This is the third article in this series about Organic Gardening.
My next adventure in the late 60's and early 70's in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada involved-again--a misadventure with the rainy climate.
When we first decided to have an organic garden, we dug up an 8' X 10' portion of our lawn in our own back yard, right in the middle.
We did not research which are the best vegetables for wet climates.
We did have a compost heap, which we kept up regularly in all seasons, knowing the value of compost as a nutritional powerhouse for our plants.
If you ever wanted the goose that laid the golden egg, then keep up your compost heap on a regular basis by throwing in kitchen waste, some grass clippings and leaves, as we did from our own lawn and trees, and you will have golden eggs galore! The reason for the grass clippings and leaves is so there's more aeration, as extra oxygen gets in there to help with the disintegration of all the organic matter.
There's not much you shouldn't add, except things that don't dissolve easily, such as meat, bones, etc.
We just threw all of our organic matter in a far corner of our yard.
We didn't turn over the compost heap with a pitchfork to aerate the pile and encourage more bacterial decomposition or anything like that, since we were not really in a hurry for the compost heap to break down into real compost.
And we didn't go to a nursery to add things like manure and dried blood, etc.
, which can also be done to add nutrients to the soil.
We also didn't fertilize our plants with anything but the material in the compost heap.
But during the planting season in early spring, our compost was rich, good stuff that smelled like earth, and had plenty of good bacteria and earthworms throughout.
We spread it over the soil, then turned the soil gently with a pitchfork to mix it all in.
Disintegrated organic matter in the form of grass, kitchen scraps and/or manure generally provide organic nitrogen, while leaves or straw or hay provide organic carbon.
And the good bacteria, worms and bugs (pre-digesting the compost material) provide all the nutrients that a good, healthy soil needs to produce stellar plants.
The only problem with how we handled the compost heap was that we had bought a bunch of pumpkins during the spring of one year, since they kept well and we could eat them during the summer, fall and winter.
As we ate them, we threw the raw seeds that I took out before cooking them, plus of course the remains after cooking and eating them.
The next spring we spread the compost as usual, then we planted the usual peas, onions, tomatoes, greens, etc.
In June, it rained endlessly for the entire month.
We were so sick of the rain, that we took two weeks off and drove into the interior of British Columbia, where the sun was shining-glory be! When we returned home, the sun had been shining in Vancouver also, and had warmed the earth while we were gone, thereby encouraging growth.
Upon returning home, we found that the pumpkin seeds (which had not disintegrated as part of the compost heap) had germinated during our trip and had taken over the entire garden, crowding out all the other plants.
What could we do? We had only varieties of pumpkins that year.
We kept some and sold the rest to a local organic Health Food store.
At that point we decided there must be a better way than making all the mistakes possible, so we reread the only encyclopedic reference book we had at the time to fine-tune what we were doing.
After that, we fared pretty well with the best vegetables for wet climates such as green beans, cabbage, collard greens, broccoli and cauliflower and a few choice pumpkins.