Organic Gardening Class Notes
Organic Gardening is a method of growing plants without using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
Organic management involves crop rotations, green manures, composts and other slow release nutrient
amendments. Organic gardening emphasizes soil health, control of insects, diseases and weeds, good plant
selection, and good growing practices. Organic gardening methods are similar to methods used prior to WWII.
Starting a Garden Plot
1. Select a garden plot that receives at least 6 hours of sunlight each day.
2. Choose a plot close to the house.
3. Have a water source, faucets, soaker hoses, sprinkler, drip irrigation or watering can.
4. Do you need to fence it in to keep animals out?
Garden Plan
1. Make a list of plants you want to grow.
2. Research your plant list, search out disease resistant varieties, how long to germinate, direct seed or
transplants
3. Make a rough draft of your garden, have paths for walking, choose beds, rows, raised beds
4. Make a realistic plant selection and use succession planting
5. Get a calendar, your final list of plants, and your plot diagram and put it all together. Use wood chips or
cardboard on the paths to keep weeds down, do you need row covers or stakes to support plants
6. Keep a garden journal, jot down notes, about first harvest, successful pest control, take photos. This
record will help you be more successful.
Test Soil
1. Soil test, soil test, soil test, use your agricultural extension office or a soil test kit.
2. Test your soil’s pH level, pH is the measure of acidity of soil. Check pH level with inexpensive kit, or pH
meter or litmus test (red=acidic, blue=alkaline), the ideal pH is slightly acidic 6.5
 Less than 7 is acidic, if too acidic add lime to planting hole when you transplant.
 More than 7 is alkaline, add compost, urea, decayed vegetable material, compost or stable manure
and wood ash.
Soil types
The ideal soil has 45% minerals, 5% organic material, 35% water, 25% air.
Clay soil Steve Solomon says that his remedy for clay soil is just to import more soil on top and consider the
clay the subsoil.
Soil Amendments
Consider what you plan to grow Tomatoes like calcium, magnesium and phosphorous, but NOT nitrogen and
NOT acidic soil
 Cow Manure is great, but must be aged/composted
Black Cow brand used to be sold at Home Depot; great product
MooNure – read the label; it is less manure and more tree/dirt filler; not great!
 Chicken Manure – very high in phosphorus
 Fish Emulsion – very high in nitrogen
 Kelp/Seaweed – great for seed germination, soil conditioning
 Lime – check the ph-level of your soil. If too acidic, add lime to the planting hole when you transplant
 Bone Meal – good for tomatoes
Fertilizing
Start of season
 Rock powder (soft rock phosphate)
 Potassium (green sand) – breaks up clay soil
 Nitrogen – use fish emulsion and kelp
Every four (4) weeks
 Foliar Spray plants for quick absorption
 What is a Foliar Spray? Fertilizer or Pesticide is dissolved, then diluted further, in water, and
directly applied with a hand sprayer. A large version is what your pest-control service uses; a
smaller version is what we all use to mist our plants.
 Always include liquid kelp!
Disease Control
Why some folks choose hybrids; they are more disease resistant
Hybrids, NOT genetically-altered plants
Don’t overcrowd your plants; air needs to circulate around stems and leaves
Products for blight and mildew
Actinovate – www.johnnyseeds.com - blight and mildew
Does not reverse, but it does halt the spread
Always reapply after a heavy rain
Fungal Controls
1. Baking soda: Mix 1 oz of baking soda with 1 gallon of water, spray foliage and soil in morning to retard
fungus, it will make the soil more alkaline.
2. White vinegar: Mix 1 oz of white vinegar with 1 gallon of water and spray the foliage and soil each
morning. This will make the soil more acidic.
Pest Control
 Keep your eyes open! Inspect plants before bringing into the garden
 Monitor and identify pests then “Dispatch” quickly before they get out of control!
 Start at the bottom of the toxicity scale, use the appropriate control
 Dilute, dilute, dilute – no matter what product you decide to use, start with a very weak dilution,
then build up to full strength (if needed) until the pests are gone!
 Do not spray on a hot day; do not spray in direct sunlight; best to spray in the morning.
 Hot/Sunlight – plants can be “burned”
 Evening – wet plants are prone to mold/mildew/rot
 Aphids – usually the earliest offenders
o Spray with water or a fatty-acid soap product
 Worms – Horned Tomato worms and other leaf-eating worms/caterpillars
o Dipel Dust – natural bacteria
 Row Covers
o Work great! Keep out just about everything!
o Pull the covers back in the morning, to let the bees/butterflies help with pollination.
 Trap Cropping
o Find out what the pest “likes” and grow that away from the garden.
o Trap and dispatch as needed.
Toxicity Scale
 Hand pick






Encourage beneficial insects such as lady beetles and lacewings and parasitic wasps and birds and
toads by placing a dish of water in the garden with pebbles in it so they can get a drink.
Use plant deterrents such as marigolds
Plant traps, plant sacrificial plants before you plant your main crop to lure pests away. Once pests
infest the crop, remove it and destroy the pests and the plants.
Physical traps, beer attracts slugs, potatoes impaled on sticks and buried 3 inches in ground will collect
wireworms. Do not use pheromone traps as they attract more bugs to your garden.
Barriers, use floating row covers, collars for cutworms, wrap pantyhose around stems of squash to
protect from vine borers, DE can protect from a lot of pests-don’t use on a windy day.
Organic Pesticides-kill the bad encourage the good
a. Insecticidal soaps, recipe from Organic Gardening magazine-dd garlic and cayenne pepper to
create an all purpose spray. Chop and grind or liquefy 1 tsp powdered cayenne pepper, mix
with a quart of water, steep 1 hour, strain and add 1 tsp of liquid dish detergent, mix well, keep
for 1 week in refrigerator.
b. Horticultural oils
c. Neem and neem oils
d. Pyrethrim
e. Rotenone
Plants loved by beneficial insects
Marigolds, asters, fleabane, alyssum, coriander, daisies, yarrow, catmint,yansy, batchelor buttons, white
cosmos, sunflowers, bee balm, butterfly weed, coreopsis, mountain mint, dill, Queen Anne’s lace.
Cover crops loved by beneficial insects, buckwheat, oats, kale and clover.
Trellises, Cages and Stakes
If you only have tomatoes, cages work
Make your own with “concrete re-enforcing cloth.”
6”x6” openings in fence-like steel material; 5-foot wide
Always rusted; wear gloves
Japanese tomato ring: A 6-foot length, tied in a circle (zip ties, baling wire, etc), provides a 2-foot diameter
circle, which is perfect for one tomato plant.
Use a T-bar fence post and zip tie the cage (home made or purchased) to the post for wind stability.
If you have mixed plants, use trellises
Make your own with T-bar fence posts and electrical conduit connecting the posts
Gently tie your plants with muslin/cotton or cheesecloth strips; or
Use twine and graduate up the posts as the plants grow, capturing them gently between the successive levels
of twine.
With tomatoes and cucumbers, place the tomato plants on either side of the trellis and plant the cucumber
between them, at the base of the trellis. The cucumber will grow up the trellis between the tomato plants.
Individual plant stakes, These work, but only one plant at a time
Gently tie your plant with muslin/cotton or cheesecloth strips
IMPORTANT – Clean your trellis, cage and/or stakes after each season with a bleach-and-water mixture.
Bacteria and disease can survive from one growing season to the next!!
Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes and more Tomatoes
Caring for your plants
As you transplant them, plant them deeper than their current soil line; they will grow additional roots along
the buried stem.
When you transplant them to your garden
Add a couple tablespoons of powdered lime to the planting hole
Add a couple tablespoons of Azomite® volcanic rock powder to the planting hole
Dip the root ball in liquid kelp (1-tbsp per gallon of water) with a trace of fish emulsion
Mulch around their base to prevent “soil splash” onto lower leaves
Trim the lower limbs and leaves at least 12-inches above the ground, to prevent “soil splash” AND to promote
good air circulation.
Blossom-end rot Too much or too little water, or weather too hot Usually temporary; fruit will be okay
Pollination
Most tomatoes are self-pollinators, No need to distance your varieties, Less than 5% chance of crosspollination
Variety Successes or Failures
The air is too humid and too hot for the flowers to self-pollenate well
Heart-shaped (German Red Strawberry) – these are generally seedless. Great for people with diverticulitis, or
trouble digesting seeds
Leaf type
Potato-leaf – hardier than their regular-leaf counterparts
More fruit production
Wispy-Wilty leaf – heart-shaped varieties. Look like they are dying, but they are not; fruit is great
Helpful Links
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds – www.rareseeds.com
Seeds – vegetable, herb, flower, etc.
Books and tools
Informative catalog (downloadable pdf)
o Johnny’s Selected Seeds – www.johnnyseeds.com
Actinovate – blight/mildew treatment
Prices geared toward larger farms
Work together to take advantage of better pricing
Peaceful Valley Organics – www.groworganic.com
Seeds, Tools, etc – for organic gardening!
Seed starting tools
o A&L Labs – www.alllabs.com
o Azomite® - www.azomite.com
Compost
“Compost happens naturally, so it is easy to make the most of it,” M. Duren says. “By piling brush, grass
clippings, food waste, leaf debris and garden soil, you can make your own free compost.”
The ideal soil has 45% minerals, 5% organic material, 25% water, 25% air. Compost holds 5X its weight in
water.
1. Start with some dry brown organic matter. We’re talking about dead leaves, dead dry grass, straw,
shredded newspaper, plant stuff that was once alive but is now dead and dry. You want it to be fairly
fine but not too fine.
2. Next, get a supply of green organic matter. This is the plant stuff that was recently alive and is still
holding its color and moisture. Up to 80% of all the nutrients in plants is in the leaves. So green leaves,
vegetable scraps, fresh yard trimmings, alfalfa hay, even manures from vegetarian animals make great
green materials. The green is synonymous with “high nitrogen”. It provides the growth component for
the bacteria and fungi. It should be fairly fine but not too fine.
3. The next thing you need is water (slide #6). Everything in the pile must be moist—not wet but moist
like a wrung out sponge.
4. Fourth, we need air. It kind of sounds like compost is just like us doesn’t it? We need food, water and
air to be happy and so do the microorganisms.
5. A fifth component is volume. Although not an additive per se, it is essential to have volume to make a
batch that will heat up enough to speed the process along. Trying to compost in a five gallon bucket
will prove very slow. It will work, but not in 3 months. By the way, the heat produced by the compost
pile has nothing to do with the outside air temperature or direct sunshine, or shade. It is the
microorganisms reproducing that generates the heat.
6. Did you notice that there is no dirt in the recipe? No dirt is needed to make compost.
7. Additional things to avoid are animal related materials. No meat, cheese, milk, fats, oils and no
processed foods. The only exceptions to the animal rule are hair and feathers; they’re OK.
THE RATIO
Collect your greens and browns in a ratio of about 2-3 parts brown to one part green by volume.
For instance, Duren notes that one application of Milky Spore, a bacterial product used to treat Japanese
beetle grubs, can be effective in the soil for up to 30 years.
Determine Soil Texture
Grab a quart sized mason jar and fill it halfway with your soil. Add a teaspoon of dish washing liquid and then
top it off with water. Shake the jar vigorously for two minutes, then set in an area where it will not be
disturbed for two days.
After two days, the soil particles will have separated into layers. From top to bottom, the layers will be:
Organic matter suspended on top
Water
Clay
Silt
Sand
At this point, you will want to roughly determine the percentage of the sand, silt, clay, organic matter. My
photo is hard to see, but it is roughly: 5% organic matter, 15% clay, 80% silt, and no sand. I type the values into
the calculator listed below and the calculator tells you what texture soil you have.
http://www.tulsamastergardeners.org/blackbox/soil_clas_calc.htm
Using Alfalfa Meal as fertilizer
Recently a gardening store offered me alfalfa meal pellets (goat food) in lieu of seedmeals in Steve Solomon's
complete organic fertilizer recipe. In addition to this post on using coffee grounds, he had this to say about the
alfalfa:
Alfalfa meal is about 3.5% N; seedmeal runs 6-7%N. Strange it may seem, but when you cut the NO3 in half,
you must more than double the amount to have the same growth response. Using alfalfa meal I would alter
the recipe to (and this is but a guess):
12-16 parts alfalfa meal
1/2 part lime
1/2 part dolomite, etc
And then spread 12-20 quarts per 100 sq. ft.
If you live in a warm climate it will work.
Using coffee grounds as fertilizer?
I managed to find Steve Solomon's e-mail address to ask him how he felt about using coffee grounds as a
substitute for the seedmeals in his recipes. Here's his reply:
Those who try to use coffee grounds as fertilizer usually are disappointed. Success depends on how hot your
soil gets; it you're in a hot place in a hot summer it'll decompose fast enough to make plants grow fast-fertilizer. In cooler climates like Cascadia, no way. If you do use coffee, use 4-8 times as much seedmeal and
spread four to eight times as much: like 16-20 measures coffeegrounds, 1/2 part lime, etc . . . . and then
spread it 16-20 quarts per 100 sq. feet. Even so, you might not be pleased. But in compost heaps or just raked
into the surface to decompose, coffee is marvelous.
Human Urine as a Fertilizer?
Researchers in Finland are reporting successful use of an unlikely fertilizer for farm fields that is inexpensive,
abundantly available, and undeniably organic -- human urine. "Our results show that human urine could be
used as a fertilizer for cabbage and does not pose any significant hygienic threats or leave any distinctive
flavor in food products," the report concludes.
Importance of N-P-K: Macronutrients
Nitrogen (N): Green growth, sources blood meal, bird or bat guano, fish meal
Phosphorus (P): Root growth and fruit/flower production, sources bone meal, rock phosphates
Potassium (K): Overall plant health, sources green sand, wood ash, kelp meal
Calcium (Ca): Cell wall development and growth, crushed egg shells
Love Apple Farm Bed Amending Recipe
For a 50 square foot bed:
2 barrows homemade compost or 5 bags Sunland One Earth
Organic Compost
5 quarts Sustane 4-6-4
1 cup Humic Acid
1 quart pure Worm Castings
Links:
Make a pocket guide to carry in your gardening bag to ID natural enemies to harmful pests so you can increase
their population. Laminate it to protect it from moisture. Pocket Guide to Natural Enemies (Insects)
http://www.ipmnet.org/Pocket_Guide_of_Natural_Enemies.pdf
Plant Disease Database: http://plant-disease.ippc.orst.edu/
How to test your soil Urban gardening gardengirl http://blip.tv/file/3076891
How to make compost tea http://blip.tv/file/3073493
Three Simple Things to Start Growing Vegetables Organically. The three things are: grow vegetables in
narrow beds and never step on your beds -- ever; maintain a mulch of chopped leaves; and rotate your crops.