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.

The Latest Dirt

Knowing that I find soil endlessly fascinating, my son Chris recorded a documentary about soils of the Amazon. Some archeologists got to looking from the air at some mysterious green islands in the middle of pretty barren savannah in Bolivia. Coming down to earth, they explored those fertile patches. They discovered terra preta, or black soil. It was a mix of the surrounding poor soil, charcoal bits, broken pottery and organic material.

The video showed a reinactment of what life must have been like before the entire civilization vanished. The women, pretty much naked in some scenes to hold the interest of guy viewers, were doing all the gardening work. I imagine lugging tons of soil to higher levels was probably the work of strong men. Or maybe the women were true Amazons.

After making one tier in the garden from found aluminum soffits, I was blessed with some actual landscaping terrace stones for the top tier. My daughter Izzy had dug them up at her place, where they had been used for borders.

The hard part was getting them level for the first layer. Using the bubble level, I kept at it. The second and third layers were easy. It was not whimsical like the other level, but quite lovely, almost professionally landscaped.

That level of the garden was dreadful clay. I decided to make my own terra preta. Inexplicably, I was out of pottery shards. Having no desire to be that authentic, I substituted cow and horse manure for the human waste. I added crushed eggshells, pelleted limestone and buckets of silt from above the river, mixing it from time to time with Tillie. I incorporated kitchen scraps in the top few inches.

Thinking I was really onto something, I put it to bed for the winter. In the spring, I planned to plant it with snow peas and lettuces.

What Went Wrong?

The blessed stuff would not dry out. It seemed I had made terra goo.

The lower end of the garden dried out first, so the snow peas went in there. They are doing nicely.

Since the stones are a drystone wall, they should have allowed the excess water to pass through. Maybe I need to dig a trench above it to divert the runoff from the slope above it.

The terra preta mix was used in other parts of the garden, so it's probably a good idea.

Compared to the massive scope of the raised earthenworks of the lost civilizations, this little garden is nothing. However I am beginning to have my doubts about how much soil I can dig with a shovel and carry in a bucket.

This motivated me to continue with the Remote Garden. After mowing it recently, I scalped the grasses with a weed-whacker yesterday. I have a few weeks to get the soil ready for the excessive amounts of tomato and pepper plants that are growing bigger every day.

The best part is no earth-moving. Well, I do intend to loosen the plot with a turning fork, but not actually turning it.