Putting the garden in order
Mark and I are devoting this week to remedying a couple of major garden
mistakes we've made over the last year. The first mistake was
totally mine --- I let the weeds take over the garden in late fall last
year. In a traditional garden, this isn't a huge deal, but for
no-till it's a catastrophe since it means a major weed infestation the
next spring (right now.) Short of losing two year's soil
ecosystem growth by tilling, or buying masses of mulch to cover the
beds, the only solution is many days of hand weeding.
The second mistake was a joint mistake. We've
been working on burying our water line this winter, which meant digging
a two foot trench down the middle of the garden. Although I was
careful to lay out the trench in the aisles, lots of clay ended up
mounded on top of beds. The result was no visible aisle, so Lucy
started tromping all over the raised beds. And, of course, clay
on the raised beds is bad too. So we're mashing down the trench to turn
it back into an aisle, and in the process building up the raised beds
on either side with non-clay topsoil to make them more visible.
This is the real reason I hadn't planted my tomatoes yet --- they were
slated to go in this half of the garden and I was thoroughly
overwhelmed by the prospect of whipping it back into shape. I
melted down this weekend, and Mark decided it was time to fix the
garden if that's what it took to have his usual cheerful wife
back. Monday we whacked about a third of the upper garden back
into shape and I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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