Want to have your own healthful food amid crisis? Take steps to have a healthy garden

These are extraordinary times, perhaps introducing us to harder times ahead. It’s more important than ever for us to grow as much of our own healthful food as possible. Many Boiseans think they can’t grow any food because they don’t have sufficient sunlight, but some crops grow in shade of various densities. Lettuce, for example, can grow in less sunlight than many other crops, and peppers appreciate some afternoon shade.

Others tolerating varying degrees of shade include spinach, arugula, mache or lamb’s lettuce, mustards (some are very pungent), sorrel, Malabar spinach (a viny plant, so you could grow on a trellis), potatoes, parsley, kale, tronchuda, collards, chervil, cilantro and basil, for example. If you have one square yard of sunshine that lasts six hours or more, save it for a tomato plant. Or put a container with a tomato plant on casters and follow the sun.

Our soil is naturally alkaline, and benefits from incorporation of organic matter such as kitchen waste, fallen leaves and herbicide-free grass clippings. Some folks think they don’t have room for a compost pile, and it’s not really necessary. Another way to compost those organic items is to dig a trench beside a row planned for crops and bury the waste, extending the trench as wastes accumulate. By next growing season, those materials should have thoroughly composted or rotted, so you could move your new planting row to last year’s trench enriched with organic matter.

One of the benefits of organic matter is that it retains moisture and feeds the microherd — the bacteria, fungi, micro-organisms and arthropods — that enrich the soil, and feed and protect plants from many diseases. We usually have dry spring weather, which makes gardening difficult if your garden water system is linked to your lawn water system — but a dry spring is helpful to guard against disease. Many plant diseases are carried in water droplets, from splashing water picking up bacteria from soil surface or from excessive humidity.

Peach leaf curl, early blight on Solanaceous plants such as tomato, potato, pepper etc., and black spot on roses are water-borne diseases. Fire blight, too, can be spread by water droplets.

I’ll be closely watching pear, apple and pyracantha for signs of fire blight, because it did hit one of my pear trees last summer, and a garden helper pruned out the diseased branches, then dropped diseased leaves in a trail around the house to the trash barrels. The disease is caused by a bacterium, Erwinia amylovora. Open flowers are the most common infection sites, and they turn black, as if burned. Bordeaux mixtures or other copper mixes are the usual control methods, but they’re not totally effective. Pear, apple and pyracantha are especially vulnerable to this disease, but it may also attack hawthorn, spirea, cotoneaster, Photinia and Amelanchier (serviceberry). The disease may ultimately kill the shrub or tree.

▪ In the vegetable garden, Solanaceous plants such as tomato, potato, eggplant or peppers are sometimes killed by early blight (Alternaria solari) or late blight (Phytophthora infestans). Early blight may occur at any time in the growing season, not true to its “early” name. Capsicums (peppers or chiles) and tomato plants are killed by frost. Potato leaves may blacken, but the plant makes a comeback. Some potato diseases are seed-borne (blackleg or some viruses), but there’s a way around that: use True Potato Seed (TSP).

Usually you must grow potatoes from seed in one year, and the following year use those potatoes to get a normal-sized crop of potatoes. This year I’m growing a new hybrid variety called Clancy that reportedly yields large tubers its first season. “SeedsnSuch” sells pelleted Clancy potato seeds. I hope to get large potatoes this season.

I’d also urge gardeners who cook to grow yellow onions, between plants, if you’re tight on room. Onion skins from those onions are great to color chicken stock, for instance, without danger of introducing insecticide into your family’s diet.

This story was originally published March 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM.