After last year, our first year having a garden, we determined to do things much better this year. We kind of threw our garden together at the last minute last year. On the bright side we did learn a lot out of our failures. Not everything was a failure. We did get a better harvest than we expected from the haphazard way we threw our garden together. But this year is going to be different, we hope.
We have done a lot of things to fix our pH, which we believe to have been a major problem with our garden last year. In the fall, we burned a large pile of brush we had collected and spread the ash over the garden. We also tilled in a bag of lime. At last check, our pH was between 6.0 and 6.5. A huge improvement over the 5.0 we had in the fall.
Next, we decided that we needed more organic matter. Lots of compost. We built a compost bin last summer and have done a good job of throwing in our waste in the bin. Unfortunately, we had a lot more grass clippings and not enough leaves and vegetable waste to make a good balance for composting. It also did not get turned as regularly as it should have, and the biggest problem I think was that it was not wet enough most of the year. So, due to those factors, we have not gotten very much home made compost to add to the garden.
Continue reading “Winter Chores: Preparing The Garden Soil”