Garden Update or the Blessings of Black Gold

The last couple of weekends have been filled with garden stuff.  In some ways it was rather discouraging as the "soil" where we planned our garden was more subsoil than top soil. We asked a friend with a tractor powered rototiller to till it up after I plowed it under. We later went over it again with a walk behind tiller. Even with bags of peat moss added to the soil along with horse and chicken  manure it still didn't show much in the way of tilth or sustainability. We had resigned ourselves to having to fertilize with 10-10-10 until we could get the soil much improved.   Today while at the farmers market, we ran into a friend who is a professional organic gardner. As we caught up on all things garden, he mentioned that they had gotten a truck load of leaf mold from the city, for free. He said it was really old stuff and would be ideal for our poor garden soil. This got our wheels turning and we headed toward the secret location to see what we could find.  What we found was a huge mound of old, double-ground leaves the city picks up each fall from home owners,  all piled up and breaking down into glorious black dirt. The bottom of the pile is probably 3-4 years old and looks like black top soil.

 The pile is 10-12 feet high and covers a good sized city lot. If your city/town picks up leaves each fall, I bet you have this source as well.

 So this is what it looks like by the truck load. In my truck, that translates into seven wheel barrows full of really rich, dark soil amendment.  I took this to the garden where Lisa and I  mixed it into our raised beds by hand so that she could plant tomatoes she has raised from seed. Today, she planted 13 Cherokee Purple tomato plants and 14 Amish paste plants as well as a  pablano pepper plant.

 Our garden is quite large this year as we''ve added 8 additional raised beds along with the existing beds from previous years that are located over by the barn. This is Lisa planting the Amish Paste with the Cherokee Purple already in the ground. The bed to the left has not received any amendments at the time of this photo.Compare it to the bed Lisa is working in.

 That ground looks significantly different with the addition of the leaf mold and other goodies.

 Notice how Lisa plants each of her babies with tender loving attention. I think Lisa is relieved that we finally have some plants in the ground. We planted potatoes last weekend but haven't seen anything above ground yet.