The real work has begun! We have our first garden fully prepped for the season and ready to accept direct sows and plants!
This work begins with clearing the previous season’s detritus, giving us another early season ingredient for our compost piles. We’ve found it much easier to clear gardens after the winter kill, so that’s why we do this work in the spring.
We then move on to clearing out any early weeds that have established themselves, we want to start with as clean a slate as possible. Fortunately, our soil is very light and easy to remove things from. But, this effort also results in a general turning (or hand tilling) of the soil, at least down to the first 4-6 inches of so.
From here, we add in commercial compost. We’re very sensitive to weeds in this garden, since we have a lot of direct sows. Our home grown compost is a bit questionable on that front, since we can’t reliably get good, long term hot composts that sterilize weed seeds. We add in 1-2 cubic feet of compost each year, more or less based on the bed’s size. These organics are essential to maintaining high quality soil.
Then, we lay in our nutrition. We generally prefer to set this garden up for long term nutrition due to the intensive nature of how we use it. So, we’re primarily using granular based fertilizers like Down To Earth’s Biolive. This bulks up our basic NPK, but also adds in mycorrhizal fungi which is highly beneficial for plant’s roots. We also focus on micronutrients, typically preferring Azomite as a relatively complex single ingredient micronutrient fertilizer.
Once our nutrition is laid in, we usually work in both the fertilizer and compost entirely by hand. Fortunately, our compost was fully thawed this year so that was relatively easy work! We level out the beds with a rake, giving us a great planting and sowing surface. And voila, our beds are ready for some highly intensive growing!
We are debating about getting started with an early planting this year. Our 10 day forecast is looking really good at this point and we’d only plant rather cold hardy stuff this early anyway. We don’t often break our own rules, because we’ve learned in the past, but this looks like it could be a safe gamble at this point. We’ll see, more to come on that!
