In one of the recent posts I told you that our neighbor just showed up with his tractor and started to till our garden for us.
Here he is, happily breaking up our soil. His box tiller was broken so he did his best with what he had working at the time. Not a problem as we were happy to have the help.
This little existing 16'x9' garden is filled with mushroom compost. I planted 3 rosa Rugosa bare root rose plants down the middle. By fall, they should have some rose hips ready for us to harvest. I think I'll also grow some more flowers in this bed so that I can cut fresh flowers to put in vases inside the house.
And remember the mushroom compost we picked up? I know it doesn't look like much, but it sure took a lot to unload it all, shovelful by shovelful.
First Joel and Jeremy unloaded the compost from the back of the pickup, and spread it all over the smaller garden closer to the house. As I drove the truck around the perimeter of the garden, they hefted the compost onto the garden. That took one evening......and there is more to come!
The next day Joel and I headed outside to the main garden behind the barn. Ok, let the fun begin!!
First, we measured and staked out the perimeter of the garden, then, we were able to run string lines for the number of rows we wanted to be able to plant. At least this part was fun......now on to the hard stuff.
Where we had string lines running across the garden, we dug out the loosened soil and threw that shovel of dirt onto the "row". By working our way down the line we created lower paths and much higher beds. Each path is going to have a couple layers of newspaper put down to block the sunlight and then a heavy mulch of straw. As the summer wears on both the newspaper and straw will begin to break down and another layer can always be added. By doing this we hope to decrease the amount of weeds we have to dig out of the paths.
The loosened soil in the planting beds is well over a foot and a half deep, providing nice loose soil for the roots of the vegetables to grow in, which is supposed to help give us healthy plants with a strong yield. Hmmmm, we'll see. We got all these ideas from The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith. It all makes sense to us, and now we'll see how it works out in real life practice. After all, gardening is one big science experiment....each year dealing with different rain patterns, bug infestations and blights of all kinds. How much fun can one girl possibly have?
I guess we'll repeat whatever works and try something new for the things that fail. I'm not afraid to fail since that is how we'll learn to do things better. You can be assured we are going to fail a lot. So, laugh along with us as we try our hand at all kinds of new experiences.
Whew! That's a lot of compost to shovel!
Resting my aching muscles today,
Debbie
