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FrontRangeLiving.com -> Garden -> BJMiller
 EARTHLY
DELIGHTS: RECYCLE TO REPLENISH
By Niki Hayden
Bountiful gardens hold a secret that only avid gardeners understand. To
replenish exhausted soil and build stunning gardens, a gardener collects what
others throw away. Dried leaves, grass clippings, vegetable peelings and spoiled
hay are only a few of the pounds of debris coveted. For Barbara Jane Miller, who
scours her neighborhood for potential compost, the list extends to grape seeds
and skins discarded from wine making, coffee grounds, sunflowers, old
Halloween pumpkins and more. All become the rich humus-laden compost that will
feed her gardens throughout the year.
 "The whole neighborhood knows I like
plant cast-offs. People are happy
about having their garden waste recycled," Barbara says. Recycling not only removes
valuable humus from landfills, it cuts down the need for fertilizer and soil
amendments. With gardens the size of Barbara’s 3600-square-foot plot that
translates into a significant savings.
 She gets help along the way. Barbara owns goats, three males
purchased from a
local goat dairy. Fenced at the back of her large property, they peer over a
railing in hopes of some chamomile leaves, a bag of dry leaves, or clumps of
tasty bindweed. These are pack animals trained to carry a load of gear when
backpackers take to the mountains. Bottle-fed as kids, they have bonded to
humans and follow as obediently as trained dogs. Their addition to the garden is
manure, which Barbara composts, rejuvenating her gardens along with yard waste.
Although many gardeners rely on cow manure as a traditional organic addition,
most commercial cow manure adds high concentrations of salt to the soil,
eventually raising such saline levels beyond what plants can accommodate.
Barbara’s goats bypass that problem. As pets, they are fed dried leaves, tree
clippings, green grass and hay as major food staples, not the high amounts of salt fed to dairy and beef cattle to
produce milk and meat. They will never become part of the food chain, so their
feed is what goats normally eat—leaves, tender shoots of shrubs and weeds. In
return, they produce manure that is productive rather than harmful.
 It all goes into the garden in an approach called sheet composting. Some
gardeners refer to it as layering or lasagna gardening. Whatever term is used,
the method is simple. "I weed whack everything close to the ground. Then
plunk cardboard down," Barbara says. "At that point the weeds have a
tough environment. Some, like bindweed, persevere for a year or two. I water
down cardboard so that it contours to the ground and walk on it. The essential thing with
newspaper or cardboard is overlap, otherwise the bindweed will find its way
through. Although it’s a total light barrier, cardboard lets rain through and
becomes edible to the earthworms and fungi. It will disappear over time depending on how
wet it is. Now that I’ve eliminated the majority of the weeds, I can control
weeds with mulch."
Barbara spreads her homemade compost on the soil first and then places large
sections of cardboard wherever she wants to build a new garden. The soil beneath
is enriching the earthworm population. She then spreads layers of mulch on top
the cardboard--usually layers of grass clippings, spent barley (discarded from
commercial beer making) or hay. She’ll leave
this garden over a winter. By spring the cardboard has disintegrated; the soil
is filled with organic matter ready for planting. And the garden is already
mulched.
 There are a few tricks to this method. Barbara never piles on large mounds
fresh grass. Otherwise they would decay into a soppy mess. Instead, she applies
layer after layer allowing each layer to dry completely. "I don’t layer
grass clippings too thickly at once--never more than a inch or so. More than two
inches might be too slimy. When it’s finished, I don’t think it can be too
deep, although some think the slug problem can be worse. I have a few, but not
enough to worry about. I have terrible earwigs, so perhaps that’s where they
were nesting. But the plants that suffer seem to make it through. Eventually,
even if the mulch harbors pests, it makes your plants stronger."
 Mulch does more than keep out weeds. It conserves water so that plants don’t
have the stress of deluge or drought. As it breaks down, mulch provides a high
quality organic additive that replenishes soil. Mimicking nature with carpets of
decaying leaves and grasses in the wild is as close to Eden as our garden plants
can be.
Walking on the broad paths of layered grass clippings underfoot is soft and
spongy, almost like an old-growth forest. Peel away the layer of grass and it
can be as thick as seven to ten inches. Barbara waters by hand or with drip
irrigation so that the entire garden is not sprinkled. This is why the heavy
layer of mulch is more like dry hay than wet grass. The final proof is that the
garden is abundant. Tall sunflowers bend over lettuces. Ruby red amaranth
blossoms dangle among squash, which sprawl near corn, tomatoes and leeks.
Cucumbers, melons, kale, green beans, garlic, eggplant, basil, marigolds,
dahlias, fava beans, pumpkins, kohlrabi, spinach, broccoli, scarlet runner beans
and more than a dozen varieties of peppers shine. Without pesticides or even
chemical fertilizers, Barbara’s garden showcases how both bountiful and frugal
a garden can be. But there is one questionable practice. With all the pesticides
and herbicides her neighbors apply to their lawns, is it safe to gather their
lawn clippings for her garden?
 "I have several families that I will ask if that they had their lawn
sprayed that week, which I will skip. If a week goes by, then I figure the
chemicals have expired. In all the time I’ve done it, nothing has hurt the
plants. I’ve never had stunted growth or seen plants die. When I see people
bagging their grass, I go up and knock on the door. You can trust people after
you’ve talked to them face to face," she says.
Barbara doesn’t bag her own grass clippings, preferring to let them decay
into the lawn. But for those who do bag, taking their bags of grass means they
need not pay the trash company to haul them away. The same is true for autumn
leaves. What adds value to the garden is cost saving to her neighbors. The 383
bags of leaves she received last winter fed the goats but also served as
insulation throughout much of the autumn. They’ll be placed on root crops like
carrots, beets, onions and turnips to prolong their lives underground. By
February, the roots may turn woody, but from September through January, Barbara
heads out to the garden for harvest.
 This year kale will extend the season of greens; she chose ‘Dinosaur Kale’
with giant leaves. By winter, it’s time to order seeds and plan a new garden
for spring. "I do plan in the winter, I always lay out the garden on a
piece of graph paper sixty by sixty squares and I sketch where I think things will look
good," she says, "some crops need to be shaded: sunflowers shade
lettuce, but tomatoes are out in the sun. Last year the raccoons broke the corn
stalks down. This year to keep the raccoons from the corn I did plant the corn
on an island in a sea of pumpkin and winter squash. It succeeded beyond my
wildest dreams. Raccoons hate prickly vines."
Barbara also finds edible uses for some crops that many consider only
ornamental: "I eat the Indian corn. It’s so pretty and can be used as a
decoration. Shell it after Thanksgiving and grind it and make corn meal out of
it. You do need a sturdy grinder."
Her methods, she believes, work in nearly every climate. What changes is the
weather and climate for growing fruits and vegetables. Barbara has gardened in
New Jersey, Oregon and Colorado with her roots in Pennsylvania. As a 1950’s
kid growing up in rural America, everyone gardened. Her first experience was a
strawberry patch her dad prepared for her when she was five years old. She sold
strawberries for 25 cents a quart. That was big money then and rewarding to sell
something that everyone wanted. "I cannot remember a time that I wasn’t
interested in dirt and what comes from dirt," she says. "Having that
strawberry patch was transforming. Kids don’t have that opportunity
anymore," she laments. Many have lost an understanding of where food comes
from and what makes up nutritious food. In the childhood she recalls,
"everybody hunted, fished, everybody was intimate with the earth," she
says. In our overstressed world, it’s an experience that many gardeners
continue to savor today.
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