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Get growing!
By Mitsy Krzywicki
Note from Doni: Please join me in welcoming Mitsy Kyzywicki and her first gardening column, Get Up and Grow! Mitsy, a top-notch graphic artist and illustrator, is also is a wealth of information about plants and gardening. I trust you’ll find her as interesting and inspirational as I do. Enjoy.
From the glimpse of your first carrot seedling to emerge from the soil, to the smell of a handful of dill, to the taste of the first ripe strawberry, vegetable gardening is just about the most satisfying hobby in which to indulge.
I love to grow my own food, and I would love to share some of my techniques.
I am not a gardener who subscribes much to conventional gardening methods, I tend to make it up as I go along. But I will resort to more formal methods when my experiments fail. (Meaning, I actually will read the directions!) Bear with me if you do it a different way. Of course, feel free to add your tried and trusted methods.
1. Garden placement. Full sun. If you can find a spot that gets a goodly portion of full sun all day, you are off to a good start. Vegetables need a lot of sun to grow vigorous and healthy, but if you can find a spot that gets late afternoon shade, you may find it helps in our scorching summer heat. A spot that stays shady in the morning, then gets hot sun later, or a spot facing a west wall, may not do as well.
2. Soil amendments. Most of Redding, unless you are blessed to live in a bottom-land area, has a heavy, nutrient-depleted, laterite soil. You will need to put lots of organic material in it to make your garden do well. Some folks like to put well-composted cow manure in their gardens. I use it, but I prefer to use products like Ferti-mulch, composted cedar or redwood mulch, something that has a bit more lasting power. I have used City of Redding’s compost products as well. Hand-dig in as deep as you can, or rototill it in. No matter what it is, if it is composted, it will help. Un-composted sawdust and bark will not help your soil until it breaks down, and will rob your soil of nitrogen.
3. Watering. I have been heard to say, “Redding, where watering is an art.” Our hot summer climate makes it important to make sure your watering method is sufficient. Overhead watering with a sprinkler works, and is the cheapest initial outlay of money, but tends to be water-wasteful, carry water-borne diseases, and will germinate a plethora of weed seeds. Flood irrigation works great if you live by the ACID canal, or have the time to run a bubbler at the end of a hose. For those of us who are water-use conscious, don’t want to be running around with a garden hose all day, and like to keep the weeds down, drip/low pressure systems are the way to go.
I use drip emitters, micro-sprayers of all kinds, in-line emitters, 3/4″ and 1/4″ recycled-tire soaker lines, and will be using what is called T-Tape this year. I use the drips and micro-sprayers in my all flower areas, but for the vegetables I prefer the soakers and in-line emitters, and, hopefully, the T-Tape. The soakers will begin to clog with scale after a year or two; big disadvantage for so large a financial outlay. However, the others will last years and years if properly cared for.
The local department hardware stores carry many of these items, but if you are doing a large area, and if you want to save money, go with the specialty businesses that cater to landscaping and plumbing materials only. Most of the folks in those businesses are very knowledgeable and helpful to even us emitter-ignorant.
4. Weeds. Get rid of them. Whether you pull them, hack them, or scrape them up, get them out of the area so they don’t finish off a couple of seeds in their dying gasps. Unless you live right next to open fields and pastures like I do, every season you prevent weeds from reproducing is another year of fewer weeds returning. Don’t spray with any herbicides unless you have these weeds from the pit of hell; Johnson grass, Bermuda grass, or bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis). In this tainted world today, one of the important points of growing your own veggies is not ingesting all the chemicals that get used on the commercial produce. Try to eradicate your weeds with mechanical means and not chemical ones. I do use Round-up in my vegetable garden, but only on the bind-weed, which is nearly impossible to kill by pulling, and I apply it with a brush or a sponge so no overspray gets on any plants or soil. For most of my weeding I love these tools shown here.
Next time: What to grow.
Mitsy Krzywicki (pronounced Kriz wik’ ki), a former Record Searchlight artist, now enjoys life as an avid gardener, freelance graphics artist and amateur photographer. You can drop her a line at czygyny@yahoo.com
Comments
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Welcome, Mitsy. It’s good to see you’er having a great time…
Misty, as a rookie gardener, I’ll be checking out your advise. Welcome to Doni’s place.
Mitsy, as a rookie gardener, I’ll be checking out your advice. Welcome to Doni’s place. You’ll be in good company.
Nice to see Stinkrz again! Keep on diggin’!
OK, Massed Flogger, Stikrz has a nice stinging nettle bouquet prepared just for you. She also told me to remind you that you still have a shovel here with your name on it, slacker.
Chris, its good to see you out and about, thanks for the greetings!
Budd, thank you for your encouragement. We all have something to share with one another of kindred interest, so it is an honor to be here to share my experiences with you folks!
I am very excited about your column and look forward to future tips!
Hi Mitzi,
Welcome to Doni’s place. Do you have any advice on taking care of gophers? The little guys have just eaten my onion bulbs that were 2″ across. This definitely means all out war. (They even ate my cabbage roots this last winter!)
Thanks,
Tammy
Hey there…. 5 steps forward and none back! The north state will definitely benefit from your gardening wisdom. Of course for us “brown thumbs” there is never hope! Spread your knowledge like manure and watch it grow.
I look forward to seeing the rest of your arsenal.
Tammy,
Gophers, and their nasty soil-mates, moles, are one of my biggest banes.
While I do try to avoid chemicals in my gardens, I sometimes end up resorting to toxic means when it comes to gophers. I use a product called Cooke’s Gopher Mix, which is a grain product laced with Strychnine. Of course, when you use poisons, you have to take the utmost care in handling, and if you have pets that might eat disoriented animals that come to the surface, then it may not be the control to use.
We just purchased a small Maccabee trap to use, but danged if we have been able to get it set. I fussed with it until my hands were weary of holding down the wickedly pointed business end. Sigh. But, the traps are going to be the sure way to know you have nailed the cursed rodents.
Now if you like playing with fire, (and who doesn’t!) you might also try using gassers, the brand I use is ‘The Giant Destroyer’. Catchy, eh? I would make a mass effort and use all of them at one time in your garden, if the area is large enough. Cover the perimeter. Just follow directions, light the fuse, and cover quick. Your garden will be redolent in the hellish aromas of sulpher for a while.
I have also experimented with creating aviary wire lined areas to deter gophers and moles. Guess what? Unless every edge is nailed down to something, those clever creatures WILL find the only tiny opening and move right on in. While it doesn’t help for larger veggie areas, you can build wire ‘pots’ to protect the roots of ornamentals.
Cats can not be underestimated for good gopher control, trouble is getting one who loves to hunt and not sit all day on your chair.
I am under siege this year, at my place. The fields around my place are PACKED with gopher runs, and they are making inroads on my five acres. Where are my owls, my hawks, my bobcats and coyotes?!?
It’s WAR I tell you!
Chris, good to see you again. There is a vague scatological joke in your message, and I love it. Just like old times.
Mitsy,
Thanks for your advice. Dick is outside trying to figure out how to use the poison poker that inserts grains of poison deep into the ground. We were reluctant to take this step, but it looks like the only thing that might work. We will keep a close eye on our princess, Ann Margret, to make sure she does not catch a gopher, especially a groggy one. She currently spends hours listening and pouncing on their entrances, without catching a thing. Fortunately, if she does catch something she does not eat it, however we will certainly keep an eye on her during this process. Our next step is to pull up the rest of the plants in one of our 4′x8′ raised beds, pull out the dirt and wire the bottom of it before putting it back. We had to buy 3′ and 2′ wide wire to ensure coverage across the entire 4′. Now, every time we empty a bed, we will have to do the same. We have already had to resort to copper arches and netting to protect the edible leafy plants from the small yellow finches! (I wish they would just stick with the sack of seed we put out for them, but they obviously prefer salad with their seed.) Thanks for the tips.
Tammy, if you are going to use the wire, make sure it is not chicken wire, but use the 1/2″ or smaller aviary wire, the one that makes the square holes, not the more familiar hexagon shape. Anything larger and the gophers will giggle as they wiggle, right through your attempts to block them.
I have noticed the goldfinches snacking on my plants, too, but only on the leaves of my sunflowers, little stinkers. They skeletonize the bases of the big leaves. It’s a trade-off, I suppose, they and their feathery brethren eat the insects that munch on your plants, and take in a bit of healthy fiber for their trouble. I draw the line when it comes to my ripening strawberries, however, and usually must net the rows at some point.