What a beautiful day! We have days in May that aren’t this nice. Spring may be early, but I’m not going to rush to get seeds into the ground yet. A day like today can set me into frantic garden fever, and the result is I want to do everything at once. What? The neighbor’s planting lettuce? I should be planting lettuce! No, instead I’m trying to just **breath** pace myself and enjoy the process.
Today I prepped the first bed for seeding in the next couple weeks – peas, spinach, maybe chard or potatoes.
I prepped the bed with: Approx. 2 cups of organic fertilizer, a couple inches of compost and a healthy sprinkling of lime (calcium carbonate). I used a shovel, then a manure fork to loosen and mix to a depth of about one shovel length. I could go deeper (and I will where I plant the potatoes) but for peas and spinach, this will be adequate. The result is a bit messy, but I’ll clean it up and lay a top layer of compost when I plant.
The straw is a remnant of a “lasagna” gardening technique I tried last fall. I layered newspaper on top of the bed with droppings from the chicken coop, straw and lime. It has reduced weeds for sure. I may do it again this fall… we’ll see. With chickens constantly disturbing it, a lot of the straw didn’t decompose.
I ended up planting potatoes in this bed. Hopefully it will be a good spot – pretty loose soil, and peas grew there last year, adding nutrients back in.