Remember the story of Squanto teaching the pilgrims how to fertilize their crops by planting a fish head under each hill of corn?  It turns out that Squanto really knew what he was talking about.

      Fish and seaweed from our lakes, rivers and oceans make excellent fertilizers for annuals, perennials, vegetables and even potted plants.  This time of year, you don’t want to hit your perennials with a whopping dose of standard fertilizer that will cause the plants to put on quick new growth that won’t be hardened off by winter.  But a little pick-me-up from a bottle of fish emulsion won’t hurt.  Annuals that need a little perking up or vegetables that aren’t producing as abundantly as you’d like them to will also benefit. 

      Fish emulsion, liquid seaweed, fish meal and kelp meal can be purchased at most garden centers.  The meals are mixed in with soil, usually before planting.  The liquids are diluted with water and either sprayed on the leaves as a foliar feed or used to water the plants.  Take note though:  this stuff really stinks!  Even worse than dead fish!

      There are benefits to both methods of application.  Foliar feeding makes the nutrients immediately available to the plants, but watering with diluted liquid products stimulates soil bacteria which in turn increases fertility through humus formation, aeration and moisture retention.

      Fish and kelp products provide small amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the NPK you find on fertilizer labels.  More importantly though, they provide up to 60 trace elements that are necessary for healthy plant growth, along with growth promoting hormones and enzymes. 

      It isn’t fully understood how these elements work to help plants, but it is believed that they improve the plant’s growing conditions so they are better able to withstand pests and diseases.  Even the awful smell of the fish emulsion helps by confusing plant pests for a day or two and allowing the plant to become strong enough to withstand them or to progress to a stage in growth where it is no longer attractive to the pests. 

      The growth hormones in liquid seaweed are called cytokinins.  They increase the efficiency of photosynthesis and the synthesis of protein.  Plants produce these hormones themselves in their roots, but when under stress for any reason, they stop producing them, making themselves more vulnerable to pests and disease.  Providing them through an application of liquid seaweed is like giving plants a dose of vitamins.

      You may have free access to your own fish or seaweed fertilizer.  When you clean out your aquarium, use the old water to water your plants.  Spread the algae from your pond between rows of vegetables or add it to your compost bin.  If you are a fisherman, take a lesson from Squanto and bury those fish scraps in the garden.

      Face it.  You KNOW that synthetic chemical fertilizers and herbicides are bad for the environment and for your own health.  Those little white signs that lawn care companies place on the lawns warning people to stay off aren’t kidding.  But your lawn is addicted and you’re afraid that if you give up the chemicals dandelions will run rampant.  Not so.

      Synthetic treatments kill soil microbes and earthworms essential to a healthy organic lawn.  Excess fertilizer runoff enters our waterways and kills fish and causes algae blooms.  And exposure to these chemicals is linked to numerous human health problems including neurological damage, hormone disruptions, cancer and Parkinson’s.

      Fortunately, there are ways to have a healthy lawn without synthetic chemicals.  There’s no point in weaning your lawn off them; it’s got to be done cold turkey. 

      The first, and easiest step in maintaining a chemical-free healthy lawn is to adjust your mower’s cutting height to its highest setting, typically 3-4”.  The taller grass blades do more photosynthesizing which produces more root growth.  That makes for better access to water and nutrients, resulting in a healthier, more drought tolerant lawn.  The taller grass blades also shade out germinating weed seeds.

      Never cut more than 1/3 of the height of the grass blades to avoid stressing them.  Keep your mower blade sharp and leave the cuttings on the lawn to provide free nitrogen and organic matter.  You may have heard that leaving the clippings on the lawn contributes to thatch, but that is not true.  Fresh clippings on the lawn stimulate earthworm activity and that breaks down thatch.

      If you still feel the need to treat your lawn with something, either for fertilizer or weed or insect control there are several companies that produce organic products for do-it-yourselfers.  One of the best is Gardens Alive which has been in business since 1984 and can be reached at 513-354-1482 or www.gardensalive.com.  While the organic offerings at stores like Stein’s aren’t as numerous as the synthetic ones, there is some shelf space devoted to them, and it will likely increase as more people become aware of and purchase them.  There are also a few commercial organic lawn care companies in our area and some of the “chemical” companies offer organic alternatives if you ask.

      Some gardeners love moss.  Some gardeners hate moss.  Some gardeners love moss in some places but hate moss in other places.

      Moss growing in your lawn is actually a symptom rather than the cause of a poor lawn.  Moss grows in shade where soil is compacted and has a low pH.  Poor drainage and mowing too closely also encourage the growth of moss. 

      The kind of moss growing in your lawn will actually tell you what the problem is.  Mosses with an upright growth habit, green growth at the top and brown stems at the base indicate dry, acidic soil.  Trailing mosses with a flat growth pattern and pale green foliage and stems are symptoms of a shaded lawn with poor drainage.  Cushion mosses have tiny upright stems and a compact, dense growth habit.  They appear in lawns mowed too closely to soil level. 

      If you don’t like the moss, remove it using Safer Brand Moss & Algae Killer, a soap-based product that does not harm the environment.  If the underlying problems are not corrected, however, the moss will return.  Power raking will take care of all the above problem conditions.  Top dressing with compost, aerating the soil and raising the mower blade will help as well.

      Some people enjoy the beauty of moss and want to encourage it in their lawns.  Just looking at the green color of moss reduces stress, and a shady, mossy area can add a degree of serenity to any landscape.  Growing moss is becoming an increasingly desirable low-maintenance alternative to grass lawns. 

      Moss is best in areas that are not high traffic as it does not stand up to heavy wear.  Moss lawns may be planted in spring or summer.  Work compost into the soil, water, then lay down cushions or mats of moss, including some of the earthy matter in which it was growing – pine needles, rotting wood, forest litter.  Press the moss down firmly.  If you do not have access to already growing moss that you can transplant, it can be ordered over the internet.

      Spray the moss with 1 quart buttermilk mixed with 2 gallons of water in mid-spring to encourage growth.  To start moss in a new area, put a clump of moss in a blender with buttermilk and water and mix together.  Spread it where you want moss to grow.  Yogurt can be used in place of buttermilk.  You can give terra cotta, metal and stone pots and even rocks newly added to a landscape a prematurely aged look by spreading the moss mixture on their sides.  A few ounces of potters clay added to the mixture in the blender will help it stick better to rocks.

      Mist the transplanted material and new growth daily and do not walk on it until it is well established.  Occasional weeding is all the maintenance needed.

      When I went to visit Suzette Lazotte’s permaculture garden, she gave me her address and detailed directions how to get there.  But I wouldn’t have needed either.  Just the name of the street would have been enough – her yard is very different from her neighbors’. 

      The bulk of Suzette’s yard is filled with densely placed plants mulched with wood chips and marsh hay.  Every available spot holds a plant with some purpose, and most plants have more than one purpose.  For example, vetch, indigo, lupine and wild senna all have flowers which attract pollinating insects to nearby food crops and they are all able to capture nitrogen from the air and make it available in the soil to fertilize adjacent plants.  At my mid-summer visit, a bed of just germinated lettuce was tucked into the shade of tall sunflowers, while everyone else’s lettuce had long since bolted and gone to seed.

      Permaculture, or permanent (agri)culture, means working with natural forces – wind, sun, and water – to provide food, shelter, water and other needs with minimum labor and without depleting the land. 

      One of Suzette’s primary goals in having a permaculture garden is to grow her family’s food closer to home, thus saving the resources involved in shipping, refrigeration and packaging.  She stresses that her objective isn’t to grow everything her family needs, but to grow what she can and then make an effort to buy locally from farmer’s markets for the rest.

      A basic premise of permaculture is to recognize the interrelationship between plants, animals, insects and humans.  The key is to select plants that have more than one function.  For example, a grape arbor attracts pollinators, can provide cover or a nesting spot for birds, provides shade for other plants or the home or patio, and produces fruit for humans and birds.  The leaves fall to the earth and are composted.  The vines can be used to make wreaths or other crafts.  The gardener’s responsibility in this web is to not use pesticides on the grapes that will harm the birds and insects that live there. 

      Water conservation is another important premise of permaculture gardening.  To retain moisture, Suzette lays down corrugated cardboard as a mulch and then covers it with marsh hay or wood chips.  She digs holes through this mulch when she wants to plant something.  During the dry month of July, she had watered only once, and her yard was a lush paradise while her neighbors’ lawns were crispy and brown.

      The beauty of permaculture is that you don’t have to embrace every principle and practice and you don’t need 40 acres to get started.  The principles can be applied even if your garden is just an apartment balcony.  You can pick and choose what appeals to you or what you feel able to do and know that you are making a start toward living in harmony with nature.

      There are many good books on permaculture and much good information on the internet.  One very interesting and well-written book is “Gaia’s Garden, A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture” by Toby Hemenway.

      Permaculture, coined from “permanent agriculture” may seem an obscure or unobtainable theory that doesn’t apply to the average yard or garden.  But there is no need to adopt the entire permaculture philosophy to derive some benefits.  Just a few of the concepts can be applied to make your yard and garden more beautiful and productive.

      Suzette said that when she looks at a landscape, her first thought is to cover the soil.  Mulch has many benefits including temperature regulation, moisture conservation, erosion protection, weed suppression, disease reduction and soil improvement.  Soil open to the sun and wind can become dry, hard and cracked, or blow away.

      An important permaculture concept is that of guilds, or plant groupings that assist each other in some way.  Many gardeners are familiar with the Native American triad of corn, beans and squash, a combination called the Three Sisters.  When planted in proximity, each plant supports the other two in some way.  The cornstalks provide a trellis for the beans.  The beans draw nitrogen from the air and make them available to the other plants in the soil.  The corn roots ooze sugars that feed the bacteria that produce this nitrogen.  The broad leaves of the squash plant shade the soil, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weeds.  Each of these plants produces more food with less water and fertilizer than any one of the three planted in isolation.  The study of guilds is relatively new, but there are several of them for which information can be found in permaculture books.

      The book Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway talks of keyhole-shaped planting beds.  These are circular beds about 8 to 12 feet in diameter pierced on one side with a path to the middle.  The benefits are of this shape are many.  First, 50 square feet of planting space on a keyhole bed needs only 6 feet of pathway.  In a traditional single row planting, 50 square feet of planting space requires 40 square feet of path.  A raised bed of the same planting size requires 10 square feet of pathway.  Keyhole beds can be planted next to each other or around each other in increasingly intricate patterns to really maximize planting opportunities. 

      When a keyhole bed’s path is pointed toward the south and tall plants are located at the back, or northern edge, the bed creates a U-shaped sun bowl that traps warmth.  The microclimate inside is a great place for heat-loving plants.

      An significant principal of permaculture is water conservation.  This can be done in many ways including the aforementioned mulching, catching rain in rain barrels, building swales or berms to contour the land to make water flow where you need it, planting densely, planting water-conserving plants, and adding organic matter to soil so that it better holds water.  One interesting technique for keeping water in the soil longer is to dig trenches about 18 inches deep and bury woody tree trunks or rotten firewood.  If you’ve ever seen a rotting log in the woods, you know that they act like sponges, holding water long after the surrounding area has dried.  This will happen underground as well.  The wood will eventually decompose, adding organic matter and fertility to the soil.  

      There are many more simple permaculture techniques that can add beauty and fertility to your life.  Gaia’s Garden is the best and most interesting book I’ve found on the topic.

      There are many basic items on your kitchen shelves that can be used in the yard or garden to enhance growth or discourage pests and diseases without resorting to the use of poisonous chemicals.

      The most obvious things that go from kitchen to garden are those that can be made into compost either in a bin or by being buried in the garden.  These include peels, rinds, cores, skins, egg shells, tea bags, coffee grounds and peanut shells.  Another idea – instead of dumping the water in which you’ve cooked vegetables down the sink, let it cool and take it outdoors to water and nourish a plant.

      My favorite kitchen item for use in the garden is baking soda.  Mix ½ teaspoon per quart of water and add a few drops of liquid soap.  I use baking soda spray as a first defense any time I see something that looks like a fungus on any plant in my yard.  More often than not the problem clears right up.  Funguses can look like red streaks, brown or yellow spots, small brown squares or fuzzy patches.  Use baking soda spray on roses once a week to prevent black spot. 

      Milk has antibacterial properties.  Sprinkle powdered milk in the bottom of the holes when you plant tomatoes or onto the soil around the plants.  Or spray milk on the foliage to prevent bacterial diseases.

      Vinegar has several uses in the garden.  Mix one cup vinegar and 1/3 cup molasses with enough water to make 1 ½ quarts total.   Put the mixture in a plastic milk jug in which you’ve cut a large hole in the side and hang it in your apple tree to attract coddling moths.  Instead of laying eggs that produce larvae that burrow into your apples, the moths will drown in the milk jugs.

      One cup of vinegar in one gallon of water can be used to water acid-loving plants like azaleas, rhododendrons and blueberries.  One tablespoon of molasses in one gallon of water provides a spray-on boost of potassium and sulfur for plants.

      Coffee grounds make a nice-looking mulch and are rich in nitrogen.  Sprinkling coffee grounds on carrot plantings repels root maggots.

      Finely chop ½ cup of garlic, onions or chives.  Blend into one pint of water and strain.  Spray on plants to repel flea beetles, thrips, leaftiers and mites.  Garlic has antifungal properties too.  Puree several garlic cloves with a little water in a blender.  Add to a gallon of water and spray on plants to prevent downy mildew, cucumber rust, tomato blight and other fungal diseases.

      Aphids are tiny green or yellow insects with pear-shaped bodies that suck juices from young leaves, fruit and stems.  Hot pepper spray is an effective control.  Mix ½ cup finely chopped or ground hot peppers with one pint of water.  Strain and spray on plants.  Another option is to dust the undersides of the leaves with flour or baking powder.  Reapply after rain. 

      To keep dogs away from treasured plants, sprinkle the area with cayenne pepper.

      There are many more uses in the yard for kitchen staples.  Do a little internet research or a talk with an organic gardener to find out more.

      The basic premise of organic gardening is that healthy soil will grow healthy plants.  Rather than feeding plants by adding chemical fertilizers to soil, which kills important soil microorganisms and makes the soil nothing more than something to hold the plants up, you need to make the soil itself healthy so the soil can feed the plants.

      Plants that grow in a good healthy organic soil are better able to withstand insect pests, diseases and water shortages.

      There are four things you can do to create healthy soil. 

      The first is to compost.  You can build or buy an elaborate compost bin but that isn’t necessary.  Just pile everything in a back corner of the garden or yard and use a pitchfork to turn the pile occasionally.   Or dig holes in the garden, throw everything in, and fill it back up with soil.  Compost all fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps as well as egg shells.  Also compost yard waste, which means weeds, leaves, grass clippings and plants you pull up from the garden in fall.  Never compost any diseased plant or grass clippings that have been treated with pesticide.  Do not compost meat or bones or manure from any meat eating animal.  Horse, cow, chicken and rabbit manure or okay, but cat and dog droppings are not.

      The second way to create healthy soil is to mulch.  Besides conserving moisture and suppressing weeds, mulch provides a food source for soil microorganisms and earthworms.  The wastes from these soil organisms are better than any fertilizer you can buy.

      Aerating the soil is important for its health.  If you are able, turning the soil over with a spade is the best way to go.  I do this in fall after everything is out of the garden.  I leave the soil in big clumps so the shredded leaves I add later and the winter snows can get deep into the soil.  Before planting in spring I turn the soil again. 

      Using a tiller is fine, but repeated tilling can damage the soil structure and kill a lot of earthworms.  This is why I prefer the gentler method of doing it with a spade.

      The final method used to create healthy soil is to grow cover crops, a.k.a. green manure.  These are crops planted in any space where there is open soil.

      When cover crops are turned into the soil they add crucial organic matter.  Some good cover crops are alfalfa, various clovers, vetch, soybeans, ryegrass, buckwheat, oats and winter rye. 

      Some people plant a cover crop between every row in a vegetable garden to make a green pathway.  I keep a large bag of vetch seeds on hand all year and whenever a crop is harvested I plant the vetch in the space.  The cover crop should be tilled into the soil before it goes to seed. 

      By mid-July in my garden, every inch of soil is covered, either with growing plants, mulch or a cover crop.  The objective is to have no bare soil.  If an area is not being used to grow plants, you should be improving that area with mulch or a cover crop.

      Many people are unsure exactly what is meant by organic gardening. 

      Although it wasn’t labeled as such, organic gardening was practiced way back when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth Rock.  Remember the story of the Indians teaching the Pilgrims to bury dead fish between the corn rows to help the corn grow better? 

      Organic gardening and farming was a way of life until the early 1900s when artificial fertilizers and synthetic pesticides were first produced.  Following World War II, much of the technology developed for use in the war was brought home and applied to farming methods.  After the war, chemical farming became the predominant method used in North America and Europe.

      However, a few people began to realize that when a chemical short-cut is used to achieve a gardening goal, you get a short-term solution carrying with it a bunch of negative side effects.  When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962 many more people became aware of the horrible things they were doing to the earth and to themselves by using chemicals on their farms and in their gardens.  Yet forty years later, people are still dissolving boxes of blue chemicals in water and sprinkling poison on their gardens.

      People seem to know more about what organic gardeners don’t do than what they do do.  Organic gardeners don’t use chemical pesticides or fertilizers.  They do try to emulate what Mother Nature does in the natural ecosystem of a meadow or forest.  They realize that nature’s cycle of growth, death and decay is continuous.  As plants and animals die, earthworms, insects and microscopic soil creatures consume them and nutrients are released to feed the next generation of plants.  This is called composting.

      Organic gardeners keep an eye on their gardens so that if a pest or disease problem develops it can be taken care of before it becomes severe.  They also realize that all the bugs they see in the garden are not their enemies.  There are many good bugs that eat bad bugs.  Organic gardeners learn to grow plants to attract the good bugs.

      If you are not yet an organic gardener but would like to be one, it may seem like a lot of work and learning is ahead.  But it really is quite easy and you don’t have to do it all at once.

      First, take your bags, bottles and cans of synthetic yard and garden chemicals to the Hazardous Waste collection site in your county.  Then, rake up this year’s leaves, shred them with your mower, and spread them on your garden beds.  If they haven’t decomposed entirely by spring, dig them into the beds.

      You don’t have to mix up your own potions to be an organic gardener, and don’t even have to make your own compost, although all that can be fun.  You can buy just as many bottles and bags of organic fixes as you used to buy synthetic ones from Gardens Alive (www.gardensalive.com). 

      Organic Gardening (www.organicgardening.com) is an easy-to-read and educational magazine to which you can subscribe to learn more.