Urban Earth 10/6/20 Urban Earth 10/6/20

Breaking Down Fall Composting

Fall is a great time for composting. Not only for building your own bin with colorful fallen leaves, but also for top dressing your garden! Spreading compost over a garden bed, then covering it with mulch will encourage growth of soil organisms that will be super beneficial come springtime!

Break-down of Benefits:
• Encourages the growth of earthworms and other macro-organisms, whose tunneling makes room for water and air, making way for optimum root growth
• Provides nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur and micro-organisms that are essential for plant growth • Acts as a glue, holding water and soil particles together, and makes soil resistant to erosion
• Binds itself to polluting metals, pesticides and other contaminants to prevent them from washing into waterways or being absorbed by plants
• Suppresses soil-borne diseases and plant pathogens (a number of plant and lawn diseases are suppressed by micro-organisms found in compost!)

Practice a technique called "side dressing". Apply a layer of compost a few inches away from the plants, protecting delicate plant stems from active microorganisms. This way, the compost is applied as a mulch and it reaps multiple rewards!

Products at Urban Earth

Seacoast Compost
Made in Oregon, certified organic and biodynamic. They make use of “waste” from three major Oregon Coast Industries. Fish, shrimp and crab from seafood processing, along with cow manure and bedding from organic dairies, as well as Red Alder hardwood from the lumber industry. They add in some homeopathic preparations like yarrow, chamomile, nettle, oak bark, dandelion and valerian to enliven the whole mix and stimulate plants to reach their full potential in their environments.

Malibu Compost
Made in California, certified organic and biodynamic. Their farm-made compost combines organic dairy cow manure, straw, wood chips, and biodynamic concentrations of yarrow, chamomile, valerian, stinging nettle, dandelion and oak bark. They proudly do not use products with synthetics, greenwaste, pesticides, hericides, growth hormones, and sewage sludge.

Sources:
King County Composting
SeaCoast Compost
Malibu Compost

Urban Earth 9/21/20 Urban Earth 9/21/20

A Trove of Cloves!

In addition to garlic being mighty yummy and great for our immune system, it is also a wonderful pest (and vampire) deterrent. Adding garlic around your garden and in different beds will be super handy when it comes to the amount of pests you have to manage come Spring and Summer.

Planting Instructions:

Break bulbs into individual cloves right before planting. Leave the papery skin on.
Plant 6-8" apart and 3-4" deep in well drained soil.
Water gently to settle the soil
Mulch the bed well with 3-6 inches of weed-free straw, hay or cut grass (this will also assist in easier harvesting in the Summer and deterring critters such as squirrels). Even as air temperatures drop, the soil will stay warm enough for the newly planted cloves to establish roots before the ground freezes.
Tips from Great Northern Garlic
Sometimes you'll see some green shoots form in fall; that's fine and won't harm plants. They'll begin growing in earnest in spring. If your soil needs a boost, add organic compost or all purpose fertilizer before planting.
You can soak the garlic cloves in a fish emulsion or liquid kelp fertilizer overnight before planting to improve health of the cloves. Fertilize again in the Spring. Harvest in early summer, generally around the 4th of July, or depending on when half of the leaves have died.
Harvesting
Each leaf above ground indicates a layer of protective paper wrapped around the bulb. A reliable harvest indicator is when half the leaves have died off, and half are still green. The leaves start to die off from the bottom up.
Stop watering 2 weeks prior to harvest and do not wash your garlic or remove the bulb wrappers after harvesting.
Storing
To store garlic, the process is calling curing. Leave the stalks and roots on the bulbs and either bundle 8 to 10 garlic stems together, tie with twine, and hang bulb-side down in a cool, dark space, like a basement, or lay the garlic flat on a raised screen in a single layer. Allow the bulbs to cure for three to four weeks.