Check your soil
Our experts suggested making sure your soil is good before you even start planting. Nick Fabisiak, general manager of Marvin’s Organic Gardens in Lebanon, noted that where houses are built, contractors often strip off the best layer of topsoil, leaving a layer of hard clay.
If you’re working with hard clay, you need to mix in some organic matter to break it up, suggested Cheryl Malott, vice president Deal’s Landscape Service in Beavercreek.
“If you have very rich soil, your plants may do well without fertilizer,” added Five Rivers Metroparks Education Supervisor Betty Hoevl. For organic matter, she suggests compost.
Fertilize naturally
Aside from compost, there are organic fertilizers on the market that can be added to the soil, but as Fabisiak noted, “it can be a marketing ploy” to label products organic or natural. He suggested checking product labels for USDA or OMRI (Organic Materials Review Institute) certification to make sure they’re genuinely organic.
Particularly with vegetables and herbs, using natural products is important, Hoevl said. “If you use chemical fertilizer with clay soil, your plants will look great, but your tomatoes will taste like paper. You need some organic matter in the soil.”
Fight fire with fire
For insect control, Fabisiak said Marvin’s Organic Gardens owner Marvin Duren likes to “fight fire with fire.” For instance, putting a birdfeeder in the garden attracts birds that then stick around and eat the bugs, too.
It’s also good to learn about insects before obliterating them, Hoevl added. For instance, some insects change shape within a couple of weeks and are no longer a threat to plants. If you’re dealing with those types of insects, she said, you might be able to just rinse them off of your plants for a few days.
Control weeds naturally
For weed control, the only truly all-natural product Fabisiak knows of is corn gluten, which should be applied early in the season, when forsythia is blooming.
Otherwise, Hoevl suggests simply “smothering” weeds — covering the ground with a thick layer of newspaper and topping with mulch to keep weeds from popping through.
Manage disease through prevention
“If you have healthy soil, you’ll have healthy plants,” Fabisiak said. “It’s kind of like people: If you take care of yourself, you don’t get sick” oftentimes, he said.
To maintain healthy soil from year to year, the key is to rotate crops, he said. For instance, Marvin’s Organic Gardens had trouble with diseased plants after planting tomatoes too many years in a row in the same patch. Particularly after planting a nitrogen-hungry plant like tomatoes, it’s important to rotate in peas, beans or another plant that restores nitrogen to the soil, he said.
Clipping off the diseased part of a plant before the disease spreads is another way to control disease naturally, Hoevl said.
Bring in the birds and bees.
Attracting natural pollinators like butterflies, bees and hummingbirds can help plant health too, Fabisiak said. Aside from the standard butterfly bushes, he suggests pineapple sage, which produces red flowers that attract hummingbirds and bees.
Sunflowers also invite birds for insect control, he said.
And an evergreen cover, though it won’t feed birds, provides a nice place for them to harbor, Malott said.
Take a class.
Lectures and classes are available for those wanting to learn more about organic gardening.
Marvin’s Organic Gardens is holding lectures on planting your summer garden, May 11; composting, May 25; and attracting useful wildlife, June 8. For information, go to marvinsorganicgardens.com.
Five Rivers Metroparks is holding classes on Compost Kitchen: All About Worms at 6 p.m. Wednesday and Garden Boot Camp at 10 a.m. May 18 at Wegerzyn Gardens, plus many other programs. For more information, go online to metroparks.org.
Hoevl says gardeners love to ask questions, so she always has enthusiastic students at her classes.
Gardeners also love to give things away, she said.
“It pays to make friends with a gardener.”
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