Guide To Organic Gardening

By Author: Chris Adams
Total Articles: 1121
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Wood ash from hardwoods is rich in potassium and contains significant amounts of calcium and other minerals. Ash from conifers may be similarly rich in potassium but contains little else. Wood ashes spread on the ground tend to lose their nutrients rapidly through leaching. If these nutrients are needed in your soil, then add the ash to your compost piles where it will become an unreachable part of the biomass that will be gradually released in the garden when the compost is used.

Wood chips are slow to decompose although they may be added to the compost pile if one is not in a hurry. Their chunkiness and stiff mechanical properties help aerate a heap. They are somewhat more nutrient rich than sawdust. Wool wastes are also called shoddy.

Methods and Variations

A note to the internet reader: In the the print-on-paper edition, this chapter and the next one on vermicomposting are full of illustrations showing composting structures and accessories. These do not reproduce well on-line and are not included.

Growing the majority of my family's food absorbs all of the energy I care to put ...
... into gardening. So my yard is neat but shaggy. Motivated by what I consider total rationality, my lawn is cut only when it threatens to overwhelm the lawnmower, and the lawn is not irrigated, so it browns off and stops growing in summer.

I don't grow flowers because I live on a river in a beautiful countryside setting surrounded by low mountains. Nothing I created could begin to compete with what nature freely offers my eye. One untidy bed of ornamentals by the front door are my bow to conventionality, but these fit the entrances northeast aspect by being Oregon woods natives like ferns, salal, Oregon grape and an almost wild rhododendron all these species thrive without irrigation.

When I give lectures, I am confronted by the amazing gardening variations that humans are capable of. Some folks' raised vegetable beds are crude low mounds. Then, I am shown photographs of squared, paralleled vertical-walled raised beds, uniformly wrapped in cedar planks. Some gardens are planted in fairly straight rows, some are laid-out in carefully calculated interplanted hexagonal successions and some are a wild scattering of catch-as-catch-can. Some people don't eat many kinds of vegetables yet grow large stands of corn and beans for canning or freezing.

Others grow small patches of a great many species, creating a year-round gourmet produce stand for their personal enjoyment. Some gardeners grow English-style floral displays occupying every square inch of their yards and offering a constant succession of color and texture.

This chapter presents some of the many different ways people handle the disposal of yard and kitchen wastes. Compost making, like gardening, reflects variations in temperament. You probably weren't surprised at my casual landscaping because you already read about my unkempt compost heap. So I am similarly not surprised to discover backyard composting methods as neat as a German village, as aesthetic as a Japanese garden, as scientific and as an engineer would design.
The author Chris Adams is the manager of the container gardening website where you can a free copy of a 'container gardening secrets ebook' and other gardening supplies and resources at low prices.