Spring Soil Fertility

All weekend we’ve been preparing garden beds, spreading compost, tilling, marking, and even found time for a little planting.  Unfortunately our splendid new equipment we raved about in a previous post let us down, and we had to resort to doing some of the work by hand.  It was pretty tiring, but heck, it builds character!

To get even coverage over the whole planting area, we use the tractor to load the bed of the pick-up with compost.

Our compost comes from Texas Organic. It’s a relatively new compost business in East Texas and we’re crazy about it. We’ve used their organic compost for two seasons now and we’re sold. It has no chemicals, and contains all kinds of healthy bacteria to boost our own soil’s microbial activity.  Compost is a crucial source of nutrition to your soil. By feeding the microbes living in your soil, you in turn feed the plants that will later be growing there.  Chemical fertilizers provide your plants with the crucial basic nutrients of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium, but they do nothing to build your soil health for long-term, sustainable growth. Not to mention, healthy soil makes it less likely for the plants to develop viruses or other bacterial diseases.  If you fill the soil with good stuff, you’ll crowd out the bad stuff! If you want a great garden, don’t focus on your plants, focus on feeding your soil.

Once the truck is loaded down, we drive it slowly, slowly through the garden.  Justin spreads several shovelfuls onto the bed and covers about a 6 foot area, before he hollers from the back for me to creep along a bit more. It’s very stop-start-stop-start, and we cover two passes of the garden before going back for another truck load. My job is especially grueling- sitting in the drivers’ seat listening to the radio and sipping coffee.

We get a light, even coverage of nutrition over the whole growing space in preparation for this week’s plantings of snap peas and fava beans.  We also spread additional soil amendments such as bone meal, and other minerals that will feed our plants all spring. In coming posts, I’ll show you how we plant our garden!  First round of kale, broccoli, and more are going in the ground soon!