Leaves

My neighbour's property is a leaf magnet. Although the surrounding houses have some leaves this time of the year, their house would be knee deep in leaves were they not diligent in raking and bagging them.

Fortunately leaves are great mulch: helping soil retain moisture, preventing erosion, suffocating weeds and minimizing soil compaction where we walk. If we incorporate leaves in beds, particularly shredded leaves, that helps to enrich the soil. Last year we added 100 bags of leaves into the paths and beds.

This morning, I took my neighbour's first seven bags of the year to Riel House and distributed them along the central path in the Produce Garden. Last year's mulch had disintegrated over the summer.

First seven bags - October 2015

About 2/3 of the central path covered - 2015

Ain't No Mountain High Enough: Moving Manure Part 2

When you put a former IT manager and an accountant/educator together, everything immediately turns into process. How can activities be effective and efficient? How do you employ the correct resources at the right time? How do you stop from running into each other?

So even though this is gardening, here's what we've learned about process after just one morning of manure work:

• two people are required at a minimum.
• recognize that fifteen yards of manure must be dumped outside of a fenced in garden with raised beds. In our case, the distance to be traveled from pile to bed and back is up to 200 feet.
• ask for aged manure that has been sieved. Since ours wasn't sieved, separate the big lumps as you are loading the good manure to be moved. The big lumps go in a storage area that already contains almost-ready soil, compost and leaves.
• transport the good manure in four 21L pails(.75 cubic feet) inside a wheel barrow (6 cubic feet) since it is too hard to unload this size of wheelbarrow in the constrained space between rows and up in raised beds
• each person loads two pails all the while separating the big lumps.
• the first person takes the manure into the beds and dumps the individual pails then exits the garden and returns to the pile. Once each bed is full (currently sixteen pails), rake the manure over the entire bed.
• the second person keeps the source pile neat, rakes the manure on either side of the loading area all the while looking for more large lumps for the storage area. 
• We anticipate it takes half an hour to top off each of our beds with the manure.
• If there are more than two people, the third person rakes the raised beds.
• If there are more than three people, then the fourth person helps at the pile, either moving big lumps to the storage area, or keeping the pile organized. If you have another four pails, then these could be loaded for the returning first person and wheelbarrow.
• If there are more than four people, more wheelbarrows! More pails!

Moving Manure

Today, we started to move the manure into the Produce Garden beds.The rake in the first picture defines the original perimeter of the pile. We moved about 1 1/2 yards of the 15 yards.Hmmmm 10%. We have a ways to go.

Here's the pile when we finished today:

Here's the pile when we started:

 

September Precipitation: Nine Inches More than 1886

And still this year's soil seems dry when we dig into it.

You can see below that this year's lows float along close to highs in 1886. Global warming?

 See References for all weather comparisons since April.

Manure, Glorious Manure!

If worms could sing, it would be "Food, Glorious Food!" from Oliver. But I digress.

Here's what fifteen yards of aged cow manure looks like:

You can see Produce Garden Beds 1-16 in the background are eagerly awaiting this feast.

We will place the manure on top of the beds, add shredded leaves on top of that, then water. The worms inside the beds will surface through these two new layers, grab something to eat, and then dive back down to consume and poop what they have just retrieved. Like dolphins. And that's how we make better soil!

After this first load, we'll order another fifteen yards to go into Beds 17-28 plus the Kitchen Garden. If we've underestimated, then a third load is required. 

Oh, we'll also add unshredded leaves into the paths to protect where we walk, and to help soak up rainwater that will slowly percolate under the raised beds - and keep the beds moist from underneath.

Soil Sampling in the Produce Garden.

Trying to get the soil sampler into a bed that hasn't been raised.

Today, we took fourteen soil samples (Beds 1 4 5 8 9 12 13 16 17 20 21 24 25 28) from the Produce Garden. We needed to do this before we started to spread manure on all the beds later this week. 

It was a "reasonable" effort to drive the soil sampler into Beds 1-8, which were the raised corn beds this year. Beds 9-16, the raised potato beds, were easy to retrieve the soil sample. The ease with which to get the samples from Beds 17-28 depended on whether we had raised the beds since the harvest of September 16. The recently raised beds were similar in effort to the corn beds. The beds that have not yet been raised proved difficult to insert the sampler. I was concerned with either breaking the horizontal plate or the vertical shaft as I levered the sampler into the ground.

When we attempted to take samples last spring (before we began raising the beds), it was very difficult to insert the sampler into the soil. Then it was almost impossible to get the sampler out of the ground. Then we couldn't get the sample out of the sampler. We gave up. Going forward, we'll take samples in the fall, and then compare them to previous years to see how we're doing.

Now we mix up the 14 samples to achieve a consistent soil mix, then select two pounds (the size of a freezer bag). That's what gets submitted to the lab for soil testing.

I'll report back once we have results.