By Cindy Sutter, Special to The Denver Post
Dave Wann faced a real challenge when he and his neighbors decided to start a vegetable garden.
In the 1990s, they had bought a piece of land in Golden to build a cohousing community. The good news was that they got a good price on it because it was on the edge of a flood plain and were able to purchase water rights. The bad news, in terms of planting a garden, was that in the space where the garden was to be, a foot of topsoil had been scraped off to make the land drain correctly, what is called a drainage tilt, according to Wann.
As any Colorado gardener who has put shovel to dirt can tell you, the hard clay here is a challenge under the best of circumstances. But with much of the topsoil gone, it was near-impossible.
“We started with something like pottery,” Wann says. “We couldn’t get a Rototiller in during the early years. It was sun-baked clay and sandy.”
Wann was undeterred, partly because of his background and philosophy. As an expert on sustainability who has written 10 books and produced television programs on related issues, Wann knew he could transform the 1-acre space into a fertile garden. His experience with this unpromising bit of ground — which now produces vegetables for 27 households — offers encouragement to any would-be gardener looking to plant the family’s first vegetable garden or convert a dead, tamped-down “hell strip” of dirt into something beautiful and productive. Fortunately the average gardener will find the task at hand much less daunting than Wann’s was.
Often, some digging and a couple of trips to the garden store is enough to get started. Even so, one thing holds true of both monumental and simple garden experiences: the soil continues to get better with time and effort. That’s important, especially with organic gardens, because building a loose, fertile soil is a major factor in garden success.
As Wann puts it: “The life in the soil is really what makes the soil. If it’s being fixed up enough, it’s starting to have this wide variety of microbes, worms and centipedes. They’re the ones doing the building. It’s the life in the soil that’s the value.” He adds that a bucket of good soil has more microbes than the entire human population of the planet.
John Smith, manager of Paulino Gardens in Denver, agrees that it takes time to build good soil.
“Sometimes, it takes three to five years of adding organic matter to get decent planting,” he says. “It’s not that you can’t plant each year, but that it gets better each year.”
For gardeners converting a spot in their yards, he suggests renting or buying a tiller to break up the ground if you’re planning a good-sized space or if you don’t have the time or energy to use a shovel.
Compost
In Colorado especially, compost is the gardener’s friend. While you may compost food scraps at home, it’s hard for the average family to produce enough to amend the soil in their garden. You can buy compost, though, and Smith suggests adding compost to break up the soil and add organic matter. Till the soil after adding to mix the compost in well. Repeat with a couple of inches of compost each year. If the soil you start with seems particularly unpromising, add both purchased garden soil and compost.
Raised beds
Raised beds can offer a shortcut to good soil, although even these require adding compost from year to year. Smith advises building a bed 12 to 20 inches deep. It’s important not to make the bed too wide. You need to be able to reach the plants in the center; one advantage of raised beds is that you don’t walk on them and pack down the soil.
For a good-sized bed or beds, the easiest thing is to buy the soil in bulk. Smith recommends a mix of ⅔ garden soil to ⅓ compost. He advises taking a look at the bulk soil before you buy to make sure it’s not heavy and clay-like. While it doesn’t have to be black, it should be loose and free of debris. He does not advise using fill dirt.
To make a raised bed, remove the sod, add a few inches of the garden soil and compost mix, then dig to mix it with the underlying soil. That step makes the soil drain better. Then add the rest of the soil and compost and turn again.
Fertilizer
Smith suggests adding a granular fertilizer with the compost each year before planting and tilling it or digging it to root-depth in the soil. He also advises gardeners to use a water-soluble liquid fertilizer for the plants during the growing season. Gardeners may choose organic or non-organic options.
Starting from scratch
Wann’s path for the cohousing complex’s garden required more work. Since he was working a patch so unfriendly to plant life that it wouldn’t even grow grass, he got the rehabilitation process started by adding some topsoil and planting winter rye. The rye’s roots reach 4 to 5 feet deep, which helped to break up the hard soil. He continued adding cover crops such as vetch and clover and plowing them under. Wann also added crushed leaves and grass clippings, as well as manure from an Alpaca farm and compost. He has also used green sand, which comes from the sea bottom and adds minerals, but he advises using caution with rock dust, which contains a lot of phosphate, since it makes the soil more alkaline. Colorado’s soil already is alkaline, which makes it more difficult for a plant’s roots to take up nutrients. Wann also adds a sprinkle of bone meal when planting.
Cover crops
Most gardeners put mulch on top of the garden to help suppress weeds and keep plant roots cool in the blasting hot sun of summer. Wann often uses compost as mulch. Sometimes he plants cover crops such as red clover during the growing season after garden plants already have a good start. The clover suppresses weeds and can be tilled in the next spring before planting.
If all this sounds complicated, start with a simple, manageable plot and expand on your successes. Keep in mind that humans have been successfully raising food for 10,000 years, almost all of them without a garden store down the road or an internet full of advice. You can do it, too.
