“Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.”
― Maria Rodale
Moving into Autumn
The year is changing, the unusual summer we had is moving into the autumn, and at this time of the year there are lots of jobs to do around your gardens or plots. The most obvious and pleasurable job of this time of the year is cropping your produce, for the last week or so I have been cropping different types of beans, soft fruits and main-crop potatoes, and heirloom tomatoes, and the crops are still coming in as I type this post. As always we ask our readers to post any gardening tips that they might have on our Facebook page, if he have detailed tips that you think might help others you could always write a post for this website.
Soil
This year I have been busy with our other project and have neglected one of my allotment plots to the point where I received a mal-cultivation notice from my local council. As a result of my neglect much of one of my plots is very over grown, and now populated with a variety of different grasses and plants, in other areas the soil is bare where crops have been taken from, so I have cut back much of the grass to use a mulch on the bare soil so that whatever nutrients are still in the soil remain there, if the grass is already seeded then it is an easy enough job to cut the cut section off and save it for chicken food if you keep them. Mulching your soil really can save you a lot time and effort the following year, and it is also a useful way of maintaining and enhancing your soil fertility and structure.
Composting
T
here might well be gardening waste that you don’t want to use as mulch, this can be thrown into you composter and mixed in with the other vegetable matter in your container. And if your compost is beginning to look like black sludge then it lacking in carbon, so add some ripped up newspaper of cardboard and mix it well in. Similarly if your compost is very dry and light brown coloured then it is lacking in nitrogen so add some green vegetable waste, the ratio of both carbon and nitrogen in making good quality compost is 30 Carbon to 1 part nitrogen.