Yes, this post goes in the category of "Lessons Learned" (sometimes the hard way)...but then it all works out in the end. Yay!
So now that you know the story ends happily, are you ready to hear (read) a story?
In fact, the story IS the post!
Here's how it goes...
I was "talking shop" (gardens) with someone recently.
We'll call him I.B. Anonymous.
Mr Anonymous told me this story, and I just knew that so many of us could learn from his experience, so I begged him to let me take photos of his garden.
Actually no begging was needed. He was quite happy to be featured in my blog (as long as his identity remained unknown)!
He and his dw (we'll call her Ima Hiswife, sometimes hyphenated as Hiswife-Anonymous) have recently moved into a brand new home with brand new gardening spaces just waiting to be developed.
So they have been developing gardens and putting in plants.
The back lawn is a split level with a stone retaining wall separating the two levels.
You'll see it in the photo.
Mr. Anonymous had this great idea (I've heard brilliance is a common trait in his family). He decided to build two raised beds for veggies and such, each about 6 feet by 2 feet, butting right up against the retaining wall on the top level of the lawn. That way he could stand on the lower level of the lawn and work in the raised beds without bending down. Since the beds are only two feet wide, he can reach the far side of the bed with no problem. The ears on my aching gardener's back perked up at this idea!
(Okay, I don't really have ears on my back, or eyes in the back of my head for that matter.
Just clarifying for those of you who are very literal.)
He built the beds using 2 x 6 x 8 pieces of lumber, stacked two boards high.
You'll see it in the photo.
After laying landscape fabric on the lawn and installing the two raised beds, he then filled the beds with a mix he made himself, based on a recipe he found on a gardening website he recommends.
The website is called My Square Foot Garden, and the name of the recipe is Mel's Mix.
Basically, the recipe goes like this:
1/3 vermiculite
1/3 peat moss
1/3 compost (as many types as you can find)
Before we continue with the story, I want to pause for a quick "learning moment" interlude.
You might be asking the same question that I've always wanted to ask and finally asked while
typing this post..."what the heck is vermiculite anyway?"
I've always heard of it and seen it as an ingredient in things like potting soil or potting medium.
But I never stopped to ask what it was exactly...until now.
Here is what Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, has to say about vermiculite:
Vermiculite is a hydrous phyllosilicate mineral.
It undergoes significant expansion when heated. Exfoliation occurs when the mineral is heated sufficiently, and the effect is routinely produced in commercial furnaces. Vermiculite is formed by weathering or hydrothermal alteration of biotite or phlogopite.
Large commercial vermiculite mines currently exist in Russia, South Africa, China and Brazil.
Okay, so I'm sorry I asked!
No, not really. Let's pretend we're tech writers and turn this gobbledy-gook into English.
Wikipedia goes on to offer some of the common applications of vermiculite...
*moulded shapes for high heat areas such as fireplaces
*packing material for explosives storage
*commerical hand warmers
*used to absorb hazardous liquids for solid disposal
*a substrate for various animals and/or egg incubation
*brake linings
*a loose-fill insulation
and here is our interest in the stuff....
*Soilless growing media: exfoliated vermiculite is combined with other materials such as peat or composted pine bark compost to produce soilless growing media for the professional horticulturalist and for the home gardener. These mixes promote faster root growth and gives quick anchorage to young roots. The mixture helps retain air, plant food and moisture, releasing them as the plant requires them. Exfoliated vermiculite is also used as a growing media for hydroponics.
So this stuff helps retain moisture, provides aeration, and helps break down heavy compacted soils.
Just from a quick perusal of the Wide Wild World of the internet, I discovered many brands of vermiculite available for purchase in many quantities from tiny bags to huge bulk sizes...found at most big box home improvement stores as well as smaller "mom and pop" nurseries and feed stores.
Ah, but I digress!
This post is not meant to be focusing on the first ingredient in this soil-less mix, but on the third ingredient - COMPOST!
(At least now we know what vermiculite is, even if we can't say it properly!)
Okay, back to the story ... and the recipe.
So Mr Anonymous decided, after reading the blog post about soil-less mixes working well for raised bed gardens, that he would use Mel's Mix for his two new raised beds.
(I'm sure he already knew what vermiculite was.)
Mr Anonymous made a trip to his local home improvement store.
He bought some vermiculite and some peat moss.
And he bought three varieties of compost:
cotton burr compost (this deserves its own post some day)
mushroom compost
and
cow manure compost (or so he thought....the plot sickens - I mean thickens).
Back at home, Mr Anonymous opened all the bags, noticing a definite manure-like smell coming from the cow manure compost. He mixed all the ingredients in small batches and began to fill his raised beds, starting from the right side of each bed and working his way to the opposite side.
"Wow, that cow manure compost sure smells potent," Mr Anonymous thought to himself
(because you really can't think to anyone but yourself)...
"and suspiciously fresh!"
At this point in mixing, Mr Anonymous had about 1/3 of each bed left to fill and an abundance of cow manure compost compared to the vermiculite and peat moss.
So in the last batch of Mel's Mix, Mr Anonymous (I SO almost called him by his real name just now!) decided to put in all the remaining cow manure compost, even though it would be out of proportion to the other ingredients.
After all, what could it hurt? It's compost. Good food for the plants.
But really, whew! What is that smell!? Compost shouldn't smell THIS punchy!
Yes, I'm sure you know where this is going....
It was at this point, having just used the last of all the ingredients to just barely fill the remaining empty section of the raised beds, that Mr Anonymous clued in to what might have happened.
He double-checked the bag of cow manure compost.
Cow manure compost.
He expected to read "composted cow manure."
To his surprise (and possibly disgust), what the bag said was "cow manure AND compost."
Big, BIG difference! Huge, gigantic difference.
He had purchased fresh cow manure mixed with some sort of compost rather than composted cow manure.
What's the problem? Well, other than the smell (ugh! truly composted manure does NOT smell!), is the whole cooking effect fresh compost has on the surrounding environment while turning to compost.
So, Mr Anonymous realized that he had just turned 1/3 of each of his raised beds into a cow manure composting bin. Soon enough that fresh manure would go through the process of composting and become what he intended it to be in the first place - composted cow manure.
But in the meantime, it would heat up - as composting compost does - to temperatures that would fry any seedlings in the near vacinity.
Now, Mr Anonymous had grand plans for his 2 raised bed gardens.
In the first one he was going to plant squash. He loves squash.
 |
| The 2 raised beds. Squash in left bed. Watermelon in right bed. |
Mrs Hiswife-Anonymous loves watermelon.
What is a gardener to do?
He decided to use this as an experiment. He planted, as planned, the squash in the left garden and watermelon in the right garden. See the photo.
The results?
Squash Bed:
The squash planted in the right side of the squash bed (the side without the extra cow-manure-and-compost) performed wonderfully.
The squash planted in the side of the bed that had an abundance of cow manure - well, to put it mildly - it stunk. It suffered. It did not grow. When it finally started growing it was so far behind the squash plants on the other side of the bed that it was not a fair comparison at all.
On both sides of the bed, the squash plants produced squash blossoms, and then squash. But the side with abundant cow manure never caught up to the rest of the plants.
(Sad end to the squash bed story...squash bugs got all of the squash this year. No more squash plants.)
 |
| Close-up of the squash bed. Notice the disparity in size of plants on the left compared to the plants on the right. |
Watermelon bed:
 |
| Close-up of the watermelon bed. All of that growth is coming from one plant, located approximately where the red arrow is pointing. |
But alas, if you could look under the vines and leaves, you would notice that ALL of that growth is coming from one main plant located on the far right side of the watermelon bed. That one plant has completely covered the entire bed with vines and leaves.
Mr Anonymous reported to me that any watermelon seedlings that attempted to come up on the side with abundant cow manure ended up doing poorly and not producing much or any growth.
No seed-spitting contests yet...but the watermelon patch is holding its own against the bugs.
I hope Mrs Hiswife-Anonymous gets her fill of yummy homegrown watermelon this year!
Well, that's the end of the story, but hopefully not the end of the lesson.
What can we take from this stroll through fields of manure?
I'm sure we can all see with our own eyes that...
1. the recipe known as Mel's Mix seems to work wonders for growing raised bed plants in a soil-less mix.
2. an abundance of fresh cow manure added to the mix causes seeds to overheat and not come up, or if they come up the seedlings suffer and under-perform until all that manure has fully composted.
3. a raised bed built along a retaining wall is a great back-saver!
Let's all give a great big THANKS to Mr Anonymous for learning this lesson for us (and dealing with the smell so we don't have to) and for sharing his wonderful garden with us!
Until next time....
enjoy the gardens calling you!
