Bed prep is hard work! This is what we are learning this week. The good news is that many hands make light work, so bed prep is a great opportunity for everyone in the garden to participate. The jobs are many and diverse, so all folks can lend a hand. The picture above is of a bed housing last season's plants that we will soon harvest. There are peas on the fence and
fava beans in the front. When we prep this bed we will 'dig' in the
favas, because they are part of the pea family and fix the nitrogen in the soil.
This is a bed that is freshly double dug. Double digging is a method of bed prep that's good to use when you want to yield the maximum amount of food from a small space. It is great for urban gardens because you can amend the bed as you dig and do not need to take out all the soil to turn the bed. We amended this bed with a mixture of straw and goat manure, worm castings, and vegetable matter. The soil really changed its constitution: when we began digging it was dry and compacted, and after digging and amending it became rich, dark, and loamy.
This is another bed after we prepped it. The prep took us 3 hours! It looks different from the second picture because we broke up all the clumps and smoothed it out with a rake, and then shaped it into mounds. Bed prep is laborious, but very much worth it. After the community effort, we all felt very satisfied. This bed is now a home to baby squash and flowers. The flowers are at the perimeter of the bed and the squash live at the top of the mounds. We will soon plant tomatoes along the fence so they can vine up it, and also along the perimeter so they can hang off the side of the box. It it fun to grow the same plants in different ways to see how they thrive. I enjoy gardening because while there are many skills to learn, much can be said about imagination and experimentation. I try to always keep an open mind and listen to what the plants are telling me!
Bed prep is hard work! This is what we are learning this week. The good news is that many hands make light work, so bed prep is a great opportunity for everyone in the garden to participate. The jobs are many and diverse, so all folks can lend a hand. The picture above is of a bed housing last season's plants that we will soon harvest. There are peas on the fence and fava beans in the front. When we prep this bed we will 'dig' in the favas, because they are part of the pea family and fix the nitrogen in the soil.
This is a bed that is freshly double dug. Double digging is a method of bed prep that's good to use when you want to yield the maximum amount of food from a small space. It is great for urban gardens because you can amend the bed as you dig and do not need to take out all the soil to turn the bed. We amended this bed with a mixture of straw and goat manure, worm castings, and vegetable matter. The soil really changed its constitution: when we began digging it was dry and compacted, and after digging and amending it became rich, dark, and loamy.
This is another bed after we prepped it. The prep took us 3 hours! It looks different from the second picture because we broke up all the clumps and smoothed it out with a rake, and then shaped it into mounds. Bed prep is laborious, but very much worth it. After the community effort, we all felt very satisfied. This bed is now a home to baby squash and flowers. The flowers are at the perimeter of the bed and the squash live at the top of the mounds. We will soon plant tomatoes along the fence so they can vine up it, and also along the perimeter so they can hang off the side of the box. It it fun to grow the same plants in different ways to see how they thrive. I enjoy gardening because while there are many skills to learn, much can be said about imagination and experimentation. I try to always keep an open mind and listen to what the plants are telling me!
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