Gardening Method Hype

We did two "deep mulch" garden areas. One is covered in about 4" of wood chips (they were newly shredded when I put them down last fall). One was covered in straw and cardboard. Some beds were just covered with several inches of straw.

The wood chips might improve the soil by next year. This year, though, many of the plants in the wood chips are really struggling for various reasons. One of the supposed selling points of wood chips--that they regulate water in the soil--does not seem to be true in our conditions. In some places, even though there's several inches of wood chips, and we've had a lot of rain, the plants seem to prefer as frequent watering as they did when the ground was bare and tilled.

The cardboard/straw combo was almost disastrous. The cardboard did kill the grass, but it also turned some areas of the garden into a swamp. We planted strawberries into the cardboard and straw. The berries started to develop root rot, and I subsequently stripped back the straw and cardboard and planted cover crops--which I should have done very early in the season. The plants did recover, finally, but it was a bit of a panic. The straw worked well in suppressing weeds and keeping the ground moist, but the depth needed adjustment through the season. Some of the strawberries are thriving and others are struggling.

It seems like every gardening method is sold as a panacea using religious language, e.g. "back to eden wood chip mulch", but any given method might not apply in every given soil situation and might not apply uniformly through the year. It will probably take several years of planting, adding compost and other amendments to really improve our situation and to learn what's going to work on our property.

No-Till Learning Curve Woes

We've got three patches of sunflowers growing in the yard. The longer term plan is to convert most of what was previously lawn to gardens and orchard. Over the past couple of years I've learned that the soil on the farm varies drastically from place to place. Some is fantastic: either it wasn't farmed previously, or has been enriched by the nearby black locust trees. Some is really bad: the topsoil is almost gone. The rest is somewhere between.

Last year I trucked in 15 cubic yards of woodchips for the garden, and 10 cubic yards of mulch for flower beds. The left over mulch decomposed nicely into something resembling deep black soil. Over the winter, the woodchips in the garden broke down unevenly. Some is like soil. Some looks like it did the day I moved them.

Some sunflowers from the same batch of seeds have been planted in each soil type. The seeds in the decomposed mulch are rocking. They're 2-3x larger than the garden sunflowers, which are doing reasonably well, too, and they're enormous compared to the seeds I planted in the yard without tilling. Those are really struggling in the poor soil areas.

The soil in the no-till yard patches seems pretty lifeless. The worms are only right at the surface. A few inches below the surface it's a uniform brown material with no roots and very little organic matter that's visible to the eye. It seems like it will be a multi-year project to improve the soil in those areas.

Milkweed Seed Success

I planted 6 milkweed seeds I sprouted on a wet paper towel. All of them grew after I planted them in some 4" pots after a few days of germinating in a heated humidity tent. It seems like the key is to cut or scratch the husk, and keep them moist, but not in a condition that'll rot the husk away after a few days.

I think you could have a really high success rate by prepping the seeds, then scattering them onto a thin layer of straw or grass clippings just on top of some bare soil. You might be able to get a hundred of them to grow with some pretty minimal effort.

If you just plant them in the ground, chances are they won't grow at all.

No-Till Sunflower Update

Sunflowers do really well around here. On our property they'd rather grow than not grow, when a bird drops a seed on the ground, chances are it will grow. It's no surprise, then, that my no-till planting of sunflowers in our future expanded garden are doing well. I planted them with three methods. One was to poke a hole in the ground and stick a seed in the soil. Another was to mash one into the ground and cover it with a handful of dirt. The third was to scatter them around under straw. All the seeds are growing. The most labor intensive method was the least effective. (poking the soil)

I think all I'd need to do is throw handfuls of sunflowers around and cover them with some straw and they'd grow like grass. I will probably give that a try.

Milkweed Seed Update

Mix of Clipped and Unclipped Seeds

I nipped the bottom of several milkweed seeds with a pair of sharp clippers. The pair I used was actually for electronics, but anything would work--scissors, a pairing knife, etc... I just clipped away at the seed husk until I could see the interior of the seed just a little bit.

I then spread those seeds on a paper towel and covered them with a paper towel and kept them moist. (covered with a dishcloth). A wet dishcloth keeps the paper towels moist overnight. You can check the progress of the seeds during the morning, then soak the dishcloth.

A number of the seeds sprouted in just a couple days. The unclipped seeds take a very long time to sprout. Actually I haven't witnessed any sprout yet. I planted the sprouted seeds in pots and am growing them inside.

Sprouted Milkweed Seeds (4 days later)

How to Grow Milkweed from Seeds

In the late autumn, you can find milkweed seed pods in meadow-like areas alongside the roads, under power lines, or along paths. If you want to grow milkweeds in your yard, it can be difficult to get the seeds to germinate if you scatter them in your lawn, or even if you put them in a prepared bed. The outer husk of the seed prevents the seed from just germinating. It's pretty likely the seed will rot or be eaten by a critter before the plant ever gets started. If you start them inside, you'll have more luck.

You can buy seeds online, or go collect them yourself. The seeds are ready when the pod splits open. If you take a seed pod too soon, the seeds will be immature. One pod has hundreds of seeds--probably more than you'll be able to use.

There are many people who provide tutorials on scarifying seeds. I tried a couple methods on milkweed seeds. One was to deep freeze the seeds for a number of weeks. The other was to simply snip open the seed shell to expose the interior slightly, which is super easy. The seed has a tear drop shape. I snipped off the pointy end by a small amount. I put the snipped seeds in coir/worm-casting planting soil in an egg-carton style container, since I figured the germination rate would be low. I kept the container in a heated humidity tent.

The deep-freeze seeds all failed to germinate and simply rotted. The snipped seeds actually sprouted recently. I'll update this when I get a sense of the rate of success.

No-Till Sunflowers and Strawberries

Sunflowers grow really well on our property. They barely need to be planted. Sunflowers grow voluntarily from birds and chipmunks dropping them on the ground all the time. I planted several in areas we'll expand the garden into next season. I mowed the grass down with some hedge trimmers, then poked a small hole in the ground and dropped a seed in. Some germinated about a week later. I also scattered some clover seeds around. Hopefully the sunflowers will overtake the grass and the clover will survive through the summer into the fall.

I probably planted the sunflowers too deep. It seems like it would have been sufficient to just scratch a small divot in the ground and cover it with some dirt to keep birds from eating the seeds, or make some seed balls with dirt to accomplish the same thing without even poking a  hole in the ground.

We also planted some strawberries using a similar method in the newly expanded garden. The strawberries were started inside from plugs that we planted in peat pots using coir and worm castings as soil. A couple weeks later, the strawberries are still doing well. The only problem with this approach is that the soil near the berries is more compact than the coir/worm castings, so the berries are in a sort of bowl. A couple of them seem to be a little stressed and are possibly sitting in some water.

The strawberries are surrounded by straw, plus some leaf mulch compost that's been aged about a year.