Organic gardening can be a contribution to the quality of the environment. If you are a vegetable gardener, it is also a contribution to the quality and safety of your edibles. Suburban gardeners, pick up your garden hoses! Oh yes, and learn to pinch together your thumb and index fingers. Here we go - a lesson on organic gardening.

Organic gardening involves the gardener's approach to soil preparation, fertilizing, pest management, and weed removal. As you might imagine, the organic gardener will practice the most environmentally safe methods.

Once you have selected your vegetable garden plot location, whether your soil is clay or sand (or anything in between), you will want to supplement the native soil with an organic compost soil amendment containing mychorrizae and fortified with nitrogen and iron. Roto-till or use the good old-fashioned shovel to mix in these amendments and level out the soil.

Of course, many gardeners like to maintain a compost pile. Composting, done properly, is an excellent product to enhance the soil and thereby improve the plant heath. Other gardeners like to use manure as a portion of this soil amending process. If that is your choice, make sure that you do this a month or so ahead of planting the garden, and water thoroughly. Manures add a considerable amount of salt and high nitrogen to the mix, too much for new young seedlings or plants.

Fertilizing can sometimes seem complicated. The three most important nutrients for healthy plants are N-P-K or nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Nitrogen is necessary for healthy, green plant foliage growth. Phosphorus is needed for the plant's root, flower, and eventual fruit (veggie) growth. Potassium is necessary for overall healthy plants through good root growth and fruit production.

All of these nutrients are in your soil naturally. Depending upon your soil type, they may be in balance or they may not. You could have your soil tested for nitrogen, phosphoros, potassium (NPK) and other minerals to determine whether you have any deficiencies at all.

If you are a compost gardener, this process adds all of the nutrients that your soil and plants need. If you do not compost, then you may want to consider other organic products that will enhance the quality of your soil.

Organic sources of nitrogen (N) are derived from fish meal, cottonseed meal, alfalfa meal, fish bone meal, and feather meal. Organic phosphorus (P) comes from fish bone meal, cottonseed meal, alfalfa meal, and soft rock phosphate. And finally, organic potassium (K) comes from kelp meal, cottonseed meal, alfalfa meal and mined potassium sulfate. The nutrients are released quickly as the beneficial soil microbes called mychorrizae digest the product.

You may have a question as to why organic gardening uses the organic fertilizers instead of chemical fertilizers. The reason is simple. Organic fertilizers are more stable in the soil and become available to the plant more gradually. While they are feeding the plants, they are also improving the soil health. The plants grow a bit more slowly, but that gives them more strength and resistance to disease and pests.

Chemical fertilizers (vs. organic) are designed to make the N-P-K (and minerals such as iron, magnesium, sulfur, etc.) available “now” to a plant, and this is like putting a plant “on steroids.” Also, the plant can't use up all that is applied and unfortunately, through your watering process and/or rain, those nutrients will be washed away (possibly into the metropolitan water system). Alternatively, the organic products are designed to slowly decompose to enhance the soil and also be consumed by the mychorrizae, and then taken up by the plant root system.

You will discover that all of the products contain varying N-P-K ratios. Ask one of our staff for assistance in determining which will be the best for your individual garden.

Are there unwanted visitors in your garden? Time to apply good IPM (Integrated Pest Management) practices, using organic fertilizers and resistance to applying herbicides (for weed killing). Integrated Pest Management, or IPM, is the approach to pest control that requires regular monitoring of your garden to determine if and when treatments are needed. And it employs physical, mechanical, cultural, and biological methods to keep pest numbers low enough to meet your toleration or annoyance levels.

Classic organic gardening pest management employs simple, completely non-toxic techniques such as hand-picking the tomato horn worm, hand removal of leaves harboring the leafminers, squishing snails or water-blasting off aphids or cabbage moths from your plants.

Now you understand the need for your garden hose and pinching fingers!

The next level up is to use the least toxic controls such as insecticidal soaps, spray oils, and other natural products (pyrethrums from chrysanthemums, for example) to combat annoying insects, powdery mildew and rust. This category of products satisfies another large group of gardeners - those willing to spend time evaluating their plants and treating (and retreating) upon need. This level is also still safe to apply to edibles.

And the highest level is for those gardeners completely intolerant of garden pests. However, that level is also toxic for edibles and should not be considered for a vegetable garden.

Now, what about the weeds? Avoid herbicides in vegetable gardens. Some gardeners like to use a cover crop such as clover in between their rows of vegetables. This works great. Or, you can cover your hands with a great pair of gloves and pull out the weeds (it's good exercise, too)! And then, to keep the weeds down, MULCH, MULCH, MULCH.

Organic vegetable gardening is especially rewarding. Your vegetables will be so fresh, so delicious, so much the ultimate of vegetable goodness, that you will become spoiled and never want to buy from a grocery produce department again. Every time you step into your garden to harvest tomatoes, beans, broccoli, potatoes, lettuce, or whatever you have grown, a smile will rise to your lips. Be proud of yourself. You should be!

Spring is around the corner. The cool season grasses such as fescue, ryegrass, and bluegrass are those lawns over which people have exclaimed, "You look marvelous!" (Can't you just hear Billy Crystal?) They have been bright green all winter. They are still growing fast; mow them weekly with a rotary mower (to 1 1/2 inches in height).

You should be feeding all established lawns now with a complete lawn fertilizer - containing phosphorus and potassium as well as nitrogen - to get warm-season grasses off to a good start and keep cool-season grasses going longer. A healthy, well-fed lawn is better able to withstand pests and diseases and choke out weeds

Warm-season grasses, such as Bermuda, dichondra, and zoysia, are waking up from winter dormancy. As they start growing, begin mowing weekly with a reel mower to the correct height for each. Mow common Bermuda to 1 inch, hybrid Bermuda to 1/2 or 1/4 inch, St. Augustine to between 3/4 and 1 1/4 inches, and zoysia to 3/4 to 1 inch height. Cut adalayd grass with a rotary mower between 3/4 and 1 inch in height.

We have mentioned two different kinds of lawn mowers: rotary and reel. A rotary mower is one in which one blade spins horizontally and uses a sucking and tearing action to cut the blades of grass. A reel mower is one in which the blades spin vertically and use a scissoring action to cut the blades of grass.

You notice that we recommend fertilizing with a complete fertilizer (we recommend Scotts Lawn Pro for most lawns). While nitrogen gives your lawn top growth and a healthy green color you can see, phosphorus and potassium feed the roots and growth systems of the plant that are unseen but just as important. Phosphorus and potassium are longer lasting in soil than nitrogen, so one feeding a season with them is often adequate. After this complete feeding, you can switch to a less expensive, pure nitrogen fertilizer if desired, and feed warm-season grasses with it once a month for the rest of the growing season.

Before applying your complete fertilizer, be sure to read the instructions for your lawn type. Apply fertilizer when the ground is damp and grass blades dry, and follow up by watering deeply. Otherwise, you risk burning your lawn. As an alternative fertilizer for the cool season lawn, add coated slow-release fertilizer. Cool-season grasses need little or no fertilizer during the warmer months of the year. Slow release fertilizer will work perfectly for this type of lawn.

We have not had much rain yet this winter. Normally, you might have lessened your lawn and garden watering, but perhaps not as much this year. Irrigate all lawns now, according to their individual needs, if the rains have not been adequate.

Both warm- and cool-season grasses may be bought as sod, and cool-season grasses can be planted from sod any month year-round. Although you can plant both warm- and cool-season grasses from seed this month, fall is actually a better time to plant cool-season grass seed. This is because fall planting gives cool-season grasses planted from seed more time to establish a root system before summer heat arrives. When planting warm-season grasses, wait until the weather has warmed up in your area. (If you plan to plant zoysia, it's best to wait until June.)

There are numerous lawn types and you should investigate each of them before choosing and planting one. How do you choose which grass is right for you? There are many considerations: sun, shade, foot traffic, pets, children, hardiness, style, color, and simply the 'look' that you like.

When planting a new lawn, regardless of the type of grass and method of planting you choose, be sure to prepare the site thoroughly. If you're planting an invasive grass, such as Bermuda or an invasive variety of zoysia, first install edging to keep it from creeping into borders.

For all lawns, roto-till deeply, add plenty of soil amendment, then level and roll this amended ground. "Level" might mean rolling the area completely flat or it may mean compacting the soil but adding mounded areas of interest. The point is to level out soil so that your new lawn is not filled with hundreds of hills and valleys that would make walking on it (and mowing it) difficult.

If you have chosen to put in a seed lawn, sprinkle seeds evenly. This is most efficiently done using a hand-held fertilizer spreader or a seed spreader and covering the seeds with mulch or a lawn topper product.

Perhaps you are putting in a lawn that can be grown from stolons. Solons are little portions of the plant that will root once in contact with the soil. St. Augustine is an example of this type of grass. Either roll stolons with a roller to press them into the soil or simply partially cover them with topsoil or a lawn topper product (Kellogg Topper is excellent). Keep your freshly planted lawn damp until established. Sprinkle it two or three times daily, and avoid watering late in the day.

Just water and watch. In a few months - voilà - your new lawn!

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