Garden observations

I’ve been questioning the conventional wisdom of crop rotation because you never see that in nature. An annual plant does not trade place with another annual plant, year after year, unless a human did it. Plants move slowly over a long period of time until they find a spot in the soil where they thrive. I don’t totally understand it but it has a lot to do with the ecology of the soil. And how much sun and water that part of the soil gets, which would also affect the soil’s ecology. So is it the soil or the sunshine or the water?

I don’t know, but you don’t see crop rotation in that process. You see plant movement, over several years, until the species is happy in a specific spot. This is a very simplified version of a complex process).

Maybe this is a naive thought about crop rotation from a gardener who has never grown crops like a farmer, but then I started reading JADAM Organic Farming by Youngsang Cho and he also thinks that about crop rotations. Are you familiar with that book? It’s about the Korean organic farming methods. It’s been on my reading list for a while and I finally started it. Fits my bias for mimicking natural systems.

The book’s intro:

What does “JADAM” mean? It is short for our Korean full name Jayonul Damun Saramdul. This name means “people who are like nature.” Yes, we are the nature-like people who believe in and follow the wisdom of nature. In nature’s wisdom lies the path to high yield, high quality and low cost.

I’m not good at gardening whenever I take the plants out of their natural context. I kill anything grown in containers or pots or indoors. I start seedlings indoors with artifical lights and that process often fails.

I’m the most successful as a gardener when I grow plants outside in soil with systems that are closer to the natural context of the various plants, and even then I experience failure.

Undesirable plants

rhizome grass

I have a lot of opinions about rhizome grass. I inherited an abandoned garden that was nearly a pasture of rhizome grass. I’ve spent many hours struggling to pull it up, trying to bury it with cardboard or compost or woodchips or mulch, giving up, ignoring it. I’m starting year two of a multi-year project to fix this problem, because this is a garden and those plants compete with the plants I want to grow. Quackgrass, Johnson grass, Devil’s grass, couchgrass (pronounced “cooch”), etc. Grass that spreads via rhizome even when it is cold. Fuck this grass, but it has kept the ground covered and helped the soil stay healthy so I’ve come to appreciate that about it. Pulling the rhizomes out of the ground feel like pulling the rhizomes stuck in my brain.

Even though the grass frustrates me, the grass fills a niche that tells me the spot is fertile enough for something to grow there. I find rhizome grass in soil that is decently aerated in the first 3-6 inches with a bit of compaction below that, and if it wasn’t fertile before it established, then the grass helped the soil become healthier because it always covers decent-seeming soil with a lot of life (worms and bugs and stuff).

mint

I often find mint alongside the rhizome grass, but the grass isn’t as bad of a problem where the mint established. This tells me that mint also pioneers soil like rhizome grass, but critically, it is a natural deterrent to the rhizome grass because it has allelopathic properties that can resist the rhizome grass invasion. The grasses are allelopathic too, so that also explains why you find them together since they deter other plants, but the mints seem to prevail over the rhizomes. This could be totally wrong too, but I’m trying it. It’s possible the mint is the only plant in the area that can tolerate the grass toxins. Idk not a botanist.

So while all these organic gardeners are trying to kill the grass by tarping half their plots or dumping vinegar into their soils, which works, I’m over here propagating mint on my garden borders as a barrier to the grasses trying to invade the plot (among other methods). My friend Hal, a person with a lot of experience and intuition about natural systems, said this is a good idea and that I should also try other plants in that family, like spearmint and lemon balm.

People observations

Some gardners hate plants, especially plants like mint, but the thing about gardening is that you can do it in a way that fits your personality. If you love planning and executing that plan and having control over things then your garden will look that way. If you like to observe and leave things as they lay and just let the plants do what they want and use a plant’s natural disposition to your advantage, like mint as rhizome grass control, then your garden will appear that way. Therein lies the tension between all gardeners.

You would think that all gardeners love plants, but no, especially not the meticulous gardener who loves to plant in their straight planned lines and kill every non-desirable plant in sight. Those sort of gardeners find the messy gardener another sort of non-desirable.

Messy gardeners love to see the life in their plot, including a tolerance for a little bit of planning. They uncover their beds each spring to see which plants volunteered, finding where the different species naturally reproduced and thrive. Hands in the dirt touching every inch of the soil and smelling the microbes then scratching their butt and getting the microbes in their intestines and probably giving themselves worms. But it’s whatever, they are enjoying the dirt.

This is not a metaphor, btw, just an observation about people and plants. Also my garden neighbors will probably not like my mint strategy.

More rhizome grass findings

fungal soils

As a pioneer, the rhizome grass thrives in high bacterial soil which is the same type of soil in the typical annual garden bed. It doesn’t do as well in soils with high fungal activity.

A wood chip barrier as a border to the outside rhizome-ridden world can help, in addition to mint-like plant barriers. It’s also easier to find and pull up the rhizomes when they grow through the woodchips. Almost like they don’t go so deep into the soil because they are like “nah I don’t like this, lemme find more bacterial-based soil” and they travel shallowly through the wood chips without going too deep.

It makes sense that rhizome grass doesn’t do well in high fungal soil, like a forest floor, because you rarely find these plants on the forest floor. Which is obvious because it’s low in sunlight, but what is more of a factor, sunlight or soil biology? Idk not a scientist and won’t go looking anytime soon. The sun is crazy! Like legit cannot understand.

grass mats

If you have a rhizome grass problem then you will most likely have a very large mass of rhizomes to compost. In the summer, you can kill them by drying with the sun. This requires space to lay them down on some sort of non-dirt surface. Let it bake!

You can also lay them on the bare soil from where you pulled the rhizomes if you don’t have immediate plans for planting in that spot. I like to give the bed some time to let more grass grow back so I can do another pass at pulling up the rest of the rhizomes. After that, you can get ahead of the few remaining rhizomes by exhausting the grass with non-disruptive weeding and mulching.

I haven’t articulated this, and I’m not sure why I’m giving gardening tips in this blog post, but I am: one effective way to remove rhizome grass from your garden: take you a fork and loosen the soil around the grass and pull up the rhizomes. One by one. Easier when it’s a lil wet. Then mulch the open soil with wood chips or leaf litter or thick layer of compost. You’ll need to do this a couple times per bed. This is labor intensive but it works if you have patience. It’s disruptive to the soil and hard to do effectively when you have other plants to work around. Also, sheet mulching works for establishing new beds on a spot that is pasture, but the grasses can come up through it if the beds are not deep enough. And the rhizomes will come across your new beds so you will still need to pull up the rhizomes one by one until finally you have not much grass and you can just exhaust the remaining rhizomes by weeding the grass blades above ground til the underground rhizomes are tired cuz they will keep trying to grow until eventually they are exhausted. And then now you have to control your borders with mint and woodchips and whatever else you observe works. (I’m not advocating for border control on a geopolitical level, only in your garden. Now that I think about it, if a community garden wanted to create community or whatever then they should encourage neighboring garden plots to collaborate on planting their borders. Could be a cool way to get some edge and new plants in your garden if y’all both agree to a hedgerow or some fruit trees or something. Peach trees make excellent shade trees to sit under btw.)

Laying the rhizomes on soil for a few weeks can work to your advantage if you are careful. The grass mat acts as a cover crop where the rhizomes begin growing into the soil, conducting the photosythesis process that creates the exudates that are so great for soil health. It brings up some worms and all that good stuff too.

If you pay attention and don’t let it get away, it’s easy to pull up this grass mat because it only roots into the very top layer of the soil and you can yank it right off. I wouldn’t leave this on the ground more than 2-3 weeks while everything is growing. I accidentally did this over an entire long winter and was happily surprised. I thought I killed them before winter and left them on the bed but they just kept growing. It made the soil better and was easy to pull up in the spring because the roots hadn’t gotten deep.

Put dead into your compost pile if you’ve completely killed the rhizomes via sun drying. It’s some great organic matter but you can accidentally inject a nice juicy rhizome cluster into your compost if you’re not careful. Otherwise throw it into the yard of an enemy, especially people who are authoritative, controlling, or think we need increased border control. Specifically, throw it into the yard people who deport somebody for expressing a political belief they disagree with, or anybody who would support that action.