The interconnectedness of it all

Column for the DeKalb County Times
by Karley


Fried pies, fresh baked goods, fabulous barbecue, and the first tomato plants are all available at the DeKalb Farmers' Market. As I'm writing this we have frost on the ground down here in the back of the holler, so if you have tomato plants, you should be prepared to give them a little extra protection on these chilly spring-appropriate nights.

Our last average frost date for this USDA hardiness zone 7 growing area is April 15. Don't let that fool you, though. More important than your zone is your micro-climate, which can differ significantly from regional averages. Our farm is the last open area at the back of a hollow and is the highest part of the hollow's bottomland. In the evenings you can feel the cool air rolling down the hills and flowing down the slight elevation drop along the path of the creek. What this means for us is that our lows are consistently 7 to 10 degrees below the forecasted low.

That might not sound like much if you're not a gardener, but the difference between a low of 32 and 25 is the difference between a light frost that pretty much any spring crop can tolerate and a freeze that will damage leaves and potentially kill seedlings. In the late fall, that's the difference between tomatoes on the vine for another week and rushing to harvest the last of the unripe fruit. In the summer that's the difference between an uncomfortably warm night up on the plateau and it being cool enough to open the windows and turn off the air conditioner down in the holler.

One of the most rewarding and wonderful parts of gardening is the level of connection you develop with the land. This applies to people gardening in containers on their little concrete patios, too. They too must pay attention to where the sun sets and rises, how the sun moves North and South throughout the season, if it's been dry, wet, hot, or cold, and what bugs are breeding and eating.

Working in the garden we encounter little brown garden snakes, big black snakes, toads, firefly larvae, garden spiders and their hoards of babies, ants, frogs, and bees to name a few. I have never been bitten by the garden spiders or harassed by the snakes. I am grateful to see those predators in the garden because a healthy population of predators is an indicator of a healthy and balanced ecosystem. Toads can eat up to 1,000 bugs in one day, so I am always thrilled to find them nestled in the mulch.

We know there's a large flock of turkeys that frequents the forested part of the property. We've seen them alight in the tops of the trees on the ridge in a kerfuffle of noise and breaking branches. We hear them gobbling to each other in the evenings. We have a woodpecker that frequents the dying Box Elder on the bank of the creek, and sometimes there's a big heron who comes to gorge on the fish, tadpoles, and crawdads that get trapped in pools as our creek branch dries up through the summer.

When storm fronts move through the area, if you pay attention to the sensation of the wind on your skin, you can feel the cool and warm air mingling. I swear I felt the first fall breeze last year, and a welcomed breeze it was. I've been dreading the possibility of last month's unrelenting heat remaining unrelenting for the next five months, but now I have no idea what to expect. I asked a gardening friend if she thought we would even be able to get a good cabbage and broccoli harvest this spring, and her response was, “This week, or last week?”

After an intense bout with the Cabbageworms immediately upon transplanting our cabbage and broccoli into the garden, we are finally down to only finding two or three green worms a day. We had some casualties, but the survivors are now growing enthusiastically. It's somewhat of a mystery, why the bugs eat one plant and leave another. Maybe the victim was a plant whose roots got mangled during pricking out or transplanting, or maybe it was just a bad seed. In any case, we're filling in the holes with lettuce transplants.

Nature abhors mono-cultures. That's one reason why you'll just never achieve a weedless corn patch. The pigweed, bindweed, and lamb's quarter find gardens simply irresistible. The good thing is you can actually eat lamb's quarter as a potherb, and at least the bindweed has pretty blue flowers since it's in the morning glory family. Just try to pull it out before it goes to seed.

We have found that applying a layer several inches thick of mulch around our plants does a fantastic job smothering out the weeds. We use old hay, which has weed seeds in it. Some gardeners prefer not to use old hay as mulch because of those seeds, but since it seems like you end up with weeds in your garden no matter what you do here in the land of eight foot tall iron weed, for us the benefits outweigh the cost.

The old hay mulch also retains moisture and shades the surface of the soil, which supports earthworm activity in the upper layer of the soil. When we use a hand shovel to dig a hole for transplanting, it's not uncommon for us to encounter a dozen earthworms in a four inch hole. Those earthworms are improving the tilth of our heavy clay soil by adding organic matter, as well as providing us with nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur, potassium, magnesium, and most importantly for our farm specifically, calcium. All this they do gleefully pro bono, as long as we shade them from sun and provide them a little protection from the frost. They also provide our resident garden toads with a protein rich snack when they get tired of hopping after bugs.

Our buzzing metropolis has also provided us with enough lady beetles to get our aphid population completely under control, and we never had a problem with having too few pollinators to pollinate our squash and cucumbers.

Spending time in the garden in quiet contemplation and rapt observation, I can scarcely help being overcome by the interconnectedness of all life on this planet. When our farm dog plops down in the sun and lets her head fall back to look at the sky, I can't help but wonder if she's sharing my elation.