flies down around here.

Cover Crop Conversation Continued

A question was raised concerning the previous blog entry/email.

I have a question on the cocktail mix. It's my understanding that most cover crops are harvest/cut/flailed, etc.
sometime between the start of flowering and halfway into bloom. With a cocktail, how do you determine the optimum time to take the cover crop down? Is it the flowering schedule of the earliest member of the mix?
The average point of all of them?

And the answer:

Most of our farmers terminate the cover crop with winter kill, meaning it is allowed to fully develop. Before moving into soil health we terminated all sunlight harvest after grain harvest. Now we use the cover crops to harvest the sunlight from grain harvest to winter. This sunlight ultimately becomes additional carbon in the soil. Making increases in soil organic matter more achievable. We have built soil health based no-till systems on the cropland and grazing systems on the rangeland, then the cover crops are used as a bridge to connect the cropland and rangeland. We try for a continual live root, just like native rangeland has. The livestock are a tool to harvest 40-50% of the cover crop biomass, leaving the remainder as soil armor. The livestock can also be used to terminate cover crops by mob grazing. I have attached pictures showing what the soil cover looks like before





and after




having 750,000 lbs of beef per acre graze a cool season cover crop cocktail. Our local Soil Conservation District also has a crop roller which is used to terminate rye or field pea.


We rolled the pea during bloom and the rye during 50%+ anthesis, both were seeded as monocultures. Occasionally we have farmers who terminate a cover crop mixture with herbicide, but only rarely with tillage.

Cover Crops

The following is excerpts from an email conversation concerning cover crops for a local organic farm. I am finding it very useful as this particular aspect of sustainable farming is difficult for me to understand.

Your first attempt at planning a cover crop mixture is very good. As I recall some of the resource concerns included armor (surface residue), crop diversity, soil aggregates, nutrient cycling, and infiltration to name a few. I see the mixture consists of cool season broadleaves and cool season grass, which is what we would use here for a fall seeding after harvest. The high carbon portion appears a little high, with the first 4 species making up 50%, while the legume may be a little low at 30% of the mix. I would suggest decreasing the high carbon to 40% and increasing the legume to 40%. Possibly an additional legume could be added, such as Lentil. The brassica portion at 20% looks good, since they are nitrogen scavenging and low carbon you do not need very much. The high carbon will give you soil armor and their roots will improve the soil aggregates and soil organic matter. The legumes will improve the nutrient cycling, while the brassicas create streets and avenues for the water to move into the soil profile. Improving soil health is about restoring balance, and the cover crop mixtures will help you with this task. Always try to include crop types in the cover crop mixture that are not used in the annual crop rotation, this will improve crop diversity and help feed the soil biology a more balanced diet.

I attached two cover crop pictures too.


[The photo above depicts] a 14-way mixture, which is primarily cool season. It was seeded at the Menoken Farm on May 12 and includes: wheat, oat, forage pea, lentil, ac greenfix, turnip, radish, sunflower, Italian rye grass, hairy vetch, sweet clover, phacelia, canola, and flax. The native pollinators did very well with this mixture too.


[This photo is] a primarily warm season 11-way mixture, and was seeded on June 14th at the Black Leg Ranch. It consists of: pearl millet, proso millet, sudan, soybean, cowpea, sunflower, radish, turnip, sweet clover, canola, and corn. Both are based on the clients resource concerns and objectives. This is not the first time that nature has seen this many different plants together. We have to understand they are working together and not competing. Thank you for your interest in soil health.


I have used this email without permission from it's author but thank him nonetheless.

Hot enough for ya?

The weather has been nice lately; I especially enjoy the cool overcast mornings. But I bet your plants are suffering. We have received about 1" less than average of rain so far and have had two (at least)spells of intense heat. For those of you without a swimming pool, it can be tough to cool down. Next time you are sitting inside with a cold beer while watching Buffy reruns, think of your poor plants wilting in the afternoon swelter. Vegetables won't set fruit when it gets over 90F. Heat stressed plants are more susceptible to disease and pest damage. But when you continue to dump water on them, your water bill will punish you.

You know where this going...

You need to mulch. Mulches, like compost, are a universal cure all. A thick layer of organic mulch keeps soil temperatures low. It helps retain moisture in the soil. (Did you know that in New Mexico, we have the evaporative average of 60" annually? That means that in New Mexico, the natural evaporation of water from soil to the atmosphere averages 5 feet a year. 5 feet! We only get 8" or so of rain to replenish that.) That moist soil provides a habitat for beneficial organism that create a healthy growing environment for plants. It's not by accident that bushes and trees drop their leaves periodically; they are providing mulch to protect and build the soil in which they live.

Although visually pleasing mulch is in some cases as important as properly functioning mulch, some materials perform better than others in some situations.

Windy areas: we have seen over the years that particle shape is as important as particle size when choosing a mulch for a windy area. An elongated shape tends to allow the mulch to knit together so that it stays in place better. These mulches also do well in well traveled areas.

A coarsely ground woody material is a good example. We call this Native Mulch





Another good example is this material. It is a little more decorative. We call it Black and Tan.


Established Trees and Shrubs: The problem with amending the soil around established trees and shrubs is that an disturbance of the soil will damage valuable feeder roots. So a mulch that contains a lot of humic acid containing compost will perform two functions: feed and protect the soil.




Forest Floor Mulch is an excellent mulch for established trees.









Decorative areas: Sometimes you want to show off a rose garden or create a pathway. A good mulch for that application would be a uniform material. These are generally processed more and will be a bit more expensive. Pecan Shells or Wood Mulch are excellent materials.

A new mulch we have is a good pathway mulch. It is a certified playgound mulch called Playsoft.

It's light in color, very uniform in particle distribution, attractive and soft.

Vegetable areas: Now here is where it gets fun. I like to use short fibered mulched in the veggie garden because they generally break down faster. Short fibered materials are usually not as carbonaceous so they won't rob nitrogen from you prized tomatoes. The best part (to me at least) is that these potential mulches are everywhere for the taking. Grass clippings or leaves make great mulches for veggie gardens. Of course, an excellent mulch for your veggies is a compost approved for use on certified organic farms...Premium Compost.

Vote for a Charity

This was forwarded to me by an old friend.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/38027143/ns/today-what_do_you_care_about_today/

What warrants a blog entry this time was the dilemma between the organizations from which to choose. The old school in me says that surfing always trumps anything else. There really is a cleansing quality to the surf that every one should test. But the new school in me sees a huge demand for urban farms. My recent experience with our Soilutions' sign painting makes me want to vote for the urban art project.

So, I leave it up to you all to vote your heart. I don't think there is a bad choose.