Katie 5/6/16 “God’s Got You Covered”

By Katie

Mankind loves revolution. As a race, we have worked hard to progress to our current level of luxury, education, and convenience. One of our earliest achievements was the agricultural revolution, thousands of years ago. We had an industrial revolution in the 1700’s, and in our own era, a mind blowing technological revolution. These big steps have greatly benefitted us, but I’d like to bring up the elephant in the room.

Sometimes progress is too much progress.

There are free public schools, but high dropout rates and a loss of practical skills, not to mention the toll standardized testing has taken on the upcoming generations’ ability to think freely.

There is access to produce in the stores year round, with season barely affecting crop availability. On the same hand, those crops are often genetically modified or covered in toxic pesticides and herbicides, grown in depleted soil, leaving a low nutrient product at which even your dog turns up his nose. Consumerism demands thousands of products and we get them all for the cheap price of being in a few million lifetimes of debt to China. Oh, and the amount of waste is so extreme we ship it to other countries.

However, do not despair! We are the ones riding the wave of the new revolution. The revolution of reconnecting to God, reconnecting to nature, and reconnecting to our higher, spiritual selves. In general, it’s a spiritual revolution. People are waking up to see the damages caused by leaning on man’s understanding instead of acknowledging God’s power. I am excited to be here with you to share in this new era, laying the foundation of a better world for our children.

I write to you today about what seems to be the newest craze in gardening, but is in fact ancient and eternal. Many affectionately call it “Back to Eden” gardening. The idea behind it is when you rely on the Lord, He is able to answer you in his perfect creation. People realized the madness of tilling their fragile soil, putting expensive chemical fertilizers into it, and receiving ever decreasing yields of produce despite the myriad of “miracle” products used. Slowly, farmers have turned to God, asking why they are failing. He answered. He always does.

In nature, we have a powerful example of redemption and abundance from lack. No matter the climate, something can grow there. God’s design works despite challenges, whereas man’s design fails without challenges. What’s the difference, you ask? Go walk where man hasn’t polluted, such as a forest or prairie. What do you see? I’ll tell you what you don’t see, and that is uncovered dirt. God covers the soil with plants and fallen organic matter. Man is faithless and only believes there is dirt to be had if he can see it!

In the Back to Eden method, gardeners understand the need of this covering. In the fall, God covers the earth with leaves and twigs and needles. The winter rain and snow aid in breaking this organic matter down, and when spring comes, gorgeous, rich soil has been made under that mulch covering. No wonder spring blossoms so incredibly! The trees and flowers truly spring up with growth!

If you imitate this covering, you will see how quickly worms and fungi move in, turning everything beneath into useable soil. You can use anything to cover your soil that you have on hand, such as grass clippings, leaves, straw, manure, or woodchips. The traditional Back to Eden garden features woodchips, which are comprised of green matter from branches, leaves, and needles. They tend to be more absorbent, don’t break down as rapidly, are unaffected by wind, and work wonders for cleaning up wet spots.

I will briefly describe how to create a covering and then go into the benefits.

First, mow any grass or other plants in your desired garden space. Lay down a couple layers of newspaper or cardboard over the space. Avoid cardboard with any sort of laminate, gloss images, or lots of ink.

Now that you’ve created a barrier to kill the grass and such beneath, apply any organic matter you have. Make a layer of some lovely compost if you have it. Take a note from the Creator when you do this and always layer, never mix or till. God doesn’t mix or till in the forest. He layers and it is perfect. We have been taught incorrectly, and this is us trying to rewire.

As your final layer, put 4-6 inches of woodchips on top of your compost, manure, etc. When it rains, this will make compost tea for you. Free and abundant. You don’t have to break the bank buying compost tea. All of God’s gifts are free, and the garden is no exception.

That’s all well and good, you think, but what’s the big deal? I’ll tell you! The soil is a living organism and must be covered, the same way we are covered with skin. Now that it’s protected, it can flourish.

Here is the good part.

Year after year, this organic covering will break down and build better and better soil. It will balance out chemically, eventually reaching a neutral 7.0 pH. Both alkaline and acid loving plants flourish in neutral soil. Because the soil is covered, it doesn’t dry out. You get to remove irrigation and sprinklers and drip lines and all the other desperate contraptions you employ to keep your plants hydrated. The covering keeps it moist down there, even in the midst of summer. It also doesn’t suffocate roots or trunks. In extreme temperatures, it is insulation against both cold and heat. Hello, winter crops!

The covering supplies nutrients to the soil, giving you high levels of things like potassium, phosphorus, nitrogen, iron, and such. Your food gets tastier and plants healthier, especially if you save seeds and start to breed a superior strain. Another great relief is that crop rotation is no longer necessary. The soil is never depleted now that it’s properly nourished. You can plant again and again with the same results.

Another amazing benefit is freedom from pests. The plants are so full of water that insects drown when they nibble. They need cellulose, not water. Pest control becomes very minimal over time as everything improves together.

Say goodbye to backbreaking weeding, too! New weeds are easy to pull out of the woodchips, since they’re so light and full of air. Some gardeners take a rake and brush them out. It’s a cinch! I just told you that your biggest problems are erased. How do you feel?

Whether you are a seasoned green thumb or a hopeless, self-dubbed “black thumb”, anyone can have bountiful produce when this return to God’s method is employed. I hope you are inspired to pursue this. God’s yoke is easy and his burden is light. So can yours be, if you use His creation to your advantage and cast off your burdens.

Before I let you go, I’d like to briefly share my own experience with this method. I live in a suburban neighborhood and have a small backyard. I wanted a garden, but wasn’t sure how to achieve it since the yard is all grass and I wasn’t in a place to buy dirt. My mom discovered the Back to Eden method online and shared the YouTube videos with me. It was truly an answer to prayer. I got a few free loads of woodchips from a local tree service and started my covering! (Note that tree services often have to drive a distance to the dump and offload their chips. You are doing them a favor by asking for the chips!)

All winter my woodchips sat, percolating. I finally couldn’t resist and had to check out beneath the chips to see if it had worked. Immediately beneath were gorgeous, moist chips and white threads of healthy fungi. A little deeper were worms, creating precious vermicompost. Even now, no weeds have peeked out of my chips, except for a few that blow in on top. My vegetables are happily growing, and I am so excited to reap a plentiful harvest!

What are you still doing here? Go watch these videos and call up your local tree service! You have an amazing journey ahead of you!

Live well,

Katie

Chip delivery websites: abouttrees.com and www.chipdrop.in

(This blog post to be featured in a magazine soon! I will link it up as soon as I can!)

Katie 1/29/16 "Waiting for Spring"

Happy Friday, my beautiful people! How’s it hanging?

Man, is it just me, or are you also bursting with impatience for the spring? Ever since I went to college and had to walk back and forth to class in snow and ice and piercing sharp winds, I haven’t been fond of winter. That’s an understatement. I hate winter.

Sunshine and daffodils and crocuses cannot come soon enough for this girl! I’ve been consumed with gardening lately. I’m eagerly awaiting my seed orders to arrive, and then I’ll probably start plotting where I’m planting everything in the garden. I know the tomatoes are going in the hottest, sunniest spot and that the potatoes are going in the dampest spot, but the rest is still to be planned.

For today’s post, I’ll share some gardening tips and talk about heirloom seeds. I’ve been learning so much! I’m hoping you’ll learn something new, too.

If you need to order seeds and bulbs, check out Sand Hill Preservation and Fedco. Sand Hill is a smaller, more hobby style farm. They are committed to preserving heirloom seeds in order to combat the rise of GMO’s and loss of pure, fertile seed. Fedco also has a good selection of heirloom and open pollinated seeds. Just avoid their hybrids and you’ll be good! Look around locally for places that sell heirloom and OP seeds. The benefit of shopping local is that they often know what plants grow best in your area, and can help you find native plants.

I really admire farmers who pledge to save the pure genes of fruits and veggies grown hundreds of years ago. Genetically modified plants and hybrid plants do not produce seed after their own kind (and GMO seeds aren’t even fertile), so it is of the utmost importance that we do not use them. If you do, you have to rely on the company who makes them every year to grow your plants, instead of harvesting your own seeds and growing stronger and hardier plants each year from this natural selection.

When you harvest seed from your best plants and plant it next year, you’ve just done yourself a favor. If you always choose the healthiest, best tasting, best producing plant to save, you will be breeding a plant that is better suited to the climate you’re in, as well as always having a better plant each year. People used to give their best and firstborn back to God, and so must we do to the earth in order to reap our best harvest year after year. Incredibly simple to do, and makes perfect sense, yet how many of us do that? Let’s start now!

I was wondering the other day about the difference between heirloom and open pollinated seeds. If anyone has any input, I’d love to hear it. The gist of it is that heirloom are antique varieties, often passed down in a family. It’s pretty cool to eat a watermelon from the 1800’s that’s the same as what your ancestors ate! Family history truly can be delicious.

Open pollinated are plants that will produce seed true to the plant’s traits. No mixed genes, no surprises. They produce seed after their own kind, how God designed them.

When it comes to saving seeds, you have to know a thing or two. Let’s look at the tomato, who is a bit of an anomaly. Is it a veggie? Is it a fruit? Turns out, it’s all sorts of complicated. If you want to save tomato seeds, you have to prevent cross pollination. I found an awesome explanation about why here. I just love learning new things!

Did you know that potatoes are the easiest thing to grow? With all that hilling and crop rotation nonsense, you might be scoffing. The secret is to grow them with a cover of woodchips (the secret to growing anything with ease and amazing results is woodchips). Paul Gautschi, renowned by gardeners around the globe for his inspired woodchip covering, does his potato planting and harvesting in one day! I’ll let you watch a video of how he does it, because some say that seeing is believing. And remember, potatoes love water!

If you’re an eager beaver like me and are anxious to get back to the garden, winter is the perfect time for pruning. Go clean up the suckers on your fruit trees, and make space in your bushes for better producing branches. Note: fruit only grows on the lateral branches of trees, not the vertical. Cut off all the verticals, because they take energy from the tree and block the sun from ripening the fruit below! Again I must refer you to Paul. He prunes beautifully. He is an arborist by trade, after all. Watch some of his pruning videos and go have fun! Personally, I find pruning to be very relaxing and therapeutic. I love seeing how nature corrects itself with such grace when we help it along.

Some other things I’d like to share is about weeds and insects. Do not use poisons. These are awful for the ground, the water we drink, and environment. If you have weeds, you can pour vinegar on them and they dry up. Vinegar isn’t poisonous to the earth. If you’re tenacious, you will eventually clear out the weeds. One of the easiest things to do is put down cardboard and then cover that with 4-6 inches of woodchips. The cardboard will kill the weeds and they’ll begin to compost, and after a few months you’ll have rich soil from all the compost tea the woodchips produce.

As for insects, they won’t harm your healthy plants. They are God’s police force. The weak plants send out a signal that insects pick up on, and subsequently they take the plant out in order to preserve the strength of the plant species. When the bugs eat the weak and dying (the same that predators do to flocks and herds), only the healthy plants can reproduce. We want this! We want to encourage survival of the fittest. If you have unhealthy plants, fertilizers will not fix this. Nutrient dense, living soil will. To preserve that rich soil, you have to put the natural covering back on it. The plants will be full of water and bugs will drown when they bite into it. They want fiber and cellulose, which is easily accessible in dehydrated plants. Woodchips are God’s way of keeping the soil moist and plants happy (the forest will testify of that!).

A natural way to stop insects is using diatomaceous earth on the ground around your plants. It’s harmful to insects due its abrasive nature, but not to the plants. Put it around the stalks and it will help keep bugs away. Just wear a mask when you handle it, because the tiny particles are really rough on our lungs.

I hope this year you have your best garden yet! If you have questions or additional information, please share! I would love to find the answers or learn from you!

Now we just have to wait for spring. I’ll be staring out my sliding glass door, biting my nails down to the quick in anticipation! Please save me from being driven crazy with cabin fever!

Thanks for reading folks, and live well!

Katie