I've got some early corn and I want to get it in the ground ASAP. Corn likes the soil to be around 85° and currently my soil is stuck around 62°. Black plastic sheeting should increase the temp at least 10° (I hope!) I sued my new "corn bed" to test this out.
So far it's been disappointing, actually not seeing any temperature increase at all. I find this perplexing to be honest, I don't understand how this can work for farmers all around the world but not for me. Maybe my thermometer is broken! ;0)
I chipped away the perimeter of the bed to pull soil away, then lay the plastic down and drag the soil back up to the edge to hold the plastic down. That's a long sentence.
I need to get some seeds in the ground and I need them in the sun! Problem is, most of my beds are spoken for and the ones that are free are not receiving enough sun yet. The solution was to dig up more grass and add more beds. I had some hire help on this one because it's a ton of work and I wanted it done in one day.
Alberto and I worked as a team on the screen to break up the sod and remove the mesh backing. The sod was pretty dry which makes it considerably less work as the dirt doesn't cling together as much.
The North side (where the rake is) will be a corn bed this spring/summer. The long East-West bed will be beans and tomato.
Even with the additional help it took 5 hours to get the beds completed.
Like the other beds, it's a mix of existing soil, the soil from
the sod, Bumper Crop amendment and coffee grounds.
Good for nothing...
The largest of the new beds with coffee ground top
dressing.
Another full day of work, started early and had the second large bed complete by 2:45pm. After a cold bud I moved on to running some more material through the shredder and finally wrapped up with a little compost work. Of course I had the camera out and was taking time lapse of everything, videos included below.
It hit 86 degrees Today and I'm sunburned - only in southern California. Too bad the people and politics suck so bad...
Seedlings doing well, first true leaves starting to pop out which means it's almost time for fertilizer. I'm also realizing that I will need to transplant these guys up to something a little larger if I'm going to keep them indoors for another 4-5 weeks. I should also start another round of sowing in preparation of succession plantings.
I need a garden plan quick.
Another time lapse - I CAN'T figure out why the camera is moving, it was securely mounted
Gorillapod clenching (very!) rigid piece of maple (tightly!) clamped to wall cap -
this camera was NOT moving, so WHY are my pictures moving?
Once again... seriously under estimated the amount of work to complete a job. I've been moaning on about the need to correct the bed soil, to remove the clods and mesh, blah blah blah. Today was my day, I woke up early, coffee to the brain and got to work. Oh, and of course I setup my camera for some time lapse goodness.
Including minor distractions by Kevin stopping by to get tools and BS and my super awesome Mom coming over to help cleanup the farm - I spent EIGHT HOURS on a single row. If I was an employee I would be fired I think. Actually no, I worked my butt off, it's just a lot more work than I thought.
BEFORE - Chunks of sod held together by plastic mesh
I was encouraged to see so many worms in the soil and I'm sure the decomposing sod attracted them. I did my best to kill as few as possible but it's tough, and good worms did die Today. It was so rewarding to see the result of all that work; this beautiful, fluffy dark soil teeming with fat worms. While I was at it I dumped 5 bags of amendment and sprinkled a bit of green sand.
AFTER - fluffy, rich soil packed with worms!
(photo doesn't do it justice...)
My Mom came over because she wanted to help out, she's worried that I'm working too hard and maybe she thinks I've bit off more than I can (or care to) chew. Maybe she's right? Either way, she showed up, jumped into action and cleaned up the leaves, plucked grass seedlings from my already-growing beds, moved a half bale of hay, helped me move my 3 large clay pots packed with wet soil and blueberry bushes, picked some weeds from planters, trimmed my geraniums by my back door and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. She enjoyed it and I always enjoy having her around, she's cool, we BS and drink together. I'm fortunate, thanks Mom!
Note to Steve: MS movie maker appears to have a 2GB size limit on clips - your (brilliant!) solution was to render out sections to keep the file size down. Also, no, you can't change clip duration, need to change options then re-add to timeline. Movie maker is lame.
I ordered ~2 yards of "Bumper Crop"(lame website) soil amendment for my beds. I'm concerned that after I remove all the sod pieces and associated soil that I'll be robbing my beds of substantial nutrients. To offset this I purchased enough of this highly rated amendment to add 4" to all my beds.
24 2cu. ft. bags delivered at no charge by Flowerdale nursery. I paid $9.99 a bag and they throw in an extra bag for every 5 you buy. This works out to $8.33 a bag or $4.17 a foot! OR... $112.39 a yard. Compared to the material yard compost at $20-30 a yard this seems expensive, if you consider that the cheap stuff contains god-knows-what then I think it's worth it. I don't want compost created from sod from a closed golf course that received Roundup treatments for 3 months before being removed. Organic ain't easy and it ain't cheap.
Bumper crop contains composted:
Forest Humus
Chicken Manure
Worm Castings
Bat Guano
Kelp Meal
Oyster Shell
Dolomite Lime
As I screen the clods and sod mesh from the beds I'll be tossing in copious amounts of amendment. I've got 2-3 yards of homemade compost in the pipeline and expect finished product in 4-5 weeks which I'll top everything off with.
I'm becoming more and more interested in the French intensive methods of gardening and considering slicing off a small area in the yard to experiment with this more. I may do a bit of interning over at Flowerdale nursery where Carlos is using the French intensive method exclusively; his beds look awesome, much more aesthetically appealing than traditional row methods.
I mixed up the special soil blend for my new blueberry bushes. I'm planting the blueberries in containers for easy control of pH and other soil properties; apparently blueberries require a low (4.5 - 5.5 pH) and also benefit from a soil with actively decomposing organic materials. It's much easier to create conditions like that in a container that in the ground. I found a recipe online somewhere that called for the following:
1/3 small bark (1/4")
1/3 Acidic potting mix (like the kind for azaleas)
1/3 sphagnum peat moss
handful of soil sulfur (drops the pH even further)
More on the blueberries later, in the meantime I made another time lapse!
Note to Steve: MS Movie Maker crashes when making time lapse movies. Use PhotoLapse to generate uncompressed AVI (HUGE file) then import than into moviemk for titling and final render.
A few days ago I decided that I needed to correct the soil being used in my beds before I transplant or sow. Turned out to be a blessing that none of my friends responded to my call for help because my plan failed big time!
I set everything up as I had envisioned and was feeling pretty good about it until I had the first shovel load in the screen - way too wet and sticky. The organic materials from the sod, the green mesh backing and the dirt all clumped together like adobe.
After about 1.5 hours I had processed 3 loads and decided to call it quits for the day. The only way I was able to make it work was to beat individual clumps against the mesh to loosen them up, then I would kneel and smack the underside of the screen which would send the clods bouncing around and as they came down again they would shed a bit of their attached soil. Stupid, totally and completely stupid.
A few Budweisers set me down the path to a potential solution, I pre-dug the bed (as seen to the right of the horse) to expose it to sunlight and hopefully let it dry out a bit. I'm hoping that if it's a bit more dry it will work as originally planned. If I can't get this done by the end of this weekend I will dig it all out and replace with purchased soil and amendments - I hope it doesn't come to that.
