Possible permaculture solutions for next year’s garden

As the traditional gardening season draws to a close (though my cold frame is still going strong), it’s time to pause, reflect and begin planning for next year. I know this because the first of the seed catalogs for 2011 have begun to land in my mailbox already!

Pause and reflect, huh? Okay, let’s be honest. My 2010 garden had – well…issues. Let’s see…

The winter squash and cucumbers were overrun with pests. In 2009, I gave away cukes to the food bank, but this year I barely got a handful due to squash bugs and striped cucumber beetles. Either or both of these pests caused the plants to dry up and die. I also killed several squash vine borer moths, but apparently not until after they had done their damage – borers prematurely killed my buttercup squash vines, although I did get a few small squashes. Apparently when the plants “know” they’re in trouble they accelerate the maturing process of the fruit in a last-ditch attempt to put out seed and reproduce anyway.

The garden was overwhelmed with some sort of invasive grass that has seemingly endless long white running roots. It’s everywhere, even though I covered the paths (two years ago) with weed barrier cloth and wood mulch. What’s happened is that the wood mulch has started to rot and create enough of an environment for the weeds to root in, so they’re perfectly happy living on top of the weed barrier – and, in fact, have started rooting down through it. Argh. Last year’s garden remained reasonably neat through the season, but once this running grass took hold it became a total mess this year.

Straw mulch doesn’t work, at least not in an area that receives 40 or more inches of annual precipitation like we do here in central New York. Straw provides a happy habitat to two voracious creatures: voles and those slimy beasties of the damp, slugs.

Despite the fence, rabbits (babies, I think) got in the garden – and ate most of the beans. I got maybe two meals worth.

The squirrels decimated my tomatoes, biting into each one and making it unsalvageable. The extra juicy heirloom Brandywines were particularly hard-hit. Because I put in so many plants, I did still get tomatoes, but for each one I picked, I lost 3 or 4. The rabbits may have been partially responsible for this as well.

I could probably come up with a few more “issues”, but you get the idea. The question is, how to best address these problems for next year? Sure, I could opt for the short-sighted, lazy fix: I could pour chemicals on everything and try to kill the squash bugs, vine borers, beetles, grass, slugs, voles, squirrels and rabbits in one big “roundup” of carnage.

Or I could engage my brain and look to nature – permaculture – for solutions.

Until now, my garden has been fairly traditional: raised 4′ x 12′ beds, plants grouped together within each bed and everything pretty much concentrated into one small area. I think it’s time to reassess this whole traditional approach, which appears to create a veritable grocery store of one-stop shopping for pests of all kinds.

So what can I do differently?

1. Scatter plants much more widely over a larger area. If you study nature (as you have to in order to paint her) you’ll see she does this as a matter of course. This way, if one plant or small group gets attacked by pests, other groups stand a chance of escaping with less or even no damage.

2. Jumble things together to confuse pests – or at least make it harder for them to find what they’re looking for. Again, nature does this a lot. Truly pure stands of any given plant are rare in nature. Even areas with a concentration of one plant species will have many other species mixed in as part of the understory, shrub and ground layers. Pure monocropping is an artificial human construct. There’s no law that says plants must be neatly grouped together in long rows. As part of the jumble, I’d like to incorporate many more flowers – particularly perennial natives – to keep the pollinators happy and the pests befuddled. If nothing else, it should be very pretty!

Here’s a really good example of the first two ideas in action. It’s from Geoff Lawton’s excellent DVD, Establishing a Food Forest :

3. Plant resistant varieties. Butternut squash (those are the pear-shaped tan ones) is said to be resistant to squash vine borer. A couple years ago, I grew some acorn squash that was completely untouched by borers, though the nearby hubbards  were decimated. (The acorn’s flavor was blah though, which is why I tried buttercup this year. Time to try butternut I think.)

4. Adjust timing. I had a couple volunteer acorn squash plants that made it out to the light of day from the center of the compost pile in late July. (A sure sign that my compost pile doesn’t exactly get  hot in the middle!) I left them to see what would happen – they did put out small squashes. More importantly, they completely missed the window for borer moth activity, which in this area seems to be the last week in June and the first week in July. The plants stayed healthy and green until frost got ‘em in October. So what if I could find a short-season variety that I could put in later, and then perhaps cover with row cover while still very small – until after the borer danger has passed?

5. To discourage the squirrels, I may provide an alternate water source. It’s quite likely that the squirrels were eating my tomatoes because of the water content, and in support of this theory, tomato damage did seem to decrease in the days after a good rain. A small pond or two, shaded to keep down algae growth, might solve this problem and also provide a habitat essential for other helpful critters like toads, which are said to eat slugs.

6. Stop using straw, at least as a veggie mulch. It’s a problem here, period. I do still want to mulch because it really cuts down on watering, so I may try a thin layer of pine shavings. I have heard that shavings are much less appealing to both slugs and voles, but I won’t know until I try. For what it’s worth, I tried scattering crushed eggshells – supposedly abrasive to slugs – around my plants but the slimy chompers never even noticed.

7. Make my raised beds taller to deter rabbits. Actually I’m thinking of creating a series of tall raised beds combined with ground-level beds for plants that rabbits don’t seem interested in, like tomatoes. According to Rosalind Creasy, in her book Edible Landscaping, beds that are 18 inches high are of little interest to rabbits and that makes sense to me. Yes, they could easily jump up that high but I suspect they just don’t look up that often. (Let’s face it, their necks are awfully short!) They seem most interested in seeking out delicacies right at eye level or slightly above. I could always line the top of the bed with a foot or so of small diameter chicken wire, held in place by short bamboo stakes.

To further discourage rabbits from tomato predation, I need a much better solution for tying up the plants. In the NC State permaculture videos, I saw a slide of a very simple solution for containing tomatoes: flat panels of 2×4 “dog wire” fencing mounted horizontally, fastened to a wood post at each corner. There were 3 or 4 panels spaced along the height of the posts and the tomatoes very happily grew up through them – no tying necessary. Can’t wait to try this!

8. Speaking of lining beds, the sides-to-bottom of new raised beds can be lined with hardware cloth before being filled with soil, in order to keep the voles out. One thing I did do differently this year was omitting the straw on the potatoes and I had no vole damage, unlike last year.

9. No more fabric weed cloth. It’s a waste of money. Cardboard seems to work just as well, and it eventually composts in place. Even if the grass invades a cardboard mulched area again, it won’t be such a pain in the butt to fix. With cardboard, just get some more and re-mulch. Pulling up the root infested weed cloth is going to be a major project and I’ll end up sending yards of the stuff to the landfill. But if I don’t get it out of there, I’ll have to deal with the mess for the foreseeable future. I think they call that a level one error.

The ultimate goal of permaculture is a balanced, harmonious system that requires minimal artificial material and energy inputs, maintaining itself in the same way that wild ecosystems keep humming along without human interference. We used to be a part of such systems. We can be again – in our own back yards!

As every gardener knows, the garden is never really done. Every growing season presents new challenges and next year’s garden is always going to be the best ever! So it’s time to hit the drawing board and come up with a good plan for 2011. It’s a great way to while away the cold months, too.

Til next time…and have a great weekend!

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Tagged as: Critters, Food, Gardening, Nature, Permaculture