amendments

To cultivate the garden bed a few inches deeper, a second tilling was undertaken. In all the depth of cultivation is about 6-7." A yard of compost and a yard of topsoil are added to increase organic matter and to ameliorate the clay content of the soil (gypsum also helps with this). Next the amendments are added. These include granulated limestone, phosphate, greensand and gypsum, all broadcast on the surface of the bed and then tilled into the first few inches of the soil. All that remains to do is refine the design drawn out on paper and hope for another dry day to plant.

In the course of tilling, numerous feeder roots from the nearby pine trees were found wending their way only a few inches beneath the surface of the soil. Trees, being advantageous organisms, seek out the most easily found nutrients. As many roots as were found were removed, but always to keep in mind is the fact that our vegetables will be competing with the nearby trees for nutrients as well as light (at certain times of day). We'll try to keep this in mind while choosing where to plant certain varieties more tolerant of shade, and fertilize (with compost) throughout the season based on observations of how the plants are growing and competing.

Sifting The Day Away

A bit of balmy spring weather culled Nathan, Galen and I outside to finish the sifting of the new grow space today. It's certainly a relief to have all that hard labor out of the way. Now we can start to focus on how our vegetables will be situated in the garden. We' still need to turn the soil of last year's grow space and move the compost pile to the other side of the concrete path, but that will be cake comparatively. To sift the remainder of the soil, we used the wire mesh we'll be employing later to build a new composter. The mesh is a 5'x3' piece of 1/4" hardware cloth you can find at your local hardware store. Four zip-ties are used to hold it together. It's placed on the ground, loaded with clumps of grass and rolled around until the majority of the dirt is separated from the grass.

Nathan later managed to escape from his mesh prison.

Prepping: Continued

Aaron and I braved the cold/rain yesterday to work on sifting grass roots from the newly turned garden space. This is definitely the most labor-intensive aspect of setting up an urban garden (don't get discouraged now!). Luckily we have relatively good soil to work with (i.e. very few rocks and no major roots from the nearby hedges). We still need to sift about half of the new area, which will have to wait until more amicable weather presents itself. Here are some pictures of vegetable seedlings we have under way:


Seeds-eye view of brocolli (left) and tomatoes
(at right) planted 3/5/09



The seedling station in our basement. Seedlings are fragile so it's important to keep them warm (70 degrees or so) and under plenty of light. Seeds germinate best at the same temperature. Our lights are kept on 18 hours a day. At left is my GlowPanel 45, an LED grow light that uses only 45 watts and seems to be giving the plants just the right spectrum they need. The fixtures to the right are compact fluorescent bulbs rated 5000K (2 at 13 watts and 1 at 30 watts). Underneath the table is a two bulb (40 watts each) T-12 shop light fixture with regular cool white bulbs. As long as your lights don't produce too much heat, you'll want to keep them as close to the plants as possible (usually within 6 inches or so) to prevent them from becoming spindly. If you're planning on starting an outdoor garden this year, it's not too late to start planting seeds indoors. Carpe Diem.

Prepping the grow space

Last year's garden was a bit underwhelming (we still had plenty of zucchinis). Though I've been gardening since I was a small child, it was my first full-fledged foray into small-scale urban agriculture. This year we're more than doubling the grow space. So far we've roto-tilled about half of the new area and today we will (attempt to) tackle the rest (weather permitting).

Some pictures of the initial tilling from a few weeks ago:

Nathan starting to till


Me, David and Nathan hacking it up (yeah I'm wearing slippers)


Clumps of grass and dirt which we'll now sift to remove unwanted roots