Gardening in a glacial moraine

Our landscape was created by the most recent glaciation. What this means for a gardener is learning how to deal with lots and lots of stones. I've already mentioned the bumper harvest of stones that I had while digging for potatoes, but I was only digging in the topsoil. The subsoil can be even stonier.

While double digging the little 3 ft square patches in my greenhouse, I kept one 5 gallon pail nearby for organic matter to be thrown on the compost pile. Another 5 gallon pail was nearby for the stones. Typically, I filled the stone pail halfway from one of the patches:

From Greenhouse

For those unfamiliar with the term, double digging requires removing a layer of topsoil then loosening the subsoil with a spading fork or similar tool. The topsoil is ultimately put back on top of the subsoil. (For a really good description of how to double dig, read "Grow More Vegetables..." by John Jeavons.)

So far so good, but there's a little challenge in a glacial moraine for the avid double digger. Namely lots of stones. The stones will be particularly challenging if the subsoil is seriously compacted. The spading fork will not do the job. I found that a six foot digging par (one long heavy piece of steel) was extremely helpful in loosening the soil before applying the spading fork. Additionally, it was helpful in removing stones like this one:

From Greenhouse

From Greenhouse

Good luck as you prepare for the next growing season!

New Garden Swale Construction

For much of this summer we pastured pigs on a slope in front of our house. It's a nice south-southeast facing hillside which should be pretty warm in the summer. Issues that we need to address include fertility and managing water for the plants as well as erosion control.

First, we set up the upper border of the pigs' fence on a contour line. Next time we'll do the same on the lower border, but it didn't work out this time. Next we turned the pigs loose to root up the soil, which took the most of the summer (it's a large area!) Once we moved the pigs, we were left with a very rough and pitted area loaded with stones and bushes that the pigs left behind. Also loaded with lots of organic matter. I was dreading leveling this by hand with my shovel and rake.

Fortunately, my brother John knows a guy who was willing to loan us a five foot wide PTO driven tiller. Last week John brought the tiller over and we hooked it up to the tractor. I've got to tell you, this is an impressive piece of equipment. Not that it does a complete job of soil preparation, because it doesn't, but it does do a good job of leveling the surface and loosening the top layer of the soil. This will do for a start, but we'll still need to do the old fashioned soil preparation.

In any case, I first ran the sub-soiler through the new garden (former pig pen) on contour. Next I picked up all of the visible stones and dug out the remaining bushes. Then the rototiller did it's job leveling the surface of the garden.

From this point, digging the swale at the top of the garden became a simple matter of raking the loosened soil downhill. Now our soil, as I've mentioned before, is sandy and gravelly. With this soil, a broad shallow swale is supposed to be better than a narrow deep swale, which would be more appropriate for clay soils. The till and rake process worked very well for creating the broad shallow swale for our sandy and gravelly soil. I don't think it would work for clay soil.

After the first pass of raking, I check the swale bottom for level with an A-frame level, then touched up the high spots with a walk-behind tiller and raked more soil out of the swale until the swale bottom was level for the entire length (at least 150 feet, but I haven't measured it yet.)

Here's the garden after tilling the soil, but before raking the swales:

From Garden Swales

You can see the pigs in their next pasture further down the hill.
Here's some detail of the swale about halfway through the job:

From Garden Swales

And here are a couple of photos of the completed swale:

From Garden Swales

From Garden Swales

Keeping Your Eyes Open

While digging yet more potatoes the other day, I came across this one:

From Fun With Local Food

Enjoy!

Digging Taters

Yesterday I spent some time digging potatoes in one of our potato patches. The total for two 40 foot rows: 53 lb potatoes & 162 lb stones. Considering all the soil preparation that I didn't do, the soil amendments that didn't go in, the rain we didn't get, and the maintenance that I didn't do, I'm not complaining.

Of course, the 162 lb of stones should have been a clue that the soil prep was non-existent. This patch gets double dug this fall then planted with something else. I'll also work to get more sunshine on the job by removing some boxelders this winter.

Greenhouse Complete

We finished the greenhouse this week. First, I continued the interior trench to the outside:

From Greenhouse

And dug it all the way to the concrete slab (which used to be our driveway but is being re-purposed.)

From Greenhouse

I piled the dirt from the original trench and some from the exterior trench approximately on contour just south of the greenhouse. The rest you can see piled next to the trench in the previous photo. Now that I've worked up the soil in both piles, I've begun planting herbs and mulching with some (free) straw from a local farmer. Aside from the herb layer, we'll be planting woody shrubs and small fruit and nut trees in this area. Already there is a volunteer plum in one of the beds, maybe some hazels and chestnuts this fall.

From Greenhouse

Now that we've installed the greenhouse film, the greenhouse is ready to plant our winter harvest plants, which will happen really soon. The planting that is, winter can wait a while.

Greenhouse

Yes, I've been quiet lately. Since I'm not employed (a fast growing minority), I've been busy gardening in the hope of having enough food to feed my family through the winter. By now it looks like we'll have enough. But just to be sure, we've moved our old greenhouse (which we formerly used as winter housing for our hens) much closer to the kitchen. We haven't put the plastic over the bare frame yet, but first we needed to do some digging. One challenge with a greenhouse, the only water that gets into it is water that you take in. So, I thought "why not store water in organic matter?" So, I started digging a trench through the path in the middle of the greenhouse.

From Greenhouse

Once the trench was half complete, my wife filled the first half of the trench with wood chips delivered by a local tree service (they are always looking for places to dump the chips and I'm perfectly willing to have them drop chips off at our place.)

From Greenhouse

Yesterday, I finished the trench.

From Greenhouse

And today filled the remainder with chips.

From Greenhouse

The beds for vegetables are between the patio blocks. I wonder how much we'll be able to grow and harvest in this space? I've been reading "Four-Season Harvest" and think that we'll get a nice supplement of cold hardy vegetables, but I'm not sure we'll keep going through winter with this setup.

One challenge with all that organic matter is that it's really, really dry right now. We'll need to get it super wet, or it will just suck all of the moisture out of the garden beds. Fortunately, we've been collecting rainwater and are currently draining one of the tanks into the path in the green house. Before the autumn rains set in, I intend to dig a path from the rainwater collection tank to the greenhouse so the overflow water from the tank can run through the path into the greenhouse. Provided we get enough rain. The summer has been unusually dry, so let's hope the autumn is better.

Sophisticated Automatic Mowers

Here's a photo of our sophisticated automatic mowers cleaning up the hillside next to our house.

From Micro Farming & Macro Gardening

We use portable electric netting from Premier to keep the sheep in control and safe.