A Crucible II

Happy May Day aka Beltane

(Note to patient readers, post is too long for email but only because of pictures.)

I last posted a week and a half ago. I have been busy, and things are about to get busier.

It snowed the day I last posted, April 20.

I covered this potato bed with partially finished compost.

By the time I finished there was a quarter inch where I started.

I built some raised beds. Those fence posts are highly treated, from a time when they used arsenic in the process, so I am staying above ground.

I covered the sheep litter with partially finished sheep compost, then later when it settled after a rain I covered it with black dirt.

About thirty years of layered, not yet composted sheep litter, about 4ft deep in some places.

A couple of compost piles. Dried sheep litter first, partially finished compost, then soil. I dug a bit close to those posts I am worried about, before I thought about it, but this is uphill from the posts, and maybe I am overthinking it?

I dug a cabbage bed. Same concept as the raised beds, dig the trench, fill it with sheep litter, turn over the grass on top, rake on the soil. The composting of the beds should begin soon and the heat I think will cook the grass.

At the orchard I need a raspberry, serviceberry and blueberry bed, and a strawberry bed.

Dog gets a little bored with me when I am working. Dog doesn’t care how much harder it is to dig a trench in mature prairie compared to soft black dirt and turf grass.

For the raspberry etc bed, I dug a trench, piling the sod alongside for keeping vegetation down, then filled the trench with wetland soil, vegetation and clay. The strawberry bed I turned the sod upside down, then covered it with 2+” of clay, and then 2+” of soil.

The pond gets bigger. It turns out, there is about a spade depth of rich black dirt and then very sandy clay. A lot of what I am hauling from wetland to the sandy soil orchard is….sand. I said in my last post there is 10,000 years of compost here, but as the hills have eroded the former pond has filled with sand too. I may have overestimated how much nutrient is available here. Later this summer if things dry out I will dig an exploratory well. Maybe there is deeper nutrient closer to the center of the wetland? The pond on the south end of the property has 20+ feet of loose sediment.

Mr cheap sunglasses. I used to wear a long sleeve cotton shirt as a turban to keep sun off my ears and the back of my neck, when I worked installing rubber membranes on flat roofs, back in my early 20’s. My foreman called me Swami.

The arborists opening up the eastern horizon for the garden probably think I buried a body (I wasn’t here when they did this work, but the hole was.) I had been piling excess sheep litter and turf grass etc, then I thought to dig a trench to use the rich, dark, former cow-yard soil on the beds, and then I rolled the pile into the trench. I have never trench composted before.

There is a book called Carrots Love Tomatoes, about companion planting. I have been hauling sand from the 80, six five-gallon buckets each time. About a foot down there is sand, under these beds in this upper part of the garden, so I dug a trench to the sand, filled in another five inches or so, and then clay like compost and then black dirt, enough to keep the seeds hydrated until they germinate. Tomatoes will be planted in the higher part of the bed.

I’m half way done with that second bed, which will also be tomatoes and carrots.

And I put up this fence.

At the garden center….this is the color of “expert gardeners” sending plants weeks before they can go in the ground. But it has been like aromatherapy, the hyacinth very fragrant, many people looking happy commenting “it smells so good in here!” Though it is going to cost Big Box a lot of money, clearancing these plants after the color is gone. They tell me this happens every year.

I started building pea, bean and cucumber trellises with the ironwood posts from the 80.

Combination melon and squash trellis beds, and spring veggies… if we have spring.

Chipping away at the sheep litter.

I left this bed partially finished with the layers showing, for the benefit of the arborists. Maybe they won’t care, maybe they will. Seemed like the thing to do. There will be more trellising where they are currently working.

I gathered some more fence, the same place I took down the garden fence. The landowner deer-proofed his fruit trees, but did not adequately rabbit-proof them. Eight of the eleven he planted were ringed by rabbits.

After working all morning at the garden center Sunday, I set some fencing on already set posts for snap peas in the raised beds, and then I set these three posts for trellises for melons.

Sometimes setting a single post I have to pull out a few stones.

Then I went home and put my garden log through the washing machine. I was looking for it, I found it halfway through the cycle, and salvaged a few pages that would otherwise have been obliterated. 1.

Based on the forecast, it looks like maybe I can begin planting a few things around May 03. Fruit trees are likely to show up around May 08. About May 03 I can finally take the tomatoes and peppers from under the lights outside. I will probably start the melons and squash today, Beltane. Happy Beltane, aka May Day.

1. A side note on accountability: long time readers may have noticed (or probably did not) I have not posted my fifth month guitar progress post (usually around the 21st). It turns out, digging so much dirt makes very sore arms and hands and makes guitaring somewhat difficult. Though I have made some progress actually singing a song and may inflict that upon you at any time, you are fore warned :)