Garden Plot: My Experience

Organic Gardening

I started organic gardening in the mid-seventies, when French bio-dynamic intensive methods were the fad. For years I grew most of my own food and medicine in a small garden on an organic farm north of Santa Barbara, CA. Here’s how:

A companion bed of herbs and vegetables. I planted a thick bed of herbs and vegetables. After selecting the main ones I wanted, I added a few plants purely for their value as companion plants: e.g., horehound for the tomatoes and yarrow for the herbs. Then I sorted everything out according to likes and dislikes, e.g., tomatoes like both dill and carrots, but dill and carrots dislike each other, so the carrots went on one edge and side of the bed; the dill went on the other. Then I arranged things according to soil strata, e.g., root crops mixed with bushy herbs; tallest plants at the back. and kohlrabi thrown in for comic relief. Companion planting also brings out the best in some plants, e.g., sage and peppermint, which I grow for medicinal use, also drive away cabbage butterflies and carrot flies. The bed is 4′x12′. The plants are:

1) Tomato           2) Dill                  3) Horehound        4) White sage         5) Zucchini          6) Peppermint
7) Echinacea       Chamomile      9) Yarrow            10) Comfrey           11) Catnip           12) Parsley
13) Thyme          14) A mixed row of carrots, beets, lettuce, and kohlrabi
15) Oregano       16) Mixed beets and lettuce.

Growing barrels of potatoes, I got my hands on four plastic 50-gallon barrels. I drilled drain holes in them, set them up on blocks and planted spuds in them. Here’s how: Cut up potatoes which have started to sprout, leaving an eye or more on each piece. Dry these out for two days in a cool, dry room. Then plant in a shallow layer of soil and compost in the bottom of the barrel. As the potatoes grow up, add more soil and compost. After they reach the top of the barrel, I plant a couple of bush beans in each barrel. The beans protect the potatoes against the Colorado potato beetle, and the potatoes protect the beans against the Mexican bean beetle. As soon as the potatoes flower you can find little spuds in the soil. When the whole plant dies back, kick over the barrel for a bountiful harvest. I have two barrels of red potatoes, one of white russet, and one of Yukon gold.

Grow a Mound of Zucchini, and following an idea from Robert Kourik’s Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally, I cleared a section of yard and hoed the dead plants, green weeds, and topsoil into a long berm atop a space I whose clay crust I had forked loose. I put a layer of compost and a layer of dirt atop the berm. Then I poked holes through the dirt and planted the zucchinis in the compost about a foot apart. I expect to get mass quantities of zukes from now til October. It is 8′ long. Grow a row of garlic:Keeping a huge stand of white and Swiss chard from last year, I planted a row of garlic. Using garlic bulbs from the grocery store, I pushed individual cloves just beneath the surface, and then heavily mulched. I grow and eat mass quantities of garlic year-round as both food and medicine.

Eat the weeds: Spearmint, nasturtiums, red clover, and dandelions all grow wild nearby. I make a garden salad with about half wild greens and half from the garden. I even let a few dandelions flower and go to seed in the garden. This will give you a start: lots of salad, tomatoes, potatoes, and zucchini. Plus highly nutritious comfrey and garlic.

• Replace your soda pop and coffee with peppermint tea.
• Treat headaches with camomile and catnip tea (both are delicious in salads).
• Treat colds and coughs with horehound and sage. Heal injuries with yarrow and comfrey.
• Prevent illness with echinachea.

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