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above: behind a spill of Bidens, trimmings from a
kiwi vine woven through rebar help keep dogs out of this bed. |
feeding As
far as the garden goes, I think a lot of us find ourselves undernourished. If
you’re not regularly amending your soil with food, that soil gradually
loses its ability to feed our plants. It’s good to remember that while
gardens are built with natural ingredients, they are still just facsimiles of
nature. Whenever
we prune, deadhead, weed, control pests, etc, we are constantly removing
elements from our gardens that are part of nature’s cycle for
regeneration, and that’s OK. Most gardens are not habitat restoration
projects, but we can use nature to guide us to making our gardens healthier. The
plant material that we remove by hand that would have been removed by decomposing
and by bugs and animals eating it, (and processing it and returning it to the
soil nearby), we can substitute with some compost and natural fertilizers. In
my own garden, I try to use as much of the existing plant material as I can,
so when pruning I either leave the cuttings on the ground or put them in my
compost bin. I make exceptions for weeds, so I don’t reintroduce their
seeds or viable cuttings into my yard. I
also use natural fertilizers such as fish emulsion, to help compensate for the
lack of animal activity in my yard, and this is especially important for plants
in containers, which aren’t able to benefit from layers of compost. A
thought to remember is that |
