Grow Great Salads Year-round

(Page 3 of 3)

August/September 2006
 
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Feed the Plants that Feed You

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Greens are easy to grow in most soils, but will be improved by a neutral to slightly acidic soil (pH of 6.5 to 7), plus plenty of calcium (from lime or gypsum) and nitrogen. Growing nitrogen-fixing cover crops during off-seasons is a great way to enrich your soil. Try Austrian winter peas or ‘Ho Lan Dow’ snow peas (a great culinary variety available from Stokes Seeds and you’ll be able to add tender pea shoots to your salads. Harvested just as the peas begin to flower, these sweet vine tips (snipped just below the first big leaf) taste just like peas, and the texture is delightfully crunchy. Fava beans, another great cool-season cover crop, also provide succulent, edible greens.

When you turn in the cover crop, work some compost or manure in, too. If you’ve gone through the trouble of having your soil tested, now’s the time to add any necessary amendments. (For a list of soil-testing laboratories, go towww.MotherEarthNews.com/directory/soil_test. — Mother)

For cut-and-come-again harvesting, feed newly snipped plants with a misting of fish or seaweed emulsion after each harvest. Or use side-dressings of worm castings. Be sure to keep all your greens watered well, especially once you’ve removed their protective coverings.

Pests and Diseases

Your greens won’t require any pollinating, so if big pests such as rabbits or deer are a problem in your area, just leave the row covers over your greens. Switch to super-lightweight fabric covers at the end of spring. Be aware that aphid infestations can be a threat if you leave covers on as it warms up. If aphids appear, open the covers to let in beneficial insects. If slugs plague your garden, apply a thin mulch of coffee grounds  to the soil around the plants.

Disease is most likely to show up on your older plantings. Your best allies in warding it off will be maximum air circulation, as much sun as possible and rotating crops to keep problems localized. Of course, the better nourished the soil, the more disease-resistant the crop will be.

Super Natural Nutrition

All greens are good for you, but consider growing greens that are especially nutritious. For instance, spinach, mustard and collards are especially high in folate; kale, spinach and corn salad (mâche) are good sources of iron; and Swiss chard, chicory, kale, spinach, mustard, collards and beet greens all rank off the charts for Vitamins A, C and K.

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  • steve@getipm.com 3/8/2007 8:18:18 AM

    How to kill pests without killing yourself or the earth...... There
    are about 50 to 60 million insect species on earth - we have named
    only about 1 million and there are only about 1 thousand pest
    species - already over 50% of these thousand pests are already
    resistant to our volatile, dangerous, synthetic pesticide POISONS.
    We accidentally lose about 25,000 to 100,000 species of insects,
    plants and animals every year due to "man's footprint". But, after
    poisoning the entire world and contaminating every living thing for
    over 60 years with these dangerous and ineffective pesticide
    POISONS we have not even controlled much less eliminated even one
    pest species and every year we use/misuse more and more pesticide
    POISONS to try to "keep up"! Even with all of this expensive
    pollution - we lose more and more crops and lives to these thousand
    pests every year. We are losing the war against these thousand
    pests mainly bacause we insist on using only synthetic pesticide
    POISONS and fertilizers There has been a severe "knowledge drought"
    - a worldwide decline in agricultural R&D, especially in
    production research and safe, more effective pest control since the
    advent of synthetic pesticide POISONS and fertilizers. Today we are
    like lemmings running to the sea insisting that is the "right way".
    The greatest challenge facing humanity this century is the
    necessity for us to double our global food production with less
    land, less water, less nutrients, less science, frequent droughts,
    more and more contamination and ever-increasing pest damage. In
    order to try to help "stem the tide", I have just finished
    re-writing my IPM encyclopedia entitled: THE BEST CONTROL II, that
    contains over 2,800 safe and far more effective alternatives to
    pesticide POISONS. This latest copyrighted work is about 1,800
    pages in length and is now being updated chapter by chapter at my
    new website at: http://www.stephen

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