If seedlings are in flats, slice the roots into squares with a knife about a week before transplanting. Repeat the process before removing from flat.

Feed transplants with fish emulsion the day before setting them out. If possible, transplant on a cloudy or drizzly day. Or set out seedlings in the late afternoon or early evening. It’s more comfortable for you, and the plants will thrive without requiring shade or constant watering.

If seedlings are in peat pots, be sure to bury the whole pot. Otherwise, it will draw moisture from the soil to the air.

When setting out pot-bound or root-bound transplants, gently spread out the roots in all directions. That helps them become re-established more quickly.

Give each transplant a boost by adding a shovelful of compost or well-rotted manure mixed with some bonemeal and wood ashes to the bottom of each planting hole. Do this under tomatoes, brassicas, eggplant, cucumbers, squash, and melons.

When you try to water transplants with a watering can, does most of the water run off in another direction? Give each transplant its own drip-watering system. Poke a tiny hole in the bottom of a gallon-sized plastic jug. Fill with water and put next to the newly set tomato plant or in a hill of melons after the seedlings are up.

Why risk the possibility of having to replant? Protect young plants from being nipped by frost or nibbled by animals. Cut the bottom out of gallon-sized plastic milk jugs. Leave the cap off, for ventilation. Place over seedlings. This acts like a mini-greenhouse. You can also do this over seeds of tender crops. One gardener keeps a jug on her zucchini until the leaves push the jug off the ground.

Keep a drum of manure tea brewing for supplemental feeding of transplants or any green thing that needs a quick infusion. Fill a big garbage can about one-eighth full of fresh horse or cow manure, then fill the can with water. Stir occasionally and wait a week or two. This is powerful stuff. Dilute it until it’s the color of weak tea before using. Add water to the can after every use. When the water is the color of weak tea, start again, after adding the spent manure to your compost pile.

Make vegetarian tea the same way, using stinging nettles or comfrey leaves. The latter are rich in potash, so are good for all vegetables.

A lazy gardening friend brews manure tea from his children’s pet rabbit droppings in a five-gallon plastic drum with a cover.

Use a fifty-five gallon metal drum and attach a spigot and valve a few inches from the bottom of the drum. Drill a hole near the top and use an Shook to suspend a container of manure inside. Fill the barrel with water.

Gardeners who use this system tried a laundry bag for the manure at first, but the cloth disintegrated. Now they have cut four rectangular holes out of a plastic bucket and put aluminum screening inside. They fill the bucket with manure and suspend it in the water from the rim of the barrel.

They’ve set the barrel on a three-foot wooden stand located at the top of their garden. They keep a length of hose laid out specifically for manure tea delivery. They can either attach a nozzle to spray or remove it to dribble manure water on transplants or any crop that needs a quick boost.

Tip Top Tomatoes

To reduce moisture loss and encourage a strong root system, prune off all but the top rosette and the large leaves just below it. Bury the rest of the stem. If it is leggy, lay it in a trench. The tomato will put out roots all along the stem. One gardener digs a hole or trench deeper than needed, stuffs shredded newspaper in it to help hold moisture, then covers it with soil and places the transplants as usual.

Ray Lambert takes some time to install self-fertilizing tomatoes. First he digs out an eight-to twelve-inch deep circle four feet in diameter, fills it with manure and compost, and puts a little soil on top. He plants six early (determinate) tomato plants around the circumference of the circle and slips wire cages over them. In the center of the circle, he sets a two-foot high two-foot diameter cylinder of pea wire. He fills it with manure and compost.

In dry weather, he lets a hose trickle into the top of the feeding cylinder. He does virtually nothing else — doesn’t prune, doesn’t weed, doesn’t feed. The cages contain the plants, the plants are close enough together so they shade the soil and no weeds grow, and the center cylinder does the feeding.

He does the same thing with late varieties of tomatoes, but because they need more room, he sets only four plants around one feeding cylinder. In mid-August, he chops off the tops, so all growth goes to ripening tomatoes.

Plant borage among the tomatoes to attract bees for early fruit set.

If you’re a fisherman and sometimes get trash fish such as suckers, don’t throw them back. Pop them into your freezer. Come planting time, think of the Indians at the Plymouth Colony, and drop them into the soil. Try placing one in a hole dug for a tomato plant, for example. Put the fish in first, then three or four inches of soil, then the plant. As an experiment, put a fish under every other tomato plant, so that you can measure the results.

Pampering Peppers

If you’ll be watering your long-season crops such as tomatoes and peppers, mound up a circular dam around each plant. You’ll spend much less time watering, and you won’t be wasting the water that would spread out away from the plants.

Peppers prefer slightly acid soil. Bury a few book matches under each pepper plant when you set them in the garden. The sulfur in the match heads will increase soil acidity. Make sure to put a bit of soil between the matches and plant’s roots.

Peppers are finicky. They don’t like cold or heat, but prefer a temperature between 53° and 85°. Mulching plants helps maintain even temperature and moisture. Do plant in rich, well-drained soil and give lots of water.

Raspberries

Raspberries can be planted right through the mulch and newspapers. Simply dig out a spot for each plant and throw some compost or well-rotted manure into the bottom of the hole before setting the plant. Space plants about three feet apart. Sink red raspberries an inch or two deeper than they were in the nursery. Black or purple ones can be set at the same depth at which they grew.

Always buy new plants when you start a raspberry bed. Old ones are too likely to carry disease.

“Be ruthless with raspberries!” warns one lazy gardener. Plant them in one long row. Whenever suckers try to widen the boundaries of the bed, pull them out! Never plant more than one row wide, or soon they will grow together and you won’t be able to get in to pick.

Keep a raspberry bed heavily mulched, six inches to a foot deep.

Raspberry canes are biennials. This year’s new canes will bear next year (although everbearing varieties will produce a crop on the tips of new canes in the fall). This year’s bearing canes will die after fruiting. Cut them at ground level and prune out all the weak new canes as well. In spring, you can top the year-old canes so they won’t flop over. Remember — be ruthless!

Prop canes by driving posts at six foot intervals on either side of the bed and stringing two courses of wire between them, one at about knee level, the other chest-high.

Don’t waste time on any but the two best varieties of purple raspberries: Royalty and Brandywine.

Strawberries Simplified

Growing strawberries always sounds complicated. To grow them successfully, you need a good system. This year’s producing plant will send out runners during the summer. For best fruit, limit the “babies” you allow to grow, probably to two or four per plant. At the end of each season, pull up the mother plants.

Set out new plants four feet apart when leaves of trees begin to unfurl in spring. The first summer, remove all blossoms so that the strength of the plant goes to sending out vigorous runners.

Keep strawberries heavily mulched, preferably with a weed-free material such as straw, salt hay, wood chips, sawdust, or pine needles.

Here’s how Closey Dickey put in a new raised strawberry bed. In late summer, she laid out a bed seventy-five feet long and four or five feet wide and covered it thickly with newspaper. On either edge, on top of the newspaper, she laid bales of hay, end to end. In the two-foot space between the bales, she piled manure, peat moss, topsoil, bone meal and greensand. From time to time until winter, she stirred this brew.

In fall’s crisp weather, her husband set 2″x 6″ pressure-treated landscape boards in the ground, against the hay, for a frame to keep grass out and mulch in.

In early spring, the Dickeys planted two rows of strawberry plants down the middle of the bed and snipped all blooms that first summer. Runners went into the hay on either side, which by now had disintegrated.

Each spring, Closey will take out two-year-old plants and let new runners become established. One year she will have two rows producing in the center, the next year one row on either edge.

Blueberries

Blueberries need an acid soil, a pH of 5 to 5.6. They are completely intolerant of limey soil, so if that’s what yours is, the laziest way to have blueberries is to buy them at the market.

If you have soil with almost enough acidity, dig in peat, pine needles, or cottonseed meal to increase it. Blueberries like soil high in organic matter. They have few insect pests. Plant them in groups to encourage pollination. (They’re not self-pollinating, meaning a single blueberry plant cannot fertilize itself.) Mulch heavily with pine needles.

Asparagus

Buy one-year-old roots. Years ago, gardeners dug a trench to China in which to set them. Lazy gardeners don’t bother to dig one that deep, but asparagus are heavy feeders, so you should get some nourishment under their roots at planting time. Dig ten to twelve inches deep and about a foot wide. Lay down four or five inches of compost or well-rotted manure before setting the roots so that they are about six inches below ground level. You can make a little cone of soil under each crown and spread the roots out over it. Set them two feet apart in rows four or five feet apart. Cover with two inches of soil and, during the summer, gradually draw more soil back into the row as the plants grow.

As tempting as it may be to cut and sample young spears, restrain that impulse. The plants need two seasons to grow and build strength before you begin harvesting.

“The secret to asparagus is to fertilize it lavishly,” explains a gardener whose succulent spears are known throughout her neighborhood. Feed first in early spring at the same time you cultivate, and again when you stop harvesting. After the ground freezes, load up the bed with manure.

Rhubarb

Rhubarb is attractive enough to use as part of your ornamental landscaping. It, too, is a heavy feeder. Dig a generous planting hole, fill it with compost or well-rotted manure, and set roots so that the uppermost buds are two to three inches below the soil surface. Add more rich organic matter each year. Be sure to remove flower stalks as soon as they form, so all the plant’s vigor goes to the edible stalks. The only other thing you have to do is harvest those luscious stalks and eat them. But don’t sample the leaves — they’re poisonous.

Double stakes protect garden from hose

Another gardener, who has several small vegetable plots, drives a stake at the corner of each bed to protect plants while he drags the hose around.

Most of us move sprinklers around to get an even watering in a garden area. It takes time, and the water is rarely spread evenly.

A neighbor of mine, starting a garden, set up his sprinkler and staked out exactly where it watered. Those were the boundaries of his garden.

A chrysanthemum in the vegetable garden is like a canary in a coal mine. The mum wilts before other plants when water is needed, giving you early warning to start irrigating.

Save your water from cooking vegetables. Let it cool. Toss out the door on the herbs or salad greens in your kitchen garden, or the flowers, if that’s what grows there. In winter, use for house‑plants.

Don’t Forget the Flowers

Plant tiny bulbs such as snowdrops, scilla, crocus, grape hyacinths, and chionodoxa in a place they’ll be noticed in early spring but undisturbed during the summer. There’s nothing worse than inadvertently digging them up as you cultivate after their foliage has disappeared and you’ve forgotten they were there. Instead of putting them in a flower bed, try them below light mulch under deciduous trees and shrubs.

Beware of gifts. If your flower-gardening friends offer pieces of perennials they’re dividing, investigate the plant’s growing habits before you plunk it in the ground. It may be a spreader that will take over the garden and become a nuisance.

Have you inherited old flower gardens with your newly purchased home? “It pays to sit and watch for a year. If something continues to grow despite neglect, it’s hardy. Don’t fight it, keep it,” advises an experienced restorer of old grounds. You may find it easier to relocate gardens using old plant material, rather than trying to refurbish a garden in the same place. You can prepare soil in a new bed and move pieces of plants from the old site when you are ready.

Most of us aren’t that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. We dream of lush crops and flamboyant flowers with few weeds, but we’d like to be able to reach that goal without accepting slavery. So we compromise and let a few weeds grow, or take a different tack and smother them with mulch.

Beat the Weeds

The secret to weed control, say knowledgeable gardeners, is to get them while they’re little. Begin cultivation as soon as weeds appear. It’s light work to knock them down then; later, when they’re firmly rooted and threatening to take over the garden, eliminating them is hard work.

Peter Henderson wrote this in 1901, and it still applies today: “In no work in which men are engaged is the adage, ‘A stitch in time saves nine,’ more applicable than to the work of the farm or garden. The instant that weeds appear, attack them with the hoe or rake. Do not wait for them to get a foot high, or a twelfth part of it, but break every inch of the surface crust of the ground just as soon as a germ of weed growth shows itself. And it will be better to do it even before any weeds show, for by using a small, sharp steel rake, two or three days after your crop is planted or sown, you will kill the weeds just as they are germinating.”

“Limit the time you spend weeding and develop a routine,” suggests Phil Viereck. “It’s a favorite morning ritual for me. I take a sharp wide hoe and spend twenty minutes each morning cultivating. I do the garden in pieces. Twenty minutes of a garden a day is so much better than three hours occasionally ”

Want to sail (play golf or tennis, hike, bike, lie in a hammock) in July and August? Weed now and sail later. Skip spring weeding and you’ll pay all summer. Kit Foster says, “We put in lots of time weeding in spring and the rest of the summer we weed just one day a week.”

“Some people get concerned if there’s a weed here and there,” says Ray Lambert. “I don’t as long as they don’t take over the plants. They’re part of the garden. I practice walk-through-weeding in my raised-bed garden. Whenever I walk through, I pull a few of the most insidious weeds.”

After a good rain, when the soil is soft and weed roots give little resistance, is the best time to weed. Let foliage dry first, to avoid spreading disease.

An experienced gardener says, “A crop like peas we don’t bother to weed much. By the time the weeds are big enough to bother the peas, the harvest is over.”

If weeding isn’t your favorite outdoor sport, do what a Charlotte, Vermont, gardener does. “I weed thoroughly and often early in the season, so the vegetables, even the tiny carrots, get a good start. Then, about July 15, when most vegetables are well up, I wish them well, and tell them they’re on their own. By that time they’re growing ahead of the weeds, and the few weeds that do come up don’t interfere with their growth.” If he plants fall crops, a late row of lettuce, for example, he’ll weed that carefully, just as if it had been started in the spring.

Carry a pair of pliers as part of your weeding arsenal. Use them to pull out tough weeds, like tree seedlings, that won’t succumb to a gentle jerk of the hand.

Another handy tool is a dandelion-weeder or daisy grubber— good for tap-rooted plants that can’t be pulled easily by hand.

Try a hula hoe or scuffle hoe. Drag it through the garden, and it cuts weeds below the surface of the soil, at the growing point.

“When I weed a flower garden,” says Nora Stevenson, “I never cart the weeds off in a wheelbarrow. All those weeds are just green manure, a source of humus.’ I tuck them in the back, behind the flowers, thinly, so they don’t mold before they begin to disinteg-rate.”

Eat the Weeds

A weed, they say, is a plant growing where it’s not wanted. Learn to love some of your weeds. Think of them as free vegetables. Don’t fight them, eat them!

My asparagus patch bears a luscious crop of early dandelion greens, indicators of rich soil. I harvest them with glee before cultivating the bed in early spring. Chopped and tossed in a salad with young scallions, they symbolize all the vigor and strength of a new gardening year.

Use young purslane raw in salads, too.

Lamb’s quarters are a delectable spinach substitute. Whenever you spy a baby in your garden, let it grow a bit, then strip leaves off tough stems, steam, and toss with butter. Once you taste lamb’s quarters, you’ll search for them everywhere.

One day, I parked behind a store in our small town and found a huge crop of them growing next to the building. I began cutting and stuffing the weed into all the empty spaces in my grocery bags. “What are you doing?” asked the curious occupant of a parked car. “Harvesting my vegetable for supper tonight,” I said, giggling, and left him shaking his head in disbelief.

When I was a young, newly married gardening novice, we lived on the sea shore. A violent December storm drove high tides within a few feet of our front door. When the waters receded, a huge pile of eelgrass and seaweed ringed our home. Too lazy to cart it away, we raked the debris a few feet closer to the house and stuffed it under foundation plantings. Our shrubs got a bonanza of enriched soil and added trace minerals, and we, by accident, became mulching devotees. We noticed, for the first time, all the piles of free eelgrass sitting at the end of the street and carted it home to hold moisture in our sandy soil.

Wherever you live, it’s worth keeping year-round mulch under shrubs and trees to eliminate cultivating and weeding. Shredded bark, wood chips, cocoa bean hulls, pine needles, and leaf mold are all weed-free and pleasing to look at. Under broad-leaved evergreens, use a mulch of cottonseed meal or pine needles to make soil more acid. Outline the bed with folded newspapers before you add mulch — keeps a neat edge for a longer time.

“I laugh when I think of our first garden,” says Deirdre Kevorkian. “Spindly was the word for those plants. The garden was three times as big as this one, but we got much less produce.” Now she and Eric have raised beds in a modest twelve-foot by twenty-foot garden, framed with jaunty orange marigolds just inside pressure-treated 6″ x 6″ timbers. In their small patch, they mulch with grass clippings. Every time they mow, they add some more. They use an organic 5-10-5 for supplemental feeding. The carrots, beets, spinach, lettuce, beans, broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, cukes, and winter squash are healthy and bug-free. “I haven’t weeded yet this year,” Deirdre boasts. “It’s almost automatic. Plant, mulch, and wait. I love gardens, but I hate the work.”

Weed haters are alert for non-commercial sources of mulch. “I was jogging through a development one autumn and I met a man raking pine needles,” explains a New Hampshire woman. “We began talking, and soon I had a promise of an annual supply of pine needles for my acid loving plants (such as blueberries), and

I also talked him into organizing his neighbors to save leaves for me. Of course, I offered inducements. Every summer, I give each of them a supply of plastic bags to use for collecting my mulch in the fall, and at Christmas I thank them with candy. Each autumn, I cart away in my utility trailer twenty-two bags of pine needles and forty-four bags of leaves. They love me!”

Hay is a wonderful mulch for vegetables. Bales of hay separate easily into “;leaves,” slices which can be laid on soil between rows. Don’t worry about the weed seeds that sprout from the hay itself. Simply lay more hay on top, or roll it over. Hay transforms soil into black, fluffy loam.

Mulching Materials – from Hay to Z

Be imaginative in collecting mulching materials. Buy if you must, or scavenge from friends or local industries. Try:

• hay (a farmer might be delighted to unload spoiled bales)
• straw
• leaves (shred or rotary mow first)
• hulls or shells from cocoa beans, buckwheat, peanuts, rice,
• cottonseed, oats, or nuts
• grass clippings (ask your neighbors or a lawn-maintenance service
• to save them)
• wood chips (get them from a utility company pruning near overhead wires) (add nitrogen)
• shredded bark (add nitrogen)
• sawdust (add nitrogen) seaweed, kelp, eelgrass ground corn cobs and stalks (add nitrogen)
• shredded sugar cane
• packing materials (excelsior, shredded paper)
• salt hay
• coffee grounds
• partly finished compost pebbles
• ground oyster shells newspaper
• peat moss (it cakes, is really better dug into soil)

• Spanish moss
• tobacco stems (but keep them away from tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and potatoes.

Mulch saves weeding, which should make afficionados of all lazy gardeners. Add to that its other virtues. Mulch:

• Conserves moisture. Mulchers rarely, if ever, water crops.
• Reduces compaction of soil when people walk on it.
• Keeps hard rain from pounding and compacting soil.
• Prevents erosion.
• Keeps dirt from splashing on crops during rains, so you spend less time washing leaf crops after harvest.

• Protects sprawling crops like tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, and squash from direct contact with soil, so there is less chance for rot.
• Helps maintain an even soil temperature — helps it stay cooler during baking summer days and warmer during chilly spring and fall nights.
• Encourages earthworms

• As it decomposes, mulch improves the tilth and fertility of soil.

In northern climates, year-round mulch may not work as well as in moderate and southern zones. Tomatoes, for instance, are unhappy in cold soil. Beans need warm soil for germination. Mulch keeps soil from warming up in early spring. Pull it back in planting areas for heat-loving crops so that the soil can bake for a week or two before planting time.

Some northern gardeners till or cultivate until the ground warms up, then mulch for the rest of the summer.

Before you mulch for the first time, add extra nitrogen to the soil. As soil organisms decompose the bottom layer of mulch, they use the nearest available nitrogen — robbing it from the soil if necessary. This problem is greatest with mulching materials low in nitrogen, such as sawdust, leaves, wood chips, or ground corn cobs. If your plants begin to look yellow or stunted, that could mean they’re starving for a shot of nitrogen. Run out there quickly, manure tea or any high-nitrogen fertilizer in hand (sodium nitrate, urea, calcium nitrate, or lawn fertilizer). Once the mulching process gets under way, you can add new mulch on top of old without worry

Make sure your soil is thoroughly damp before applying mulch. Otherwise, you’ll be maintaining soil dryness instead of conserving soil moisture.

Don’t be a miser with mulch. Make it thick enough so it can do its job of surpressing weeds. Coarse mulches, such as hay or straw need to be eight to twelve inches deep. Finer mulches can be applied more thinly. Something as fine as coffee grounds needs to be only one-half inch thick. When in doubt, add a little extra; it settles more quickly than you think.

It’s easier to spread mulch on your entire garden, then part it and plant, than it is to wait until crops are up before mulching.

If you do it the hard way, you have the tedious work of placing mulch between and around young plants, and that takes a lot more time.

Save your old newspapers — but not the color pages — for mulches. Lay them two or three sheets thick wherever you don’t want weeds to grow. The papers will gradually disintegrate, and when they do, just add more. Don’t like the looks of them in your garden? Then try laying a thicker layer first — eight or ten sheets — and covering with a thin layer of straw or some other more attractive mulch. This covering will also keep wind from lifting the newspaper.

Do your muskmelons sometimes taste like squash? For increased sweetness, plant through black plastic. It will heat up the soil several degrees, and that often makes the difference between tasteless and first-rate melons.

“I can’t bear to put holes in my beautiful 6-mil black plastic,” says one lazy gardener. In April, she rototills, fertilizes, and digs organic matter into the plot where she plans to plant heat-loving crops. She lays large sheets of 6-mil black plastic over the soil and leaves them to kill weeds and heat soil until planting time in late May or early June. She lifts the plastic and carefully stores it, whole instead of holey, until next year; then she plants melons, cucumbers, and other heat-loving crops in warm, weedless soil, and lays “cheap black plastic” ( 1.5 mil) around them for continuing easy maintenance.

Warning: If you have snakes in your area, they may find the black plastic and crawl under it. They love the extra heat there.

The Weed-Free Asparagus Bed

“Please, please tell me how to keep weeds out of the asparagus patch,” pleaded one frustrated gardener.

“My Dad had the ideal solution for weeds in his asparagus patch,” a grower explains. “He built a fence around the bed, and after the harvest, when the spears had grown up tall and lacy, let his chickens loose inside the fence. They ate all the weeds, kept the asparagus beetle under control, and fertilized the soil with their droppings.”

Plant annual ryegrass in the asparagus bed after the last harvest in spring. It crowds out other weeds in summer, and dies in the winter. Next spring you’ll have mulch already in place, and it won’t interfere with emerging spears.

Cultivate the patch in early spring, two or three weeks before spears emerge, weed once after cutting, and mulch heavily for the rest of summer. One gardener saves his grass clippings for mulch, since they’re weed-free.

The Ruth Stout way is to keep the asparagus bed heavily mulched. Each fall, add eight inches of loose hay. In winter, broadcast cottonseed meal and wood ashes on the mulch. The soil warms more slowly in spring, but the hay also protects the asparagus from tip-kill by late frosts. If you can’t wait for those delectable spears, push the mulch aside in spring. Or split the harvest, by removing mulch from half the bed for an early crop.

Weeds in perennial flower beds are the gardener’s nemesis. How do you enrich the soil and mulch it without introducing weed seeds? “I have a new system, which works,” says Closey Dickey. “Never, never again will I add horse manure, and I’m loath even to use compost. Instead, I topdress every fall with a mixture of peat moss, bone meal, dried cow manure [no weed seeds], and churned-up leaves.”

Weeds are always a nuisance among onions and garlic. A fine, weed-free mulch, such as peat moss or grass clippings, applied soon after planting will lick the problem. You’ll have less area to mulch if you plant them in wide rows or square beds.

• Can’t be bothered with mulches?
• One gardener sets his lawnmower high and mows weekly between his garden rows, forming weed paths between the vegetables.
• Another says, “To have a good garden, you have to get down on your knees once in a while. Recently, I’ve found it pretty difficult to do that. [The speaker is in his mid-eighties. So I leave four feet between rows and use my rototiller regularly to maintain a dust mulch and keep weeds down. It’s a waste of land, but it makes it possible for me to keep a garden.

To lick weeds, concentrate for just one year. This approach works particularly well on areas that haven’t been gardened before, but may be full of weed seeds. In the spring, till, then plant buckwheat at the rate of four pounds per thousand square feet. This is heavy seeding. After it has blossomed, but before the dark seeds form, till the buckwheat under. A day later, plant another crop of buckwheat, again four pounds per thousand square feet. Again, the buckwheat will come up, and so, too, will the weeds, but the buckwheat again will outgrow and eventually kill off the weeds by shading them out. This time, be particularly sure the seed hasn’t formed before you till it, or the buckwheat will be the weed you’re faced with next year.

After tilling in the second crop of buckwheat, plant another cover crop, such as annual ryegrass or winter rye. The result will be three cover crops tilled into the soil, enriching it, plus almost all the weeds eliminated from the site. This is an excellent method to use before raising strawberries, since weeds are what usually do in a bed of them.

Has your soil been poisoned with herbicides? This could be the case on a lawn that you now want to turn into a flower or vegetable garden. It could take as long as five years for the residue to dissipate. You can speed the process by adding extra organic matter to the soil and deep-watering to wash residues away. If the contamination is bad, you may want to mix activated charcoal with the soil, at a rate of 300 pounds per acre.

Cut plastic gallon milk jugs in half lengthwise. Punch a hole in the bottom to let out rain. Set ripening melons in these contraptions. They help prevent rot and keep mice and shrews from nibbling on the melons.

Are rodents feasting on your tulip bulbs? Plant daffodils instead. Their bulbs are bitter, so mice and chipmunks won’t eat them.

If you’re determined to have tulips, interplant with Frittilaria imperialis bulbs. The two- to three-foot tall plants have pendulous red, orange, or yellow blooms. They exude a skunk-like odor that repels rodents and moles.

Birdhouse plan

Why should you do all the hard work of getting rid of unwanted insects? Get some help on the job. Make a few birdhouses like this one, place them near the garden, and the birds will pitch in hungrily.

A house wren feeds 500 bugs and caterpillars to her babies in one afternoon; a brown thrasher consumes thousands of bugs a day. Spot some simple bird baths here and there in your garden as enticement to feathered helpers. Fill large terra cotta saucers, the ones made for placing under flower pots, with water, and set on logs turned on end.

Save fur from brushing and grooming your dog. Scatter it in the garden. It deters nibblers and also adds nitrogen to the soil as it decomposes. No dog? Ask the local pet-grooming operation to save fur for you, or try human hair from the barbershop.

Birds are welcome if they’re eating the bugs, but do you want them to snitch your berries? Actually, I think it’s rather fun to share my raspberries. I enjoy having the catbird perch atop a bean pole, tail switching, emitting scolding sounds as I pick her red jewels. There are always enough berries left for me. If your generosity doesn’t match mine, cover your berry bushes and strawberry beds with used tobacco netting as the fruit begins to ripen. It can be easily lifted when you want to harvest.

A clever gardener replaces the windows in her portable cold frames with screens and sets them over ripening strawberry plants to keep out the birds.

Plant for the birds, and they’ll be less likely to raid cultivated berries. They prefer the tartness of wild fruit, so nurture red and black chokeberry, barberry, wild honeysuckle, autumn olive, Russian olive, mountain ash, staghorn sumac, and mulberry

“One year, the birds took one peck out of each ripening tomato and then it would rot. It infuriated me,” explains a Massachusetts gardener who now takes some time to “foil” the birds. She and her husband have drilled a hole through the top of each six-foot high tomato stake, and after the stakes are in the ground, they thread twine loosely from stake to stake. Halfway between stakes, they hang four-inch diameter aluminum pie plates. The pie plates must be put up at the same time the tomatoes are planted, not after the birds start eating.

Keep ravenous crows from pulling up newly planted corn. Scatter crow repellent, available at feed stores, on the bed, or mulch loosely with hay after seeding.

Or take a tip from Jim Brady. He realized that his corn growing was for the birds — they got every seedling that came up. This year he’s tried something different. He laid down a three-foot wide strip of black plastic, cut holes in it, then planted the corn through the holes. The birds stayed away from the corn. “They just didn’t like walking on that plastic,” is his explanation. He’s getting a couple of other benefits from the plastic. The soil is warmer, which speeds the growth of the corn, and there’s no weeding, which he misses not one bit.

Coons and Corn

Raccoons have an unmatched affinity for ripening corn. I talked with only one gardener who had no problem with raccoon-ravaged sweet corn. His garden is bordered by a pasture. The cows keep the grass cropped and coons and woodchucks won’t cross the large, open expanse to raid the corn.

Most of us aren’t that lucky. We don’t feel like lazy gardeners when all of our work goes to feeding raccoons, squirrels, and woodchucks. Maybe one, or a combination of, these antidotes for varmints in the corn patch will work for you:

• Put a strand or two of electric fencing around the garden, one six inches above the ground, the other fifteen inches high.
• Cover almost-ripe ears with a paper bag and secure with a twistem.

Keep a transistor radio playing at night in the corn patch. Stick it in a plastic bag as protection against rain.

Interplant corn with large-leaved pumpkins and squash. Sup‑
posedly raccoons and squirrels don’t like to walk on the leaves.

Surround early corn with a double row of late corn. Hope the raccoons will think none of the patch is yet ripe, while you feast on the early harvest.

Add a floppy overhang of chicken wire, about two feet wide, to the top of your garden fence. It won’t support the weight of animals that try to climb over.

Remember the lazy gardener’s motto and build your soil for fertility and tilth. Insects and diseases do the most damage on unhealthy plants. Robust plants draw their vigor from soil. Check yours for proper pH and sufficient nutrients, keep its organic content high, make sure there’s enough water by irrigating and mulching, control weeds while plants are little, and rotate crops.

Read the blurbs in seed catalogs to find disease-resistant varieties, choose seeds adapted to your geographic area, and grow plants in season.

Varmints — Spell Trouble

A Line of Defense

“The woodchuck got to me. He ate EVERYTHING — an entire row of beans in one night. I couldn’t feed him and me, too.”

If you’re in a country place where the woodchuck and rabbit populations are high, you need a fence. Invest some time and effort to construct one that’s burrow-proof. Do it in fall, while the memory of crops unsavored (because the varmint got there first) still stings.

Friends of mine marshalled their strong sons to install a fence that is three feet above ground (stretched on metal fence posts), one foot below ground, and runs one foot out horizontally, underground, to discourage burrowing beasts.

“It was a terrible job to put in,” they recall, “but worth every aching muscle. We had to dig a trench a foot deep and a foot wide around the entire garden, install the fencing, fill in the trench, and reseed the lawn. Around the bottom of the fence they have sunk four-inch high plastic edging to keep weeds from growing into the garden.

If you’ve decided to fence in your garden, but the creation of a gate sounds technical, look at this stile. It’s easy to build, beats bending a fence to crawl over it, offers a place to put things, like that dozen tomatoes you just picked, and makes an easy entrance to the garden. But don’t try to run a tiller up over the top.

If you till, you’ll need an opening wide enough for garden machinery to pass through. Gates can be complicated to construct. Bob and Eleanor Kolkebeck have devised a simple substitute. On each side of their five-and-a-half-foot wide fence openings, they drove two metal fence posts (leaving four feet extending above ground) so there is a slot between them. The gate is a three- by six-foot wooden frame with hardware cloth stretched on it. It slides between the double fence posts like a sliding door — no hinges or latches to fuss with. Just remember to close it when you leave the garden.

A four-foot fence won’t stop deer from entering your garden? Don’t believe it. Lay four-foot high chicken wire around the perimeter of the garden. Deer won’t walk on it. Stake it down so that it lies fairly loosely on the ground.

Take a few minutes to cover your raised salad bed to make it nibble-proof. Rig a tunnel of hardware cloth to protect lettuce, spinach, basil, and parsley grown in the bed. Staple the hardware cloth on one side. Attach a pipe to the other side to weigh it down. The pipe rests on hooks screwed into the pressure-treated pine timbers that contain the bed. Handles above the pipes make it easy to lift the mesh to cultivate and harvest. To close in the ends, attach pieces of hardware cloth with clothespins.