It’s been a couple of weeks since I published anything. I had been trying to keep to a daily cadence, but with everything else happening on the homestead I had to drop some balls, and this was one of them.
Spring is a busy period. We had just finished our garden fencing, a sturdy 6’ fence meant to deter all but the most determined deer. We have enormous deer pressure here, a herd comes through every night. Our dog is less of a deterrent than you’d think, so fencing was step 1.
I also started a whole bunch of plants indoors weeks ago. Tomatoes, artichokes, broccoli, cauliflower, and many more. Almost 180 cells, some doing better than others. The difference between being on a windowsill and having a proper grow light is dramatic. The windowsill plants are struggling far more. I also have 100 sweet potato slips waiting for me to plant, and have 20 lbs of seed potatoes on the way.
Avoiding Tilling
I wanted to avoid tilling up the garden since this effectively sterilizes the soil and kills the mycorrhizal fungi networks that are so beneficial to plants. It takes them years to recover. If you till every year, they never do.
The result? Weaker plants that are more susceptible to disease and weeds, with lower nutrient densities in any resulting vegetables. Plants get a lot of their nutrients by trading them with fungi networks. The whole thing is quite amazing to read about. Once I understood how the system worked, I vowed to not till ever again.
So instead of tilling, I laid down silage tarps to kill all the weeds and get the soil prepped while the fencing was under construction. This was surprisingly effective.
While the tarps were doing their job, we then had to produce an enormous amount of wood chip mulch to try the Back to Eden gardening method pioneered by Paul Gautschi, whose homestead I talked about here. Living on a lot of acreage, most of it forested, getting the trees was not a problem. We have more deadfall laying around than we could reasonably process in a lifetime.
I didn’t want to import wood chips because I’m somewhat paranoid about the inputs we put into our homestead. Almost everything is laced with pesticides these days. Without knowing what the trees had been exposed to, I didn’t want to get possibly contaminated wood chips for our garden, so I chipped some of the smaller trees and branches myself with our small PTO-driven tractor-mounted wood chipper, and then eventually had to hire a company that bought out a much larger chipper and did in one day what would have taken me months.
Mulching the Garden
Moving around hundreds of cubic feet of mulch by hand is hard work - luckily, I have a tractor with a bucket to help out. A 1 minute trip in the tractor replaces an hour of shoveling wood chips and dragging them around in a hand cart.
After dumping them, spreading them out is easy - you just use a rake, like Paul does. It’s relatively light exercise and feels strangely meditative. I can see the appeal of Japanese Zen gardens!
Planting
This weekend we’re hoping to start putting some plants and seeds in the ground!
Hopefully things will slow down around here in a little bit and I’ll have time to post more. Then again, we’re getting our first flock of sheep next week and some livestock guardian dog puppies to go with them, so maybe not.