Basic No Work Gardening
If plant choice is our first consideration in planning the no-work garden, then where do we go from there? We’re picking the no-work plants that reduce deadheading, have high survival rates, don’t require a ton of pruning and that’s all well and good but how do we get them to really perform well without a lot of work? There are several key components to the no-work garden that we should focus on right off the bat and get them out of the way right now. These are key to both reduced work in the garden as well as increased health of the plants. And while they’re both going to cost you a bit of money upfront, they’ll pay off in the long run.
Mulch
The first is mulch. I don’t care what kind of garden it is, my belief is that it should be mulched with the appropriate material. If you look at any natural area where plants live, there’s nobody out there raking up the leaves or removing the fallen bits of foliage and plant debris. It’s all allowed to sit there as a natural mulch. That’s why forest soils are so rich and alive. They’re fed naturally and have a full eco-system of plant life (we call it the soil foodweb) going on in them. And it all starts with mulching the garden. I don’t care what organic mulch you use on your garden. You want something that degrades naturally, something that will sit and rot to feed the soil microorganisms that are going to make your plants healthy. It really doesn’t matter; pick what your wallet and tastes dictate. I used to use straw on the vegetable gardens and bigger perennial borders and bark chips on the front gardens. My current garden is covered with bark mulch in both the vegetable and perennial gardens. Plastic mulch belongs in plastic gardens and stone mulch belongs in rock gardens and walkways. Neither of the latter belong in a real garden because they do nothing for the soil. Did I mention that three-inches of mulch will reduce your weeding by over 80%?
Healthy Plants
Now having healthy plants is particularly important in the coming years as the availability of garden chemicals is reduced. A healthy plant is one that can fight off bugs and problems; indeed, a healthy plant isn’t attractive to pests. Insects and diseases tend to attack the weakened plants in the garden, the plants that are under stress before they attack the healthy one. Think as insects and diseases as the predators that pick off the weak so that only the strong survive. Your job as a gardener is to create a healthy soil ecosystem so your plants are healthy. Mulch is the first step to do that. You really do want to mimic nature in this to create a healthy soil and healthy plants.
Rethink the Use of Compost
Before you turn the page, let me suggest that you rethink your use of compost. Here’s the bottom line with this material. It’s not the actual compost itself that’s what we want in our gardens. It’s the microorganisms that live in the compost that we want. We want all those beneficial bacteria and fungi that actually feed our plants and make them healthy. You can do this by applying lots of compost or you can learn how to make compost tea. I never met a gardener yet that can produce enough compost for their entire garden (well, maybe one but Dave’s a berserker composter) Compost tea takes a handful of good compost and turns it into enough microorganisms to do 5 acres of ground. So if you can only produce a handful or small bucket of good compost in your home compost system, then you do have enough to make compost tea and provide all the microorganisms your garden needs. Learn to make compost tea.
Organic Matter
The organic matter component for your garden soil health can be added by using mulch, by purchasing peat moss or by using all the leaves you can find and tossing them onto your gardens. Digging them in will shorten the time it takes to make them available to plants, leaving them on the surface is slower but a heck of a lot easier (and just as effective in the long run) When horses were the main mode of transport, there was no lack of manure and old straw or hay for the gardens, but now we have to be creative at getting both the organic matter and the microorganisms into our soils.
E-Coli Bacteria and Compost
If you’re worried about the recent scares about e-coli bacteria, then let me assure you that there is no e-coli in properly made compost. A hot compost destroys all e-coli bacteria. And if you’re starting from your own compost - if you don’t put manure into it, then you won’t have this bacteria to begin with because this bacteria come from manure. Home made compost doesn’t contain e-coli if it’s made without manure so it’s perfectly safe.
To head off the question about purchasing manure to be used in compost tea - the answer is that manure isn’t something modern science recommends you use in compost tea. It is also quite possible that chemicals and pharmaceuticals used in the production of the animals have survived the composting process and these will act to destroy the beneficial bacteria in your compost tea. So buying bagged manure - and making compost tea with it - isn’t a recommended garden practice. It doesn’t matter whether the manure is composted or not; the home scale gardener doesn’t have the testing equipment to evaluate how good or bad the manure is. So don’t use anything having to do with manure in your compost tea.
In terms of this series, we’re committed to having low-maintenance plants in the garden and to growing them in a healthy way so insects and pests don’t bother them. These two key ingredients are your first step next spring. Photo Credit
Spreading Compost Tea
Here’s a video on spreading compost tea. I outline the need for filters and show you the 4 main systems a home gardener has for spreading compost tea around in the garden.
How to Make Compost Tea
Here’s a video on how to make compost tea - not something you’d want to invite the Queen to …
But you could invite her to the garden afterwards.
Note that this video is part of a series of videos I’m producing for my seminar series and it’s only the first one in the series (more on the way). Also that some of the links mentioned in the video are not active on the seminar site yet.
Contaminated Composted Manure
Thanks to GardenRant for the lead on contaminated manure in the U.K. This story actually got me thinking because my daughter - raising lettuce and tomatoes in containers in Toronto - claimed this past weekend that she and her partner got sick when they ate their lettuce. Now this was containers with potting soil and she used some purchased composted manure and claimed she washed the lettuce really well.
Here’s the EPA link to the datasheet.
The concern seems that it survives the gut action of ruminants and stays active in the manure pile. Studies submitted to the EPA show that “Under aerobic conditions, degradation of aminopyralid in five different soils resulted in the production of CO2 and non-extractable residues. Half-lives ranged from 31.5 to 533.2 days in 5 soils. For risk assessment purposes, EPA used a half-life of 103.5
days. ” So it can stay active and kill crops in soil for up to a year and a half. And it seems it stays alive after passing through the guts of cows.
Now, the toxicity on humans would seem that the major problem (according to the this factsheet) is dermal irritation although you may read it a little more carefully than I did and find something else of concern. So this isn’t likely what created the problem for my daughter.
She did say she washed the lettuce very thoroughly so that she’s hoping there wasn’t e-coli on it and this was at the height of the tomato concern so we thought it wasn’t necessarily the lettuce. She wiped it off the face of the earth anyway and now it’s composting somewhere.
The bottom line as always though is that you will be further ahead to use your own compost. And if you don’t produce enough, use compost tea. And if you don’t produce compost because you live in an apartment of town house, then get a worm bin. And if you don’t do compost or worm-compost to use as a compost tea starter - then you really can’t call yourself an organic gardener, cause you just don’t get it.
Compost Tumbler Review Update
This isn’t going well.
A few weeks ago, I posted a video of me putting the simple compost tumbler together. It was an adventure and you got to see the process (shortened drastically) along with some tips to make your process easier.
I have to report that there are some problems with this kind of system.
1) The composter is half full of material from the kitchen and garden trimmings. It is so heavy that Mayo can’t spin it. This isn’t a problem if you have a strong person around but I have to tell you that this baby is heavy and doesn’t want to move too much. (Maybe we have heavy vegetables?) 
2) There is a screen in the bottom to allow excess moisture to leak out so your compost stays at the right moisture level. It works much like your sink drain I’m afraid. You know the one that plugs up when too much wet vegetable matter is compressed on the bottom of the sink and you have to take the guck out by hand to let the water drain?
Right - well, I have a bunch of sopping wet compost on top of this drain and I’m darned if I’ll insert half my body to clean out a screen that’s sure to clog up again with a few seconds of cleanout.
I know it’s clogged because when I spun it last night, a foul stench water poured out the “top” (which was now the bottom). Opening up the lid (after turning it I note) I was greeted with a full, foul smell that surely isn’t cooking compost by any stretch of the imagination.
Luckily, I had cut some tall grass in the orchard so I loaded up the other half of the composter with half-browned grass that I figure will absorb all this moisture. Locked her up and turned it over so the moisture would leak down and soak up the grass. If I hadn’t thought of the grass at the last minute, I was going to use newspaper to do the same job.
But it surely isn’t making compost at the moment.
We’ll see how it works in the next week or two as the grass becomes part of the equation and we continue to load in the veggie trimmings.
So I’ve either missed totally on getting the right combination of green to brown or the compost tumbler doesn’t work well.
So for the moment, I’m not a big fan of compost tumblers and the garden plans call for old-fashioned compost bins behind the shed.
I might have a compost tumbler to give away this fall to somebody local. Doesn’t come with any guarantees however. 
Compost Tumbler Review
One of the trials we have going this summer is this compost tumbler (we got ours from for review purposes from http://www.organic-compost-tumbler.com/)
Start to finish in the construction process, about 45 minutes. I deliberately didn’t study the instructions and still managed to get it all together. Mind you, I had to refer to the sheet more than once during the process as you’ll see.
Two tips - let the poly (it’s really heavy duty stuff by the way) sit out in the hot sun for at least an hour before you put this sucker together. Otherwise, it will be hard and not at all easy to work with. Don’t even bother trying to do this on an overcast, cold day in the spring - you’ll wind up hating yourself and this compost tumbler
The second is to really apply the vaseline or cooking oil to the lip. You’ll see me struggle to turn it, hit it with darn near everything I had close to hand (my tools were still all packed away after our move) and even manage to whack a finger. The tight fit works really well once you have it together and it doesn’t leak on the stand but getting it together means really having to hold your mouth right and using a lot of slippery stuff.
After one month, we’re surprised how much organic matter we have in the drum. Because we eat a lot of fruit and vegetables, theres a lot of trimmings being composted. As soon as the gardens get going, I think we’ll see a great deal more going in. The tulip flowers and stems will be the first garden debris to hit it so it should start seeing some serious loading.
This thing is heavy. And loaded up, it is becoming a bit of a chore to turn it around. There’s a lot of weight there so put it where you want it. You aren’t moving it once it’s full.
Here’s the video.
