Hands on Experiment In Right Brain Gardening

Alas, the summer is winding down. Even though the heat and humidity this week is going to be as high as it's been all summer, the halmarks of autumn are everywhere. The goldenrod and ironweed, which were just starting to show a few weeks ago, are in full flower. Grasses are turning to golden straw and some nights it's actually pretty cold.

This year I'm almost in sync with the seasons and planting cover crops at the appropriate time. One of the garden beds that has been nutured along this way for almost two full years has totally transformed. It was a patch of lawn in relatively packed silt/clay soil but now it's friable soil. The surface layer is crumbly and structured. It is also teeming with insects and worms.

I prepped it for fall/winter cover crops yesterday, mostly with just my hands and with a japanese sickle tool. It's not very big--maybe 15x15 feet--but it still took a relatively long time and was good, hard work. A task like that, which is repetetive and pretty boring, puts you into a sort of meditative state where you can observe without forming an abstract-language-based thought about what you are seeing. Rather than "think", that is mentally talk to yourself, about what you're experiencing, it just sort of soaks in. Also, you get more of an emotional reaction to what you're experiencing; upsetting the insects' world, for example, which you can easily ignore if you're rushing or using a mechanical tool like a rototiller, is maybe a little more poigniant when you're eye to eyes with them.

One thing I noticed, which is actually fairly subtle, is the sphere of influence of this bed actually expanded into the rest of the yard, rather than the other way around, which is the more usual thing. That is, the "garden" started to invade the "yard" rather than weeds invading the garden. The patch of improved soil grew without me really doing anything. Another thing that was less subtle is that the cover crop grasses, like sudangrass, seem to be the best at transforming an area. When they get 3 or 4 feet tall they really stifle the weed competition.