The Sleeping Garden

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But there are addicts who have not made that wise choice.

Like cars, gardens must be winterized (an ugly Madison Avenue word, but useful). There are a number of ways to do it. Naturally, they all involve hard work but on a smaller scale than that of the previous six months.

About the time your garden is ready to retire for the winter, you can begin to think about next year's garden. But over the winter, the soil must be protected from loss of vitality and even fertilized, if possible. This is basically true for farmers and gardeners alike. Each gardener must select methods of winter garden maintenance that are most workable for his or her gardening style, climate, and time schedule. You shouldn't feel like a negligent gardener for not running the tiller in October, which is what some gardening manuals would have you do. If you didn't get a cover crop in, it's not the end of the world. Do not believe everything you read about gardening methods, except perhaps what I'm about to tell you: Do it your way, learn from your own mistakes, and don't be intimidated by the experts. Experts may disagree, but then, I'm no expert. And I say, don't knock yourself out in the next two months.

October is a busy month anyway, and the organized gardener will now glean all stalks, vines, and organic debris from each garden bed and shred it all up for compost. He or she will test the soil for an ideal pH of 6.8, amend as necessary with lime (to sweeten acid soil) or some hot chemicals like agricultural sulfur or gypsum (to acidify sour soil), drop in some organic manure, put on the aforementioned garden debris, and till everything into the soil. Once that's done, the efficient gardener will plant a cover crop to crowd out pernicious weeds and fix beneficial nitrogen.

Some gardeners swear by cover crops and some never use them. At any rate, you've got an amazing number of choices: clover, alfalfa, hairy vetch, fava beans, buckwheat, oats, ryegrass, peas, lupines, and winter rye. Take your pick. One pound of winter rye and vetch will seed 600 square feet; the rye germinates first and helps the vetch get going.

Let's suppose you have a very large garden, half an acre or larger. Cover crops, also called "green manure" for some reason shrouded in obscurity, combat erosion, pump up the soil with nutrients, control weeds, and even fight insect pests. But sowing a mulch crop means doing a lot of research. You have to "inoculate" legume seeds with a specific bacteria first, and when you plow under winter rye, sorghum, Sudan grass, and others, they release toxins capable of killing lettuce, carrots, and beets in the seedling stage. By the way, make sure you work the cover crop seeds deeply into the soil. And don't plant a cover crop too late or too early because...

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