Nothing Better Than a Freshly Made Bed...

I love the thought of a brand new flower bed in the spring. There's nothing better than a freshly made bed...

But when the harsh, hot reality of mid-July summer sun and the work that's required really sets in, I, well, truthfully, I have my regrets. Just like the five-year old in the cafeteria line, my eyes are bigger than my stomach. To save yourself from this kind of rueful awakening, I suggest you ask yourself these questions:

"What do I want to grow?"
Research the requirements of the plants you want to put in your garden. Will they grow in your Hardiness Zone? (Don't know your zone? Here's a link to the USDA online map, with instructions on how to use it: http:www.usna.usda.gov/Hardzone/.) Personally, I love cherries, and would love to grow the trees in my Zone 9 garden. Unfortunately, they hate our hot, humid weather - we don't have enough cold days to entice them from dormancy in the spring - so they are, in effect, permanently dormant (i.e., dead.) Once you know what you want to grow, and have done your research, go on to the next question.

"Where do I want to grow it?"
In the summer of 2005, my Louisiana garden had ten billion trees in it. It was a beautiful, tree-shaded lot full of pines, water oaks, black gum, swamp maples, and understory trees like star magnolias, bay magnolias, grancy greybeard, and azaleas out the wazoo. I could not grow a vegetable garden in that thicket to save my life. It was so shady that even the magnolias and azaleas were struggling to find enough sunlight to bloom sparsely and sporadically.

Hurricane Katrina did what I didn't have the courage to do: it edited my landscape, and opened up my yard to the sun. OK - it's not exactly bright in there, but there is enough light now for a small patch of grass (aka "the bocce court"), and the magnolias and azaleas have sprung back to life, putting on brand new leaves, and blooming happily. Why this long diatribe? Because you need to be realistic about what you can grow on your site, and put in the kind of plants that will be successful under your conditions. Roses need eight or more hours of FULL SUN - not half-sun, or a little sun, or patchy sun. No matter what else you provide for them, they won't be happy if they are not getting the sunlight they need.

On a bright, sunny day, take a piece of white paper out into your yard and put it on the spot where you want your garden to go. Put it on the ground and hold your hand about four inches above it. The shadow your hand makes should be dark, and have a clear outline. Now, go back out there every couple of hours, and test it again. Write down the hours that your hand produces that dark shadow. That's the number of hours you have of sunlight. Now that you know that, go on to the next question.

"How hard do I want to work at this?"
You can grow ANYTHING - ANYWHERE - as long as you are willing to work at it. So, how hard do you want to work? I'm a lazy gardener, and so are most of my Master Gardener friends. We don't want to spend so much time working in our gardens that we don't have time to enjoy them. So make this easy on yourself! Most soil types in the south east part of the United States will need amendments of some kind, and the heavy, clay-based "gumbo" soils of Louisiana and Texas will require you to build raised beds. Part of the reason for this is to provide drainage to a depth that will allow deep roots to develop, and some of this is because it's so much easier on your back!

There are many books that provide information about building raised beds, and there are several kits available (Through The Gardener's Catalogue, for example, or on their web site at Gardener's Supply Company: http://www.gardeners.com/Hexagonal+Raised+Bed+Corners/VegetableGardening_RaisedBeds,35-910,default,cp.html

If you want to do it yourself, here are some helpful hints:

1) Plan on your beds being 12 inches high, at a minimum, and if you want to grow large carrots, horseradish, parsnips, or other large root crops, 18 inches minimum.

2) Don't make your beds wider than about 3.5 to 4 feet, so that you can reach in and weed them (and pick your flowers or vegetables) from either side.

3) Design a watering system for those hot days of July - either ground-level sprinkling or drip hoses, or raised sprinklers. The former are relatively unobtrusive, but less effective. The latter are downright ugly, but cover the acreage better. Run your water access out to the garden now, while the weather's cool.

4) Like the five-year-old with the big appetite, gardeners tend to want it all. Start small. Really - I'm not kidding. Professionals plan for one full-time worker for every quarter acre, more or less. That's one 8-hour-a-day person, five to six days a week to keep one quarter acre of planting bed weeded, hoed, fertilized and mulched. If you're like me, that full-time person is me, and I don't want to work that hard. About 6 feet of new, raised, 4-ft. wide bed is about all you will want to take care of. If you find you want more, there's plenty of time to build another bed in the fall.

Fill your bed with your very own, amended soil, designed precisely for the plants that you want to grow. A general purpose vegetable garden would be about 1/3 sand, 1/3 high quality soil, and 1/3 organics such as composted manure and soil amendments. If you want to grow plants that love water, add some perlite to the mix - about 1 small bag per foot of bed. Mix this up well, and fill the beds - the mix will settle by about a third by the end of summer, so be prepared to add compost, or other organics, as you re-plant the beds.

Increase the amount of sand in this mix to about half, if you want to grow Mediterranean herbs. Throw in a good wheelbarrow full of small pea gravel as well, to improve drainage for rosemary, lavenders, and other heat lovers. You will have to water them, just make sure the water flows right through, and the plants don't sit in the beds with their feet wet.

Some bulbs, like bulbing irises, love this kind of drainage, too, especially when they are bedded in for the fall, and our hurricane season starts. Be sure and mulch them well when you see the first signs of growth in the spring - then keep cutting!

Always top your new beds off off with a good, light mulch. Just like a nice blanket, it finishes off the neat appearance of the bed, but it also helps to hold in moisture, and keep the roots cool during the long, hot summer. Mulch also retards the germination and growth of weed seedlings, so be sure to replenish it each time you replant.

When your plants are safely in the ground, sit back and enjoy. All your hard work will pay off down the road, when you don't have to spend your July out in the sun, bending over the weed patch growing where your tomatoes used to be. So pour that big glass of sweet tea, and have a great day, ya'll.

pH- Part 2

This is the part where most people decide they really don't want to be Master Gardeners after all. What's all this stuff about particulates in soil and electric charges? "Nobody really needs to know this stuff," you say, "and it's boring."

Well, yes - YOU do, and no, it's not. One more short set about positive and negative charges in soil, and the pH.

The pH is a measurement of soil's acidity or alkalinity, and this one state will have the biggest impact on the plant's ability to take up nutrients from the soil - (quick review: nutrients are elemental minerals and compounds that help plants turn SUNLIGHT into sugars, which they use for growth and reproduction). On a scale of 1-10, acid is a 1, and alkaline is a 10. In reality, I've never seen a soil test register lower than a 4 - and that was in one spot in a yard in Alabama that WOULD NOT GROW ANYTHING - especially grass. Normal pH is about 7 - and if you don't know a particular plant's requirements, 7 is always a good guess.

In truth, there are plants that thrive in acidic soil (I'm talking about 6, here, not 2 or 3) and plants that won't tolerate it at all. Well known acid-lovers are camellias and azaleas, and pine trees, of course, which help maintain the acidity of the soil they grow in. This is why the clay-rich soils north of the coastal zones are prime real estate for these plants. Most vegetables do well at 7 to 7.5, and if you are growing tomatoes in acid soil, you are letting yourself in for the heart break of blossom end rot - a condition caused by the plant's inability to uptake calcium (and manage magnesium, contrarily) due to the fact that the soil is so acid. (Amend your soil with calcium and gypsum - about three years ago.) More about that later.....

WHEN you send in your soil test (please note that I didn't say "if"...) you will be asked to list the "crop to be grown." This lends itself to many interpretations, especially for the home gardener. In the front yard, you grow grass, in the back yard, you grow roses...what do you put on the form? If you are a specialty gardener, and you grow something with very specific requirements, then you need to take separate soil samples, and submit them independently. You will mark them "Front Lawn" or "Backyard Rose Garden" and you will pay for each one to be tested.

When the test comes back, they will give you the same categories of information, but in the "comments" section, the Ag Agent will tell you how you need to amend your soil - specifically for the horticultural requirements of your "crop." The recommendations for your lawn will be quite different than those for your rose garden, even if the soil samples test out to be identical (which they won't- even if your yard is very small). The test will tell you specifics about your soil: they will type your soil (i.e., sandy loam), tell you the pH and rate the amount of essential nutrients phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, make recommendations for amendments, and give you specific comments about the fertilizer needs. Unfortunately, all of this will be unintelligible to the average human being. Don't be shy! Pick up the phone all call your county (parish) Ag Agent and ask for clarification. All this is for naught, if you can't understand the results.

This seems like SO MUCH WORK....OK - go back to the beginning of the last blog. Read again the part about "If you are serious about gardening, then you need to get serious about soil." The soil test is the most important thing you will do as a gardener. Without this knowledge, you're just tossing the seeds out there and hoping for the best. At least, when you know the condition of your soil, you can take steps to insure that the things you want to grow will thrive in your coastal garden. But in the meantime, while you are waiting for your test results to come back from the AgCenter, there are some steps to take.

Compost (isn't God cleaver?) just happens to be about a 7 on the pH scale. You can alter this by adding lime - or maybe lemon peels, I guess. But on average, composted anything seems to wind up at about 7 on the acidity scale. This makes it the perfect amendment for both acid and alkaline soils. Gee, isn't life good? Where else can you encounter the "perfect" anything?

I will get into starting a compost pile soon, but in the mean time, you can buy composted cow manure (green grass run through the insides of a cow - YUM) and you can begin adding organics to your soil right away! "Soil Conditioner" is ground pine bark, and tends to be acidic, so hold off on that until you know the pH of your soil. If you have an alkaline soil that you want to neutralize, soil conditioner is a grand thing to add. If you tend toward the acidic, but want to grow camellias and azaleas, then it's grand for your garden, too.

Next time, we'll talk about fertilizers, and understanding application rates. Now, wasn't that FUN? What are you doing inside - get out there, and get dirty!

pH - What It Means in Your Garden

If you are serious about gardening, then you have to get serious about soil. Soil is the carrier of "nutrients" needed to help plants process their only source of "food" - sunlight. Water carries these elemental nutrients from the soil into the roots, and from the roots up through the vascular system of the plants to the leaves, where they are used to process photo energy - that's light - into sugars the plant can use to grow, bloom, and reproduce. OK, that's the very simplistic view of a complex process, but basically, that's about all there is to it.

All soil is made up of 1) a parent material -rocks that are broken down by 2) climate-through freezing and cracking, for example. Three other things determine the type of soil also: the nature of the 3) organisms which live in and break down the material; the 4) and slope and drainage of the site, and the 5) length of time (geologically speaking) that these things have been working on the soil. The rock-free sandy loam of most of the Mississippi drainage (from Beaumont, Texas to Mobile Bay) has been laid down over eons from glacial deposits dumped in Wisconsin and Minnesota during the last ice age. (It's an exaggeration, but you get the point.) The sandy loam in Gulf Shores is a very different soil from the hard clay-base in Montgomery and points north. The "nutrients" in these soils vary widely, as well, and give rise to a host of problems if you insist on treating them the same.

You can think about it this way: Soil's four physical components, minerals, air, water, and organic matter determine the quality of the plants you can grow in your yard. The minerals (is it sandy or more clay?) determine how loose or compacted the soil will be, leaving room (or not) for air, water, and organic material. Sand is coarse, with a large particle, so sandy soil is looser and has room to contain more of all three, but it doesn't hold water well, and coarse organics sift right out or float away. Clay is a smaller particle, so clay soil is usually compacted, but it has a terrific elemental nutrient content. It holds water too well, and drains poorly. The best soil is a mixture of sand and clay, with lots of organics (think compost) thrown in. Ideally, soil should be about 48% mineral (sand and clay mix), 25% water, 25% air, and 2% organics.

The small particle size of clay gives it a larger surface area to react chemically and physically with other particles (and roots) in the soil. Like little magnets, clay (which has a negative charge) can attract and hold positively charged elements. Negatively charged ions are not held, and therefore leach right through the soil. Some important nutrients with a positive charge include calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), potassium (K), ammonium (NH4), aluminum (Al) and hydrogen (H).

The problem is that highly acid soils attract and hold highly charged particles such as aluminum and hydrogen, which makes them highly toxic to plants. The only way to tell if your soil is acidic is to take some soil samples and send them off to your local AgCenter for testing. Auburn University has a good publication about how to do this entitled "Home Soil Testing: Taking a Sample" - at their Web site (www.acesag.auburn.edu) and then search for Circular ANR6a. You must send it to YOUR state's AgCenter, and there is a link to the coastal state's at the beginning of this page.

In my next blog, I'll discuss what the Soil Test Report will really tell you about your garden.

What Master Gardeners Know

Master Gardeners have a status among gardeners, but particularly, I've noticed, among gardeners that don't understand what a Master Gardener is. First, I want to make it absolutely clear what a Master Gardener is NOT:

A Master Gardener is not someone who knows everything there is to know about gardening in every place, county or state.

A Master Gardener is not someone who has completed a course of study that is so demanding and difficult that ordinary people can't possibly finish the course.

A Master Gardener is not someone who has a perfect yard/garden/potager; who never struggles with weeds, or ever kills plants.

A Master Gardener is not someone whose knowledge is so superior that they would never take the time to help you with your yard and your gardening questions.

In fact, the mission of the corps of Master Gardeners, is the opposite of the above. Master Gardeners love gardening, and are usually long-time gardeners who have developed a certain level of skill and expertise in one area of gardening. When I took my first course, at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, one member of my class was the president of the Alabama Rose Society. He knew just about everything there is to know about growing roses in Birmingham, Alabama, and he was a tremendous asset to our class. But he didn't have a lawn, and he didn't know anything at all about lawn care.

Master Gardeners have completed a course of study that is devised by the professors of agriculture at your state's agricultural university (In Alabama, it's Auburn University; in Louisiana, it's LSU, and so on). The quality of the course is as varied as it's director and teachers, and can have sections that are difficult. However, it's devised to that everyone can find some level of success in the study - and go on to become a Master Gardener.

Master Gardeners rarely have perfect anything. They love to try new and difficult plants - most of which they kill. But most of all, you need to realize right up front that no garden is ever perfect. The ones in the magazines? Well, just remember this - the photographer who took that picture had his back to SOMETHING. He chose his shot carefully. Think about it!

Finally, Master Gardeners enroll in the Master Gardening Program at their local Coooperative Extension Service so that they can help people! They are trained specifically for this job, and they relish every opportunity to talk gardening.

If this blog does nothing but encourage each and every one of you to explore the Master Gardner Program at your local, county Cooperative Extension Service, then all this blogging is not in vain. On this blog, I have added the Web sites of each coastal state's Cooperative Extension Service. They each have a search engine that will provide the name and contact number for the agent in your area. That's the first step in learning about the Master Gardening program nearest you.

If you can't take the Master Gardening Program, then I want to offer you the next best thing. The Gulf Coast Gardener Web site will be going on line this week. It's an act in progress, and I hope to have lots of great information, links, and blogs for you to visit.

Thanks for reading the Gulf Coast Gardener Blog - I hope to hear from you soon!