How does your garden grow?

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
   How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row.

The old nursery rhyme asks an important question.  In my garden, I don't have any silver bells or cockleshells growing and my wife will be pleased to know that I don't have any pretty maids in my garden either.

So, how does my garden grow?  Well, it grows green and healthy due to nitrogen.  But nitrogen must be "fixed" first.  Here's a little bit about nitrogen that I learned:  (Source: Wikipedia)

Nitrogen fixation happens when nitrogen (N₂) in the atmosphere is converted into ammonia (NH₃)  Atmospheric nitrogen or molecular nitrogen is relatively inert, meaning it does not react with other chemicals to form new compounds.  Fixation processes frees up the nitrogen atoms from their diatomic form to be used in other ways.

Now, I was never very adept at chemistry, so a lot of this is outside of my grasp, but what I do understand is that nitrogen is essential for life because nitrogen is required for the basic building blocks of plants, animals and other life.  Nitrogen fixation is essential for agriculture.  In an earlier post, we discussed how nitrogen fixation occurs naturally in the air in lightning and is the reason why rainwater is so much better for your crops than tap water.

There are other natural ways to fix nitrogen.  There are plants that contribute to this, specifically those in the legume family.  In my garden clover fulfills this role.  Clover contains symbiotic bacteria called Rhiozobia within nodules in their root systems that produce nitrogen compounds that help the plant grow.  When the plant dies, the fixed nitrogen is released, making it available to other plants and fertilizes the soil.

The other day I was weeding in my garden and pulled up some white dutch clover to make room for a row of corn and witnessed this:



Nitrogen producing nodules on clover roots in my garden

Can you see the little white nodules on the roots?  Those are producing nitrogen.  How cool is that?   I'm growing my own fertilizer!  This is referred to as "green manure."  Here is a close up photograph of the nodules: 



This is so very beneficial.  So what I do is feed the top portion of the clover to our cows that methodically line up at the garden fence whenever I'm weeding.  And the root part of the clover?  Well, I turn that back under in the row to provide fixed nitrogen to fertilize the soil for the next crop. 

This enables your garden to grow!  You really want to grow legumes in your garden to keep this process going.  Hopefully that will translate into something like the potatoes below that have "shaded out" the rows.

Irish Potatoes "shading out" the rows

As a young boy we grew soybeans on the farm, first row-cropped, then drilled.  Shading out was a much desired stage of growth.  When that occurred, you didn't need to cultivate anymore because the sunlight couldn't reach the soil between the rows and thus, no weeds could grow (Hallelujah!).  Nitrogen is a key ingredient promoting green growth and accelerating this process.

Kyle, Kyle, why the smile?

How does your garden grow?

With nitrogen fixed by white dutch clover, making potatoes shade out the row!