We are tired, sore and beat down. But, we accomplished a major gardening milestone for the year! Our 1,700 square foot community garden is now prepped!
We’ve been gardening at Fairbanks Community Garden now for eight years! It’s hard to believe it has been that long! It was good to see some familiar faces as well as a new gardener or two, we look forward to growing with you all again this year. Lots of folks were out getting things ready and we couldn’t have asked for a nicer day! If you also garden there, be sure to say hello, we’re plots F2 & F3 in the northeast corner of the garden near the tool shed.
Eight years is long enough to know your garden pretty well. We can prep this garden in five hours of grueling, hard work. We generally add compost to each bed, till it into the first 4-6 inches of soil and then we shift the weed fabric down one row to accomplish our crop rotation plans.
This is one of the huge things we’ve noticed about gardening. The longer you do it, the better, faster and more efficient you get at doing it. We remember this being a multi-day slog when we first started. Now, we’re in and out in part of a day.
These photos also show the “wide raised rows” that we advocate for, it basically provides all of the benefits of raised bed gardening with none of the actual cost. (They can be narrow, too, the point is raising the soil.) It’s a marvelous technique for maintaining warm soil temperatures, which eeks out quite a bit of additional growing performance from your plants.
Hope your gardens are coming together. We’re tired and sore, but darn glad to be dirty again!
