With so much native, freely growing food around us, it hardly seems necessary to plant a garden, but we’re excited to do so anyway.
Not long after we moved, we trimmed a section of a field and covered it with an old, very large, billboard tarp to kill off the weeds, etc. below. That should have been there for about a month or two, but with the busyness of fixing the house it ended up being there for closer to 10 months. For the past month or so we’ve been figuring out the best way to get wood chips. When our van broke down, we picked up a used truck and made trips filling the whole bed with wood chips. To prepare the garden we chopped it up with a mattock and then got down on hands and knees to pull out the large stones (LOTS of stones in the Ozarks) and weed roots. It’s been a slow and tiring process, but also a joy to do it together with the boys and very fulfilling to see it getting done, and the pile of stones growing larger and larger. We then mixed in a decent layer of decomposed cow manure. (We are surrounded by cow pastures, so this is easy to come by.) Finally topping it off with a thick layer of wood chips. (We’re shooting for about 4-6 inches over the whole garden to suppress weeds and breakdown to build the soil year after year.)
One fear was that with the tarp having been on for so long (too long), that the soil would be dead underneath. This was far from reality. We found it to be very much alive! There are tons of worms. With each swing of the mattock, we find a whole new crowd of worms! Wonderful! The weeds and grass had broken down, and the worms and various soil critters had been turning it all into wonderful soil!
We’ve been doing it in sections and hope to finish the last section today. The first section is already planted with asparagus (growing wonderfully) and strawberries. These are both perennials, like to spread, and can grow well together.
- Update: We finished preparing the garden and planted Buckwheat over all of the unused parts as a ground cover and to help the soil. It also provides great feed for the chickens.
One goal (for now) is to have the base of our garden to be perennials, in a very well mulched garden. This captures the water, resists drought, is easy to weed, and comes back year after year. From that base, we can then add annuals elsewhere in the garden and as we start another garden spot.
3rd Culture Living 