Digging In for the Autumn

Having at last gotten some rain, I could resume my soil improvement efforts. This compulsion to turn over the ground must be a basic survival instinct that has atrophied in sensible people.

The former strawberry bed is one of my recent revitalizing projects. I had plywood pieces over it all summer to kill the invasive but not productive strawberries and the dock, chicory and red clover. The chicory didn't die, so had to be dug up with a shovel. I read that they are great for the soil, but they are not a lot of fun to wrestle out of the earth.

They bring up nutrients from deep in the earth, possibly from China. I read up on how to use chicory for coffee but it sounded like more effort than I cared to expend on ersatz coffee.

This small part of the old strawberry patch required me to loosen the dirt with a shovel, separate the many roots from the soil clinging to it and later till the area. I added broken-up cow manure, pelleted gypsum and limestone, tilled it again and planted it to a cover crop of pinto beans.

The rusty grocery cart is upside down to protect a volunteer cantaloupe from critters. Volunteers usually don't ripen in time, but I'm a sucker for holding out hope that this will be the year that they make it. One year, I did have good luck with growing the vines up through the cart, making a modern cornucopia. 

Cultivating this spot  was a tremendous amount of work but will no doubt be worth it when it can once again be used for garden crops. It was part of the no-topsoil stretch left by the former owners. Apparently weeds care not if they have topsoil or adequate rain.

Meanwhile, my efforts at making Terra Preta in the top tier have paid big dividends. After just a year, that soil is so rich and loamy that I was able to dig the last of the potatoes with my fingers. I added more cow manure and limestone and buried a bucketful of kitchen garbage. Nothing to do now but await fall rains and spring.

The nearby sweet potatoes are being left in the ground until frost, since I read that they develop the biggest tubers late in the season. I read that last year right after I dug them up a tad too early. My daughter Izzy started these for me in the early spring and they have done well with lots of watering.

The next project was to run the big tiller over the once again failed Remote Garden. Like other farmers in the area, I have to rely on summer rains to grow crops up there. If the rains fail to show up, we try again the following year. 

The remaining tomato plant finally started growing after some rain, but it was too late for it to amount to anything. Left to possibly mature in the middle of the plot were some sweet potatoes.  I pulled up a lot of these weeds to allow the soil to dry out slightly. 

After making a few fixes to Big Red (the few that were fortunately within my scope) I worked in a tub of cow manure (that had to be carried up the steep path) and achieved this marvelous tilth. Later, I have plans to incorporate leaves and more manure. That's as soon as my muscles get over being so stiff I can barely walk.