#soil

Productive Friday!

~ FarmingMum ~ Leave a comment

On Thursday evening I planted more corn and green, yellow, and purple green beans. I snuck a few more Blacktail Mountain watermelon seeds in, too. I don’t have a lot of luck with this method. I also tried to fill in some of the spots where I had poor germination (eaten seed?) in the last planting. That was 2 weeks ago, oops.

This morning (Friday, a day that peaked around 93 or 94 degrees) I tried to smooth out the west-most beds. The soil is so sandy there! There is still a lot of grass, which I wish weren’t a problem. Then I prepped some more ground for potatoes. I only went about 12 feet because there’s no drip tape past where we’ve already planted, so the soil is really dry in the top several inches. Then I forget if I did something else (maybe checked the Chandlers?) but I went and picked some old strawberries. I put Camarosas in one basket and Seascapes in the other, but I don’t quite know which is which.

This evening T and I planted sunflower seeds! I had a big bag of mixed sunflowers, and a packet of old Mammoth sunflowers (packed for 2014) and another packet of a big sunflower. I tried to put the big ones in the middle of the bed just in case they can block some light from hitting the house, which is on the other side of the garden. I want to cover that bed with compost but I am a bit concerned that we only have 4 or 5 yards left. There are way different bugs in that bed than I’ve seen anywhere else in the garden. We’ll see if they just eat the seeds, or what. I also worry that I could have planted the seeds too deep.

To do: hoe the greens, add all those buckets of stuff I’ve got to the existing compost pile – it will be much bigger that way, pick strawberries, plant dry beans, plant flowers, plant cover crops (Z needs to prepare a lot of beds for this), plant pole beans, plant the other sunflower bed, go to herb fair and get some perennials to plant…where?

Z has pretty much mowed the whole back area with the tractor. He moved the tractor and mower back under cover tonight because he’s noticing new rust. A few mornings ago the fog was down to the ground, so I’m guessing that that’s why. That was the day I had all this weird wilting on the Chandlers (did I write about that?).

Thinking about the “stale seedbed” technique

~ FarmingMum ~ Leave a comment

So many farmers who are doing the cutting-edge stuff with organic food gardening are doing this “stale seedbed” thing- you prep, fertilize, water, and then throw down a plastic tarp for however long until you need the bed. The weeds will be dead, the fertilizers and compost mixed in due to macro soil life, etc. I’m talking about Curtis Allen Stone, Paul Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm, and Jean-Martin Fortier (I’ve read Stone and Fortier’s books in the last year, and Paul is local and frequently written about). I’m listening to The Urban Farmer with Curtis Stone, Season 2 episode 1 (on the Permaculture Voices podcast  on Soundcloud). I see it’s not archived yet on the website.

I first heard of this in my classes at SRJC, and it referred to tarping weeds for 2 weeks at the hottest time of the year. But prepping the bed first really helps a farmer be ready to put crops in the ground when it’s the appropriate time of year or when they need the crops.

I wonder what the long-term effect of this is on the soil life (especially during hot weather, for example, in a place where the ground is usually dry). How can it not be bad for the soil?

National Cat Day Cat Visit

~ FarmingMum ~ Leave a comment
Kitty cat climbing Z
Grey kitty climbing Z

Z picked some dino kale and Grey Kitty seemed very interested in it.

This morning I had a doctor’s appointment so I only got out there for about a half an hour. I straightened out the drip tape on the garlic bed (Z had done this already and I realized that he was lining it up to follow the way the strawberry bed’s tape was laid out, so I had to put some back the way he’d left it earlier in the morning). I pulled a few weeds in the new strawberries – there are a lot! Also, the animals had dug up a few plants.

This evening, I picked a basket or so of strawberries. They seemed to me to be in better shape than yesterday’s. Picking every day and pulling off old leaves can make a really big difference. There are still plenty that have holes, and I threw out a lot that had soft spots from cucumber beetles, sow bugs, etc.

Later, I put compost out over the bed where the garlic will be. I am feeling pretty distressed about the condition of the soil in the paths. And in the beds. Z bought cover crop seed today, so we hope to plant this weekend. Z is concerned that he doesn’t want to put sprinklers out again and have them get lost in the vetch like what happened this spring. Not much rain is predicted for the foreseeable future.