Month: April 2009

See here for an updated post on this topic.

Here’s a picture from the other direction in my garden.  The blue wheelbarrow is right side up, but in almost the same place as the picture in the post a few days ago.  This is the path leading up to my two main plots.

We have these gravel paths all over the garden complex, and don’t have any say in them.  The city says we have to have them, and it’s just a rule we have to keep them clear.  Weeds in the gravel are really a problem, and it’s a lot of work to dig them out.  Every gardener is responsible for the paths in front of their plots.

Many of the gardeners in the complex are not organic, and use Round Up, even though this doesn’t work.  This doesn’t stop them of course from needlessly dousing their paths, hoping it might work a little bit someday.  I’ll admit, the Round Up does something, at least changing the color of the weeds a bit.

Taking an idea I got from a Mrs. Greenhands a while ago, I’ve decided to start using vinegar on my path.  I have the agreement of the gardeners on the two sides of the path to try this.  The logic is vinegar makes the gravel too acidic, so weeds won’t grow.

Before anyone eagerly rushes out to try this in your own garden, let me be clear.  Vinegar is not healthy for any plant and you can’t make things better by adding lime later.  Adding vinegar to your garden will probably ruin it for a long time and make it so nothing will grow.  Only use it where you are sure it cannot come in contact with an area you want to use for plants.

I’m not 100% certain I won’t cause problems in the neighboring gardens doing this.  I also don’t really have any idea how much vinegar I should be adding.

Has anyone done this before, and do they have any tips for me? At the moment, the vinegar doesn’t seem to be killing the weeds, but it is slowing them down and does appear to be keeping new weeds from becoming established.  So far I’ve only been using the vinegar for a few weeks, and I haven’t used that much.

It would sure be nice to offer an alternative to the Round Up!

Here’s what the garden looks like.  For reference, the tiny patch of green in the middle is the spelt you see in the picture below.  You can’t usually see everything so clearly, but nothing has really started to grow and I recently did a very severe cutting back of the hedge, so it’s all a bit more visible.

The blue thing is my upside down wheelbarrow.  My garlic is growing on the left side, between the pile of brush left over from cutting the hedge and the greenhouse.  The straw is mostly for covering the garlic, but the main cost is having a local farmer make a delivery, getting extra straw is almost free, so I’m using it as a mulch for much of the rest of the garden.  I’m also using black landscape fabric in a few places.

You can’t really see, but there’s a line of fruit trees across the front, along the hedge.  There are all growing too close to each other, and the ground they are on is very depleted and waterlogged.  I trimmed them back pretty severely this year, as well as removing a few to give the others more space.  Only one tree gave edible fruit last year, and if the others don’t improve soon I’ll remove them all over the course of the next few years.  I’ve also planted some black alder trees next to the fruit trees as well as several other places in the garden, which are nitrogen fixing, in an effort to improve the soil and feed the fruit trees.

The guy who had the garden before me used it more for summer recreation than growing vegetables, and one of the things he did was put down a huge number of paving slabs, about 100 stones in total, taking up around 15% of the space in the garden with firmly established weeds growing aggressively through all the cracks.  They were a real maintenance issue, and were taking up too much garden space.  These are astonishingly heavy, with one slab being at about my lifting limit.  Getting rid of them was really going to be a problem, because it’s a long walk from my garden to the street and I was going to have to carry them one at a time.  Most things can be brought to the dump for free disposal, but not paving slabs, so I was going to have to pay to dispose of them.

It was really a lot of work, and took most of last summer, but the solution was to turn them into raised beds, 9 in total with plans for a 10th this year.  Not all the stones are straight, and I’ll have to fix this over time, but mostly I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

I made a sketch last year of the garden layout.   These raised beds are where the former patio in front of the shed was, as well as where the cold frame used to be.  You can see the red current plant in the back corner, but this will likely come out this year to make room for the 10th raised bed.

The green grassy looking stuff at the bottom is spelt I planted last year.

Finally here’s the garlic growing in the straw.  I have around 60 varieties growing this year, down from last year’s 100.  I’m growing about 1000 bulbs in total on about 45m2.  It’s looking good so far.