Amending the Soil

Seven years ago when we moved to our current home, the dirt was clay and hard.  We worked very hard adding leaves, compost, finding manure to add to the soil and grass clippings.  Our first garden here did not produce as much as we have at our previous home, where our garden was established, of course.  It was to be expected.  It took work.  A LOT of work.

While it does look brown in this picture, it was very compact and clay-like.  The work continued, until we reached this size garden.

For those of you who do not know,  the black plastic keeps the weeds down by burning them through the sun's rays heating up and being absorbed by the black plastic.  The weeds are decomposed and turned in to compost....unless they find their way through to the little holes where the tomato plants were to grow there.  To the little holes, we added grass clippings, leaves and mulch.  This began our first year growing here in our current home.

This is how big our gardens are now.  The big garden is 35' x 85' and the two smaller ones are 10' x 85'.  This picture was taken in 2010.  The mound you see is the manure/sawdust pile.  Currently, it is still there, but the friends we get it from have added goats, chickens, and cows to the variety of the manure, so it is a good thick rich variety of nutrient rich microbes for our soil and plants.

This year, we've finally added the grapes to the garden.  Yes, where you see the mounds of potatoes that Mr. G is watering, in the very beginning of the bed, closest to the mound is where our grapes are growing.  We only have 2 vines right now, but we plan to add enough to fill that entire 85' long bed.  The bed next to it will be blueberry bushes.  We'll do the same thing with them when we plant those as well, as finances allow.  We're hoping to fill that bed next year with those bushes and finish filling the grape vine area as well.

This year with our potatoes, we've added 12" of hay on top of the manure for mulch.  Our tomatoes and peppers are not as plentiful as they were last year, however.  We decided to scale down with them in order to plant other things with the kids.  The kids are working this year and with our school year beginning again on Monday, July 2nd, we may just let that part of the garden rest.

We do not use pesticides in our gardens.  We try to keep the weeds down within reason.  A good practice is just a few weeds for the native bugs to feast on.  I've seen bugs completely decimate a weed stalk while leaving the vegetables alone, so some weeds are good.

We plan to put newspaper around the plants, then put more manure/sawdust around the plants to hold the newspaper down.  We'll keep adding grass clippings as they are readily available.

A friend of mine mentioned "Lasagna Gardening" on her blog, so I looked it up and found some intriguing things that we were already doing.  :)

On my list of things to do is to look up a better alternative to our compost area than what is currently being used, which is just a pile right now.  I'd like to get one of those black--off the ground--tumbling kind that you just crank every so often.  In two weeks you're supposed to have good composted soil.  So, we'll see what happens.  It is an ever changing thing, gardening.  To think one particular way works every time, hands down, is not opening one's mind up to a variety of other things that could potentially help.

Read lots and lots of blogs, books and websites about gardening.  Try things out one year and learn from those ideas.  What works and what doesn't?  It's all a great experiment. :)