Effective deer control, efficient composting, timely irrigation, labor-saving weed control, and worthwhile variety selections help you grow tasty organic produce.

Rodale News
by Derek Fell

Source: Sally Hammerman,
In My Backyard Misty Hollow LLC

When I purchased historic Cedaridge Farm in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1989, I needed it to use it as an “outdoor studio.” Formerly a dairy farm established by Mennonite farmers in 1791, the 20-acre property allows me to test different gardening techniques and different varieties of flowers and vegetables.

It also allows me to photograph the results, both good and disappointing. As the author of more than 100 garden books and calendars, I have used the property to test vertical growing techniques for my book Vertical Gardening and variety selections for my book Grow This! As a consequence, I have developed 20 theme gardens connected by a trail that leads from one area to another, creating a visual adventure. From the very beginning, I decided to do it all organically, using no harmful chemical controls, and the results have been spectacular, with blemish-free lettuce, asparagus as thick as a man’s thumb, and armloads of man-high gladiolus.

Critter Control
The biggest problem I encountered was controlling the deer. Cedaridge Farm shares a boundary with the Ralph Stover Park trail system, and we have deer in the garden every night looking for food. Without deer control, we couldn’t have a garden. My first project was a vegetable garden about the size of a tennis court, and I soon realized that the only way to keep out the deer was to fence it in with deer netting that extends 8 feet high. The space inside the netting is divided into four large rectangles, each growing a different plant family that rotates from one space to the next in successive years to minimize disease problems.

For years I had difficulty growing carrots—the seed is so tiny I just could not get around to thinning the seedlings properly after emergence, and a big fat groundhog would burrow under my netting and eat them just before harvest. I now get my carrots perfectly spaced by first taking a roll of toilet tissue and lightly spraying it; then with the tip of a pencil, I transfer seeds individually from the seed packet onto the paper, spacing them precisely 1 inch apart in rows spaced 2 inches apart. I then cover the pre-spaced seeds with another piece of damp toilet tissue to lock the seeds in place, and like a commercial seed tape, I placed the ribbon of paper over bare soil and cover it with just enough soil to anchor it. The groundhog, I caught with a Havahart trap—using carrots as bait.

Cutting Garden
The second major project was a cutting garden close to the farmhouse, since my wife Carolyn loves to create flower arrangements for every room in the house and we have collaborated on books about flower arranging, including the very popularImpressionist Bouquets (Friedman/Fairfax), which recreated still-life arrangements from famous painters such as Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne.

Our cutting garden is a 20-by-30-foot space divided by a flagstone path, with the flowers planted in rows across the width. Featuring mostly annuals such as zinnias, marigolds, rudbeckias, sunflowers, celosia, lisianthus, and cosmos, it also includes some summer-flowering bulbs like gladiolus, garden lilies, and dinner-plate dahlias. I didn’t want this area enclosed by deer fencing, as it would have spoiled our view from the farmhouse, so I chose to test various deer repellents, including coyote urine, which we found to be ineffective.

The only deer repellent that really worked is an organic formula called Liquid Fence, which is made from garlic concentrate and powdered rotten eggs. We spray it on all ornamental plants as soon as they emerge in the spring (including the deer’s favorite foods, tulips and daylily shoots) and again at four-week intervals or whenever there is more than an inch of rain. We mix coconut oil with the spray as a sticking agent so we need to reapply only after we get a heavy rain of more than an inch.

Woodland Garden
A third of the five-acre cultivated area at Cedaridge Farm is a woodland garden, with a wood-chip trail that begins at an entrance arch of old barn beams, then leads across a bridge, through a sunny bog garden planted with a colony of hardy swamp hibiscus and ostrich ferns, beneath a canopy of mostly sugar maples, and out to a sunny lawn area.

The edges of the path are planted with an assortment of local shade-loving native wildflowers like trillium, foamflower, ostrich ferns, and blue phlox, along with some flowering nonnatives like primroses, daffodils, hosta, and heuchera. The deer are kept at bay by spraying with Liquid Fence at the same time we spray the cutting garden, using a three-gallon pump-action backpack sprayer.

Where the woodland path emerges onto sunlit lawn, we’ve planted an especially beautiful plant partnership of pink-flowering native redbuds, native pink dogwoods, pink-flowering nonnative crabapples, and pink-flowering nonnative Korean azaleas.

They all bloom together to create a striking pink monochromatic color harmony. The inspiration for this monochromatic color harmony is a Van Gogh painting of peach orchards.

Sunny Perennial Beds
Walking up the lawn toward the farmhouse, visitors encounter several sunny perennial borders that are mostly kidney shaped to make islands in the lawn. One bed borders a pond, where the soil is moist, making it the perfect environment for Japanese irises, astilbe, and the gigantic parasol-shaped leaves of Japanese butterbur. Another bed features a collection of garden lilies, notably fragrant Oriental types such as white ‘Casa Blanca,’ red ‘Star Gazer,’ and glowing burnt-orange ‘Schehezerade.’ Some small-size flowering shrubs augment the perennials, including ‘Pinky Winky’ hydrangea, bicolored ‘Sensation’ lilac, and several colors of hardy tree hibiscus (Alcea rosea).

We use herbaceous peonies in all the beds and have a special sunny area devoted to them—beside a white Victorian gingerbread gazebo—for cutting.

The perennial beds are topped up with compost every autumn before frost. During the growing season, we also use a foliar spray of an organic fish formula called Bill’s Perfect Fertilizer, coupled with an organic fertilizer additive called Spray-N-Grow, which promotes profuse flowering.

Water Features
Carolyn spent a career in fashion designing clothes for famous fashion house like Pierre Cardin and Calvin Klein. Today, she’s a professional landscape designer with projects like designing three waterfalls for a New York vineyard and a stream garden for a celebrity entertainer. It’s our belief that every garden needs a water feature, both for the musical sound of running water and for the beauty of its sparkling movement.

Up near the farmhouse at Cedaridge, in what was a paddock, we also created a series of waterfalls and a stream that combine to form a plunge pool, with all the water recirculated through a filter so that the plunge pool is suitable for bathing during the heat of summer. One section of the pool is devoted to growing water lilies, while other areas feature colorful moisture-loving plants like cardinal flowers, swamp sunflowers, and insect-eating pitcher plants. Several specimens of ‘Waterfall’ Japanese maple, large-leafed hostas, erect cinnamon ferns, and bronze-leafed ligularia are used to create a tapestry of foliage colors and textures.

The water lilies are contained in submerged terra-cotta pots to prevent their spreading into unwanted areas, and we have a pink lotus that’s also confined to a submerged pot for the same reason. The pots are lowered below the ice line during winter to prevent the roots from freezing.

Cottage Garden
We have a small guest cottage with a cottage garden surrounding the foundation, as well as a flagstone patio off the bedroom where we generally arrange a collection of containers with colorful plant partnerships. Shrub roses such as the disease-resistant ‘Flower Carpet’ and ‘Knockout’ series provide continuous color all season, and most years, we create an exotic effect for the patio by displaying tropical plants in containers, including several ‘Dwarf Cavendish’ bananas, ‘Tropicanna’ cannas, and giant elephant ears. Other years, we grew vegetables in containers, relying on ‘Bright Lights’ chard and various colors of lettuce for ornamental effect.

Soil Health
To keep the soil in good health, I designed a three-compartment compost bin that holds finished compost in one bin, maturing compost in another, and fresh compost ingredients in another so there is a continuous supply all season.

I have separate bins made from cylinders of chicken wire that hold shredded leaves, which provide an attractive weed-suffocating mulch for all the beds. The ingredients for the compost bins include garden and kitchen waste, wood ashes from our three fireplaces, generous amounts of stable manure from local horse farms, and a wonderful dark, crumbly compost from a nearby township compost center that’s provided free to members of the community. This is made from shredded woody plant material mixed with decomposed leaves.

Irrigation
We obtain potable water from a deep well, and also have the benefit of several submerged cisterns that once held an emergency supply of water for livestock and we now use to water the garden so we do not stress the well. Over the years, we have tried several irrigation systems. We generally water the containers with a watering wand attached to a garden hose so we can poke the end through foliage and apply water close to the root zone.

We sometimes use a lawn sprinkler on our melon and sweet corn beds, and in other areas, we use an inexpensive drip irrigation system connected to our well. We like the brand called Irrigro because it sweats water all along its length and it can be buried. We grow warm-season crops like tomatoes and peppers through a horticultural fabric similar to black plastic but with pores to allow water to penetrate. This effectively controls weeds around our vegetable crops. In the fall, we also gather leaves that have been shredded with a lawn mower and use them as an organic mulch to further control weeds in our flower beds.

Space-Saving Ideas
We like to grow vines, both flowering and edible. In particular we favor clematis and varieties of wisteria, although wisteria can be aggressive and easily rot wooden supports, while clematis are better behaved. We have several plantings of the hybrid trumpet creeper, ‘Mme Galen.’ A cross between the native American trumpet creeper and the Chinese, it attracts hummingbirds like a magnet and flowers non-stop from early summer through fall frost.

Of all the many kinds of containers we have tested, wooden whisky half-barrels have proved to be the best for growing both edibles and ornamentals. They can accommodate a good amount of soil at sufficient depth to prevent rapid drying out, and the wood will not overheat like plastic and metal containers. To prevent rotting of the wood from soil contact, we line the inside with black plastic, ensuring that holes are punched through the bottom to facilitate good drainage. Some of our most productive vegetable varieties include pole snap beans and pole lima beans, indeterminate tomato varieties such as ‘Better Boy’ and ‘Early Cascade,’ vining ‘Sugar Snap’ peas, ‘Vegetable Spaghetti’ squash, and climbing, ever-bearing ‘Malabar’ spinach. All these are grown up trellis, garden netting, or bamboo teepees to save space.

Derek Fell is the author of two Rodale books, Vertical Gardening and Grow This! He is also editor of the Avant Gardener, an online, full-color newsletter. His three-compartment compost bin, made from rot-resistant Western red cedar, and a vertical gardening kit are available from www.cedarstore.com.

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