Grow Better Veggies

Class: Compost and Vermiculture (Worms!)

Using your own home-made compost is the single best thing you can do to increase your garden's fertility, ward off pests, and keep diseases at a minimum.  Worm castings have also been shown to be a similarly powerful tool.  Great gardeners will have both an active compost bin and worm bin up and running at all times.  They know the benefits to their garden are enormous.  Using your own compost and worm castings will also drastically cut down on the amount of soil amendments, fertilizers, insecticides and fungicides that an organic gardener usually needs to purchase to maintain their vegetable plot.

Come to Love Apple Farm and learn what these benefits are, how to properly build a compost pile (we build one ourselves during class), learn how to harvest it and use it on your garden. 

The second half of the workshop is devoted to vermiculture: how to start, maintain, and use to full benefit a proper worm bin.  See how we feed our worms, harvest the castings, and even make a fabulous worm tea for use as a supplemental fertilizer.  You get to take home a worm bin, complete with starter worms.

Class date: April 7, 2009 (Tuesday) 10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Tuition:  $20
Materials Fee: $25
Register and pay via Paypal:

Preparing a Bed for Replanting

Feeding the soil is probably the single most important thing you can do to grow better vegetables.  I do it every single time I change crops in a bed, even if it's a quick crop, like radishes. On the odd occasion when I've forgotten for some strange reason (or been too lazy) to amend the bed before planting something, it's always immediately evident to me: slow growth, yellowing and stunted plants.  Now I never "forget" to amend the planting bed between crops. 

The above is a shot of the bed I'm going to prepare for planting.  You'll see that it still has the residue of the old crop: celeriac, (also known as celery root).  The harvest debris is still on the bed.  It will have to be removed.

Once the harvest debris is removed, I then remove the irrigation lines from the bed and place them temporarily in the mulched path:

We prep beds in various ways, depending upon the crop, but for this bed we will use what's become known on the farm as the 'standard amendments'.  I always use humic acid on my garden beds first.  Not too much, just a sprinkling of it.  I use about one cup for a 4 x 12 foot bed, or about two cups for 100 square feet.  Here's a shot of the humic acid I buy from my local organic feed and farm store:

And this is how the humic acid looks in the bucket.  It has a fine dark brown pebbly appearance:

Humic acid is an organic soil amendment that can (1) increase microbial and mycorrizal activity,, (2) promote nutrient uptake, (3) accelerate seed germination, (4) increase crop yields, and (5) aid in reducing frost damage.  Sounds great, doesn't it?  Betcha you guys haven't been putting this great stuff in your soil, have you?  Well, now you can, there's no reason not to, particularly since it's not very expensive.  A bag goes a long way.

Now that the humic acid has been sprinkled on the bed, I then put on a goodly amount of crab meal.