This post would be great to show your six-year-old son.

We received a few inches of snow today. It should all melt in a few days. Chris spent most of the day today outside shoveling dirt… I helped for a couple of hours, but I have a slight foot injury right now which prevented me from doing too much work.

Following is a fun little gallery of pictures of our compost delivery. We received three truck loads (30 cubic yards total; 10 fit in one truck). Click on a picture to enlarge.

I’ll try to snap some pictures of the snow tomorrow… when the sun turns back on.

In April, 2010 we ordered two truck loads of compost from a company in Elk River, Minnesota. They helped the garden quite a bit. This fall, Chris decided to order three more truck loads (30 yards) before it snows, to give our garden an extra jump start next spring.

Puck checked it out. He approves. (This is him sitting in front of one truck load, 10 cubic yards).

Chris is putting in a new garden section, so this should help with that. We also cut out quite a bit of sod and top soil to prepare our current garden – and I put in a bunch of concrete block raised beds, so this black dirt will be nice to fill the rest of those in. It’s going to be a lot of work incorporating this, and hopefully the ground will stay free of snow for a couple more weeks so it will get done!

We’ve spent much of the weekend outside, working on cleaning up the yard and garden before it snows. I finally picked all of the carrots and onions, and they are stored for winter. The soil at our old house was mostly clay, so we’ve never had much luck with root crops. Now, we live on the “Anoka County Sand Plain” and the the root crops did well this year. The addition of compost helped a lot. We’re considering getting another load year but haven’t decided yet.

I should have picked the onions a while back, as they died off mid-summer and some were starting to grow shoots again. We go through a lot of onions in our house though, so I’m sure we’ll use those before they go bad. These were just the standard red, yellow, and white sets you pick up at any local garden store. One of the things I’d like to do next year is spend some time finding good varieties of onions that store well.

Last weekend I was getting kind of sick of our composting system (piling up compost behind the garden and blocking it off with skids so that Puck won’t eat it), and so I built this. It is made out of untreated 1×4 and 1×6 pine boards. Chris treated it with linseed oil after it was built. I picked up the boards in the standard/less than perfect pile for next to nothing at Menard’s last Saturday.

I’ve been neglecting our blog a bit because I’ve been very busy working… and also, we are planning a kitchen remodel this month! This means that during prime canning and freezing time, we won’t have a working kitchen in our house. Hmm. Not sure if that will be an issue or not.

I finally ripped out all of my zucchini plants, and planted peas where they were. Hopefully we’ll have sugar snap peas in September and October, if the frost holds off long enough!

Flowering Onion (click for a close-up)

We’ve never had much luck growing onions or other root crops.

In Morris, our soil was too heavy, and root crops were leafy at best. We ate a lot of beet greens, actually! When we moved to the “Great Anoka Sand Plain,” I was excited to see how our carrots, onions, and potatoes would turn out.

Two weeks later we finished spreading the compost and tilling the garden.

Jessi’s half is on the left; Chris’s half is on the right. Let the games begin!

One long weekend, sunshine, and several shovels full of dirt turned the giant mounds of compost pictured in my last post into this:

We actually expanded the garden a bit this year, so the first step was renting a sod cutter, and removing more grass. Then we spread the compost, amended the dirt with lime, rock phosphate, and green sand … and Chris tilled! This is only half of the garden – there’s still another pile to be dealt with.

We got a second arbor, which I put up this weekend along with some sections of the fence. It’s getting there… I’m hoping to find time to dig out the rows in this half (“my garden”) this week and start planting next weekend. Chris already has one row in “his garden” planted.

Last year, we amended our new, sandy garden with seven pickup truck loads of compost from the Free Compost Site in our county.

Since then, the truck was sold for $300 (it was worth nearly every penny, too…), we moaned and groaned about the sand, and had a mediocre garden.

Here is a bed in the back I tilled under. I planted rye late last summer (or was it fall?), but it didn’t take too well. I think I should have watered. Over to the left is a bed of garlic which must’ve died with the weird weather we had. I stupidly forgot to put any straw on top. Oh well. I talked to Herman the allium man a few weeks ago and I plan to do a fair amount of garlic this fall. UPDATE: I saw what I can only imagine is two little garlic sprouts when I was out today.

Thats the compost. For those of you that aren’t all that acquainted with compost I can assure you it doesn’t smell. I mean it used to smell really bad, especially when I put a bunch of flour in there, but if you do it right it is an aeorobic process and not an anaerobic one (like remember in gym class how they said jogging is aerobic and lifting weights is like anaerobic? it has something to do with oxygen, I guess).

Speaking of oxygen, I am also going to use some of this stuff to make compost tea, which believe it or not entails me putting some compost in a cloth bag and putting that in a bucket filled with water. Then you run one of those oxygenator deals you see in a fish tank and some time passes and you sleep and eat and everything, maybe a couple times, and then you’ve brewed yorself some nutritious tea*.

I have been slowly learning the dos and don’ts of compost and I think we’ll truck this stuff out to the big garden to start a new compost pile. I need a good compost book. I am reading Sir Albert Howard’s book
An Agricultural Testament about the indore process and whatnot. Maybe that’ll help.

Update: we planted some blue potatos in the bed pictured above. We are going to plant all our potatos at home.

*The tea is for plants. I probably won’t drink any.

This morning we worked some composted manure, kelp meal, and our regular compost into the beds in the back yard. I think we officially have “raised beds” now – even after all this rain, the soil was fairly loose and it was pretty easy to work the compost in. We planted carrots, beets, and onions in the back; we also planted cilantro, mint, and flat-leaf parsley in containers sitting in the front yard. I want to get half of our beans in the ground, but I think I’ll wait until we get a trellis built up for them. I’ve read mixed things on timing of bean planting, but I know we planted them too late last year. I’m thinking late-may, and a second planting a few weeks after that.