These last four days have been frustrating, exciting, skeptical, frantic, depressing, energetic, and hopeful.
I told Chris that when we were done with this year he would be prepared to write a new book entitled something like So you want to grow vegetables on an acre of land, and decided to do this in the spring? Of course we didn’t think of this giant project in the fall, which puts us in an interesting situation. The ground would have been much easier to work if we had plowed last year, planted a few green manure crops and tilled them under, planted a winter crop, and then reworked it all again this spring.
But, we are complete novices and stuck with what we have – about a thousand seedlings that need to go in the ground.
The problem is that the soil is thick clay – when it dries it forms huge clumps and even the best tiller can’t break it up. We’ve found that the best time to till is actually when the soil is wet – contrary to most advice about working soil. The clay needs to absorb enough moisture to break up, but not so much that it’s just a sticky mess. Ideally, we’d be adding a lot of compost and peat to the soil, but since we don’t own the land, don’t know how long we’ll be working there, and don’t have a ton of money to throw around, we’re just working with what we have. We’ll be amending with compost and organic fertilizers eventually but right now we just need to get things in the ground!
Saturday we started our three sisters planting and got about 40 hills of squash and 40 hills of beans/corn in. Sunday we put in 50 broccoli transplants, and Monday 50 cauliflower. Chris spent today working the soil but incredible winds made for a tough day.
We’re hoping for rain tonight but the skies have started to clear up. If it does rain, the moisture will make the soil more workable so we can get more plants in this week. If not… well, we slave it out and do with it what we can! Our expectations have been lowered a bit, but even if we only get our transplants in we’ll have an incredible amount of food at the end of the summer.
