Every year my dad plants a vegetable garden, sometimes a few flowers. This year he wasn’t feeling quite as strong as in the past, so was unable to put quite so much effort into it. Still, it produced a huge number of tomatoes, banana peppers and okra. We had a few crooked neck yellow squash but they didn’t do well. The eggplants weren’t too enthusiastic, and some of the tomatoes never produced at all. We have a half dozen cucumbers so far. Lots of onions, but most didn’t do too well. The cantaloupes are coming along.
Right now dad isn’t available, so my wife and I took over tending the garden. I spent several days just pulling weeds and grass. Then we slowly cleared the non-producing plants. Right now, about one-third of the main garden plot is empty, so I chopped up all the plants we pulled, plus some grass clippings and such, and let them dry on the empty portion. Today I turned all that under.
The problem we have here is the soil is a light layer of sand on top of red clay. So I’m turning it over as deep as the shovel will cut one time and chopping it up. Then I’m adding one heavy layer of mulch from the trees ground up a couple years ago in our trailer park. I keep it all wet and leave it for a week or so. Then I’ll turn it all under again, and add another layer. Over the winter, I’m hoping this will break down and make next year’s garden plot more like potting soil instead of a clay pan.
I’m doing this with hand tools. I chop the silage with a pair of short limb snippers. The mulch I tote about a half-mile in a large plastic barrel on a hand truck. It’s a good work out. Every day I give it an hour or so in the morning, then a similar effort in the evening before I water it. This is pretty good, since I’m not able to get to my usual make-shift gymnasium, and I can’t do any work on my trails until the first freeze kills off the deer ticks.
It won’t hurt the soil, of course. I’m trying to create a bit of a raised bed above the grass in the yard, so I’ll keep adding that black tree mulch until it’s up at least a couple of inches. Sometime during the winter I’m also going to add some cedar and pine clippings, because the soil is very basic here. There’s plenty of conifers along my fitness trail, and I’ve already piled some dead limbs from last year. Provided it’s still our garden next spring, we’ll plant stuff more typical of Central Oklahoma that we like: carrots, radishes, green beans, tomatoes bred specifically for local conditions, but we want to try the squash again, maybe some turnips, a couple heads of lettuce, and whatever else make good natural companions with those. Depending on how the cantaloupes turn out, I might do that again.
Naturally, it’s pretty good for the soul, too. I enjoy working with he soil, but I prefer to do it pretty much alone, and the way I want it. I would not enjoy nearly so much working someone else’s ideas. I’m that way on a lot of things, though hardly everything. When it comes to computers, I’m all about customer service, for example. But for something like gardening, I need to work alone mostly.
Given the way the economy is going, it might make a big difference for us in the next few years.
I agree with you all the way. There is something about working in a garden that gives you this special sense of accomplishment found nowhere else; at least for me.