Yes I left the garden in a mess last fall and I do not exactly remember why. There it is though, the mess still waits for me and creeping charlie has had a grand ole time covering everything. The ground is more than wet so I started pulling up the charlie and repairing the tomato trellises. My plan is to then spread chicken manure mixed with pine shavings. I bed the hens with pine shavings so that is how it comes, ready for the garden. After that has settled in and it gets a little warmer I will plant white clover. My plan is to then make holes in the clover and put in tomato plants, the clover then serving as a living mulch while fixing nitrogen for the tomatoes. Last year I tried red clover, but it gets too tall and floppy. The\u00a0 honey bees cannot harvest from the red clover as the flowers have to long and narrow a passage but they love white clover and it is shorter and should form a sustaining mat although I am not sure it is any match for creeping charlie, we shall see. I am doing this because I am having difficult finding anything I can use for mulch.\u00a0 It turns out hay and grain fields are being sprayed with a herbicide that keeps flat leaf weeds out of the field and it comes through in the straw and my tomato plants suffer being a flat leaf plant and I am trying to keep toxins out of my garden. the first year I used straw I was lucky to get any fruit at all. I feel this is a horrible thing for all the native plants and insects and birds but I won’t get started on how we are killing the planet spray by wretched spray. A warning, it also comes through in the manure I learned that the hard way with horse manure\u00a0 now I only use my home grown fertilizer. \u00a0I have also been reading “Attracting Beneficial Bugs” by Jessica Walliser. She has some very interesting concepts that make sense to me. It turns out that when a plant is attacked by lets say aphids that the plant puts out an odor that signals beneficial bugs to come to the rescue and chow down on the bad bugs in this case the aphids. when we then spray the aphids even with just soapy water we also kill the good bugs that have come to dine and we damp down the smell signal. If we wait maybe a couple weeks do nothing and check again we will probably see the good bugs in shinning armor and maybe eggs for backup that have come to do the job and of course dine. Maybe we need to get out of the way and stop doing more harm than good. Also part of the plan is to put in plants that attract beneficial insects and build an environment that has a natural cycle of eat and be eaten. I am going to jump in and try this as it makes sense to me and the book is worth checking out. As gardeners we need to educate ourselves as to what a good or bad bugs looks like[also in the book] and find another way to live in harmony with the whole system that already exists for us to take advantage of. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yes I left the garden in a mess last fall and I do not exactly remember why. There it is though, the mess still waits for me and creeping charlie has had a grand ole time covering everything. The ground is more than wet so I started pulling up the charlie and repairing the tomato […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":141,"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140\/revisions\/141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christinelinderstudio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}