Preparing New Beds

Last Sunday in our workshop we prepared some new beds for planting. The week before it snowed the soil had dried sufficiently for me to till in the weeds and get the drainage working so the soil could be worked by the time of the workshop. We laid out the beds 4' wide so we would end up with a 3' planting area and a 1' path. I got this from Masanobu Fukuoka's influential book One Straw Revolution back in the 70's. He determined that 3' is the distance most people can reach so a person can work the whole bed from one side.
We raked the soil from the path area up into the beds to create a raised bed. We spread kelp meal for micronutrients and espoma plantone organic fertilizer for macronutrients. We harvested wormcastings from our worm bins and spread them about 2" deep over each bed. We leveled out the beds and voila´we are ready to plant.

Making Gourmet Compost

Compost is only as good as the ingredients that go into it. If the green matter you are composting is lacking in nutrients the resulting compost will be lacking in nutrients. If the manure you use comes from animals that are regularly fed antibiotics the antibiotics will end up in the compost. I read yesterday that plants can take them up and they appear in the leaves. Yikes! If the compost is missing the microorganisms in the soil food web that make nutrients available to the plants the nutrients are bound up in the compost.
I do the following things to be sure my compost is doing what i expect it to do. First i make sure my garden is well fed so that the plants (including the weeds) have all the nutrients i and my compost need. Second, i add kelp meal and local granite sand to the compost to compensate for any missing nutrients. I get my manure from people i know who feed their animals a natural, nutritious, and healthy diet. I have my compost tested by Soil Food Web, Inc. to be sure all the organisms in the soil food web are present. I study my compost under a microscope to see if all the organisms are present. I then add some older compost to all my new piles to be sure the organisms will be in the new compost. You can get soil and organic matter from old undisturbed forests to add to your pile if you are not sure all the organisms are present. I monitor the internal temperature of the pile to determine when it needs turning and when it is ready to be used. A hot pile needs to reach 135º and remain there for 3 days in order to kill weed seeds and harmful bacteria. It needs to be turned 3-5 times with the temperature returning to 135º each time to insure all of the pile gets into the middle and heats up properly.
That's how you make gourmet compost!
Go here to see a graph of compost temperature over the 1st week and a half.

An exciting day at the Funny Farm

Today we planted our first crops. We prepared the beds by tilling in some of our gourmet worm compost, kelp meal and granite sand for mineral nutrients. We planted beds of basil, cilantro, chives, japanese snow turnips, and Scarlett Queen turnips. Our broccoli, red cabbage and lettuce plants are growing well in flats and will be ready to plant soon.

I tilled in organic fertilizer and kelp meal in the bed that is destined to have Top Hat blueberries. Top Hat is a new variety that is self-fertile that was developed at Oregon State U. The plants are said to grow 2' high and wide making them ideal candidates for pot culture. They promise to be a great addition to urban farming. The berries are supposedly almost as large as Rabbiteye. We'll see next spring.