Good Night, Sweet Garden

Ready for Next Year

The blog has suffered from some neglect, but actions speak much louder than words, or so it is said. 

There's a lot to do to close down the garden and the yard, and there never seems like there's enough time to do it in. While pulling the wilted vines and flowering lettuce and herbs, I discovered that the soil in the beds had devolved into something resembling concrete. Our soil has a lot of clay, but I thought we'd mitigated that by importing black dirt. Not enough, apparently. This is compounded by this past September being the driest on record.

So here's the process: 

• Rip out the old plants
• Dig up the weeds
• Rake the leaves and rotted veg off the surface
• Stick a fork into the soil about a foot deep and a few inches at a time and wiggle it around to loosen things up - but not, importantly, to turn over. We don't want to disrupt the microbial communities working away down there.
• Add 80 lbs. of rotted cow manure compost to each 8x4 bed. (This is new, based on our neighbors' tremendous success with manure on their beds this year.) Ideally this will sink into the soil over the winter, and the beds will be bursting with nutrients, ready to go in the spring.

They look pretty nice when they're all prepped for winter do the beds. And it sets one to dreaming of next year, and all of the things that we're going to do better and all of the mistakes that we are going to avoid.

Staying home in June will be a biggie. 

Other tips for ourselves for next year include (but are not limited to):

• Plant a different variety of peas - snow peas with soft, edible skins
• Protect the blueberries and raspberries from birds
• Do not plant "Tommy Toe" (mushy) or "Delicious" (mutant and anemic tasting) tomato varieties
• Start seedlings MUCH later. No need to fire up the greenhouse until late April or early May
• Get a Prairie Moon pollinator garden kit. 
• Plant more sweet bell peppers and few indelibly hot peppers (habaneros, Anaheim chili)
• Fewer cucumbers
• Water more deeply, less often

We're not going to add to the number of beds next year, either. We had a hard time keeping up this year. If we can increase our yield, and plant more of what we like to eat in the space we have, we can think about further expansion toward self-sufficiency next year. 

We've also got to entirely re-do the lawn at the side of the new stairway. It turns out that spreading the rock infested heap of clay across the yard to dispose of it (actually sifting the material and tossing the gravel under the shed), ended up finishing off the already scorched and burnt excuse for grass that was clinging to life there. 

Large pile of slag, now, with tremendous effort, distributed across the dead grass

This is not all bad. We'll have a chance to re-do it properly, planting a clover & pollinator lawn which will be much stronger, greener, healthier for insects, and draught resistant. Probably cost a bit of money, but it will be worth it. 

On to next year!