Garden Prep

Yesterday I spread (roughly) a cubic yard of freshly-cooked compost over our main garden area. Then I turned over the whole plot - about 350 square feet. This upended the winter rye cover crop. The soil looks good; although there is quite a bit of variation. Some areas are slightly more sandy and other areas have more of a heavy, clay-like texture.

According to the Pacific Northwest Garden Guide, I should now be working on getting the soil warmed up. I should also do something to keep the spring rains off the garden. The soil, after all, should be moist. Right now it is heavy and soggy. Our forecast calls for four days of sun, however, so by Sunday, things should be good!

Since we're planning to move to a drip irrigation system for (at least) the main garden, my next project involves bringing a hose bib out through the wall of the greenhouse. The Old Amigo is a tad nervous about tackling the plumbing, but the line to the greenhouse has its own shutoff. That at least will prevent serious disruption to the main water supply.

Oh, and I picked up a copy of an excellent book on drip irrigation. It's called (remarkably enough) Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape and All Climates. The author is Robert Kourik. I ordered my copy from Barnes & Noble.

The New Garden

It's coming along. I can work for a couple of hours at a time without excessive strain to back and arms. I have a large (but getting smaller) pile of Roger's Magic Dirt and a somewhat smaller pile of what passes for local soil. The latter is the result of many hours of hard work during which the Old Amigo breaks apart the local glacial till using a mattocks, sifts the rocky stuff through a heavy screen (1/2" galvanized mesh) and then carts the rocks off to the rock piles that lie near the wood pile.

I mix the sifted soil at about a 7 or 8 to 1 proportion with Roger's Magic Dirt. The resulting mixture contains some small pebbles and dimly resembles the "sandy loam" that plants love so much. This is my third such project, and this one will make for a nicely terraced extension of usable earth in one of the warmest, most sheltered parts of the yard.

At this point, it's becoming apparent that we'll need another 7 cubic yards of Roger's Magic Dirt to complete the project. Before ordering that, however, I want to use up all that I've already purchased and (if at all possible) construct some kind of ramp that will allow the dump truck to drop the next load *right* where I want it. That will allow me to mix in place (by renting a rototiller for a day) rather than shoveling into a wheelbarrow and carting the soil to its eventual spot.

Once I have the soil components piled near their eventual location, I'll be able to complete the retaining wall. That will produce said terraced extension.

It will also leave behind a final, flat sunny area in which the Venerable Friendly One thinks that raised beds would be ideal. That project will probably have to wait next summer. It will certainly require extensive fencing. Bambi and his buddies have showed up recently with industrial strength harvesting equipment.

One of my friendly neighbors claims that several members of the local deer population have degrees in mining engineering and are able to tunnel beneath fences that are too tall for them to leap. This hypothesis remains to be verified, but I do note that the section of our garden that is currently fenced has yet to be pillaged. This seems to be grounds for optimism.

The Mole Sez', "Can you dig it?"

The Old Amigo has been carting around a lot of dirt lately... probably a couple of tons. One of the neighbors has started referring to me (in a nice way) as "the Human Mole." We had a blast of rain through here, and it let us know just how full of water the garden area can get. So when the rain backed off for a couple of days, I hit the garden prep project really hard and got it wrapped up -- at least for this year. We're talking at least 300 cubic feet of dirt removed and either sifted (to remove LOTS OF ROCKS) or hauled over to a low spot on the property that I'd like to raise. That was all the heavy work. By yesterday evening, I hurt pretty much everywhere, but it is great to have it done.  

Next we plan to add a couple of inches of compost (already piled up and ready to go) to the bottom. Above that we'll mix sifted soil and compost. Then we'll top the whole thing off with some night crawlers and some straw. Ought to be great by spring.

At the end of the digging, I took a quick shot of the sunset over the Olympics. Pretty nice, huh?

Very nearly stupid with fatigue, I ate a quick snack and taught my regular Monday evening gentle yoga class. Most of my students are very kind, however, and applauded at the end. It was the biggest class ever (19 students). Speaking of kindness, one of the guys who works at the gym helped me scrub down the mats. Then I returned to mi casa, ate a real dinner (Angel had been gathering Chanterelles and made a fantastic mushroom Stroganoff), relaxed, and crashed.

On the Economic Front, it might be worth mentioning a couple of things:

• Paulson seems bent on spending every cent to bailout his buddies in Big Finance. We, The People are at liberty to spend still more of our tax dollars if we'd like to cushion other industries, but the Hankster sez' we should keep our grubby hands of the hundreds of billions that he wants to dole out to his cronies.


• The 5% or so of the TARP funds that we may or may not want to throw under the wheels of Big Auto is NOT supposed to come out of the piles 'o cash already allocated. Do your nostrils detect a stink?


• Wholesale prices seem to be falling. Hmmm... I've blogged this before, but it bears repeating: if we stop buying crap from BIg Retail, Bit Retail will just go away.


• In fact, if we start paying off our debts and then saving as much as we can, we'll avoid inflation. We are the ultimate drivers of the economy. If we spend with consciousness and intention, our purchases become a powerful political act. Keep that in mind.


• Would you like to shake things up big time? Don't buy stuff you don't need, and if you do need (really need) something, see if you can buy it used. This could quickly & extensively re-order the economy.


• Be careful if you play with sharp objects.

Finally, I wrestled with MySQL for much of the day. Talk about Old Technology. Talk about FUNKY user interfaces. Ouch. Well, I got a bunch of things going at least. Equally important, I'm set up to do some good tutorials next. I've started taking (typing) more detailed notes so that I have a trail of bread crumbs for the next time I enter these woods.

There are so many rocks.