Massive Garden Expansion Underway!

Over the winter, I've finally convinced my family of the value of organic gardening. A single 2 square meter plot had managed to produce over 100 lbs of food last year using permaculture methods. As such I got the go ahead to expand the area of my little gardening experiment by four folds. So on sunday, I made a go at it. And it was rough going to be sure.

First the old plot had to be enriched. The two square meter plot was dug up to a depth of some 6 inches. The top soil was collected into a huge pile besides the plot. Then a layer of leaf mulch weighing some 30 lbs was packed into the plot and beaten down with the handy shovel until it was compressed firmly along the ground! Now this technique accomplishes two things. The packed leaf mulch(which had been composting since last november) provides a hard base with which weeds will have trouble breaking through. Additionally, over the coming months, worms will eat through the decomposing leaves and return the nutrients back into the soil, adding to the amount of top soil on that plot by several inches. After this was done, the removed topsoil was mixed with 40 lbs of black organic compost(half a bin) which had been sitting in the 2 composting bins for the last 9 months. This blended mixture was then applied back into the packed garden bed. The resulting garden bed was then lightly tilled to an even depth of 8 inches of topsoil/compost mixture. This took some 2 hours of hard digging and tilling.

After a short lunch break, I began the construction of a second garden bed. The progress was quite slow. Each and every shovel brought forth a broken piece of turf about 6x6 inches in area. The square of turf had to have it's attendent sod shaken out by hand. The sod is of course valuable top soil that needs to be collected to build the bed. At the end of all the extraction, the piece of turf was just a tangled mass of grass and roots with a little bid of soil left. Under the hot sun, the manual labor was quite exhausting. This de-turfing took over an hour and resulted in some 30 pieces of turf along with it's attendent soil. Then came the painful process of digging up the actual bed. Some six inches of soil had to be removed from the garden bed. That translated into over 60 lbs of top soil. Unfortunately, the geography of the Northeastern U.S dictates that the soil be rocky as all hell. A single 2 square meter garden bed yielded over 20 lbs of rocks(lodged in hard to extract angles) which had to be tediously levered out with the trusty spade.

After the top soil had been extracted into a nearby pile, the packing begins anew. Instead of wasting the valuable turf, I chose to put it towards good use. Take a piece of turf and turn it upside down, there's exactly enough flipped turf squares to cover the garden bed. This packing accomplishes 3 things at once. Firstly, it inhibits weed growth. Secondly, it attracts beneficial organisms such as worms and arthropodes. Because the upside down turf dies within a day, that entire layer becomes in effect a compost pile. Both worms and centipedes eats the decaying matter and produces valuable organic fertilizer. And lastly, the packing of the turf inhibits one dangerous organism, the tiger beetle larva. These little critters specializes in the consumption of living roots. The turf, once flipped and packed, can no longer serve as a viable food source for them. Thus, within a week or so, all the tiger larvas must either move away from the area or starve to death. After the packing was finished, I spent another hour mixing the extracted top soil with the remaining half bin of enriched fertilizer with the handly rotational plow. After the mixing, there was only some nitrogen rich sludge at the bottom of compost bin number 1, I had exhausted 50% of my compost supply with the 2 garden beds. The soil/compost mixture was then placed back onto the packed bed and roto-plowed to break up the larger lumps of soil. After this step, the bed was tilled to an even depth.


The 2nd bed took over 4 man hours to construct from start to finish. After the deed was done, I drove to the local Agway to buy some heirloom saplings which had been started off in green houses. Vegetable/flower saplings, thus started, could mature earlier and produce food several weeks earlier than normal if transplanted into the garden beds. While there I picked up some onion chive flowers and cabbage transplants for 4 dollars of hard currency. These saplings I'll have to keep indoors for another 2 weeks before the transplant can occur. Here in PA, killing frosts usually dissapear after mid april. That's it for this week. Next week I shall begin the construction of two new garden beds!