Growing Pains

For many folks out in the country, the family garden is asleep for the winter, buried under a blanket of snow.  The fall chores were long ago completed, and the hustle and bustle of springtime is yet to come.

Janet Carson has some tips for gardeners who hope to achieve top-notch harvests for years to come.  Carson is an Associate Professor and Extension Horticulture Specialist for the Univeristy of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service.  She coordinates the Natural State's Master Gardener program, and hosts weekly gardening tips shows on KARN Radio in Little Rock and on the Arkansas Educational Television Network.

Hopefully, she says, gardeners have already sown a fall cover or "green manure crop" over their beds.  This "helps to keep the weeds at bay, " she says, "and that actually enriches the soil and adds nitrogen back into the soil when they till it back in."

Among the plants suitable for cover are buckwheat and vetch.  In the mid-South, Carson says, turnip greens overwinter quite nicely.

"If it gets cold," she says, "they get nipped back, but they usually bounce back, and then we can have those again."

Legumes are particularly beneficial, because these nitrogen-fixing plants give the soil a head start, nutrient-wise for the following season.  If conditions permit, Carson says, a wintertime tilling can work wonders for gardens that were plagued during the previous season by insects.

"The insect larvae will actually burrow deeper to overwinter and if we till, we sometimes can expose things like th squash vine borer or some of the other insect larvae, and that can actually cause them to freeze."

Prepare for weeds

Winter tillage can also serve to suppress weeds, although Carson notes, "We always say that tilling just puts the weeds back into the ground.  It's much better to just take a hoe and kind of scrape the top off."

The goal is to prevent weeds growing on fallow soil from blooming and setting seeds.  "Keep in mind," Carson says, "that we basically have two seasons of weeds.  We have winter weeds, which germinate in the fall, grow during the winter; they bloom, they set seeds, and they die.  And then we have summer weeds, which germinate in the spring, and grow through the warmer months."

If the gardener can till when the weed seeds have germinated and grown into small, green plants, the load will be reduced the following year.  If the weeds are allowed to bloom and set seeds, she says, "the seeds stay in the garden forever."

Among the winter annual weeds are henbit, deadnettle, chickweed, and wild mustards.  They imbue shades of white, yellow, purple to your garden when they emerge in the spring.  The summer annuals include crabgrass, goosegrass, foxtail and barnyardgrass.

Perennials are a different matter entirely.  Examples include bindweed, burdock, dandelion, dock, ground ivy, horsetail, Japanese knotweed, plantain, poison ivy, purslane, quackgrass, thistle and ragweed.  For these touch customers, cultivation-pulling the weed out by its roots-or, in some cases, herbicides are the best means of control.

Healthy Soil

Diseases can also be a problem in gardens, and one way to thwart them is to make sure you clear out all of the remaining plant debris as soon as the season is over.  Carson identifies tomatoes and some squashes as particularly disease-prone vegetable crops.

"If you leave plants that have problems," she says, "and you till that material back into the soil or you leave it there, you're actually leaving disease spores as well.  And you know, a lot of our disease problems are soil-borne to beging with, so we don't want to exacerbate that."

If you have not had disease problems, Carson recommends putting the remaining plant materials in a compost pile.

"Composting is one of the best things that any gardener can do, because it's just black gold.  Adding that back to the soil will enrich it ,and help it retain nutrients and moisture."

Compost, she says, can be applied in fall, winter or spring, but it needs to be worked into the soil.  Gardeners have the option of topdressing it and letting it lay fallow for the winter, then incorporating it in the spring.

"But the thing is," she says, "if you're a gardener and you're using the same space over and over again, you start to deplete those resources.  So, adding compost back to the garden is a wonderful way to keep that soil in the healthiest condition."

Mulching is also very important.  It reduces weeds, and helps soil retain moisture and stay at a moderate temperature.

In addition to the organic matter supplied by compost, your garden may need additional fertilization.

Carson recommends a soil test at least once every three years, and says fall and early winter are ideal times to do it.

Unfortunately, she says, "a lot of gardeners wait until they're ready to plant, take their soil samples in, and expect results the next day.  But if you go ahead and plan ahead, that way if you need to add lime to the soil or you need to have certain nutritional things ready, you can have that there when it's time to plant."

Typically, she says, gardeners incorporate the first batch of fertilizer at planting, then come back through and sidedress.  Some vegetables are heavier feeders than others; legumes - peas, beans and lentils - provide their own nitrogen.

"But corn and tomatoes and peppers, you do need to have some follow-up."

Time to plant?

Carson doesn't recommend dates anymore.  Her own growers had two months of pleasant early spring weather in 2007, only to see their crops get wiped out by the untimely freeze during Easter weekend.

"There's lots of Farmer's Almanacs and lots of old wives' tales out there about when to plant," she says. "The key is, just pay attention" to the weather.

The first crops to go in next spring will be cool season vegetables, like English peas, spinach, broccoli and cabbage.  Once your area has passed its frost-free date, that's when the tomatoes, squash and peppers find their way into the dirt.

"You need to make sure that your soil is workable," says Carson.  "We don't want to get out there and start working the soil if it's overly sautrated, because that will ruin the internal structure of the soil."

She also urges gardeners not to plant the same thing in the same spot every year.

"Try to divide the garden up into thirds basically, and just try to rotate every season, and that helps with disease issues.  And also, weed issues; you know, the taller plants tend to shade the soil better and give you less weed problems, where the shorter, vining plants tend to let a lot more sunlight through, and they get more weeds."

She recommends you plant the taller crops, like corn, okra and tomatoes, to the north side of the garden, so they're not shading the crops on the other side.

Critter problems

When it comes to keeping out wild animals and other undesirables, Carson answers with a laugh, "Electric fence. And we're getting plagued by that more and more because, of course, the urban interface is kind of eroding.  The cross between country and city is not there anymore."

As a result, animals you'd usually associate with rural, wooded areas, like 'possums and groundhogs, are now showing up in the suburbs.  The old technique of hanging pie plates in hopes the clatter will scare away pests helps for birds, she says, but not for squirrels; nor does placement of hair or other human artifacts.

That used to work, says Carson, "when we had very rural areas, and we could put human hair because the animals weren't used to human smells and that scared them.  But now, we have deer right in the backyard of people, so they're getting used to the human smells."

She recommends gardeners employ an array of pest deterrents, and don't be afraid to switch from one to another.

"Having an arsenal at your disposal is good," she says, "because they get used to what you're doing.  And so, what worked for one person may not work for another."

It's also a good idea, she says, to experiment with new varieties every year.  But don't go whole hog; plant them to a small area to see if they'll work for you.

Says Carson, "I always tell my gardeners when I'm speaking, "You're not a true gardener if you've never lost a plant," because that means you're not experimenting with new things.  But I also don't think you should give up the tried-and-true."