The Watson Backyard Homestead: Soil Preparation

This past week we prepped the soil for the gardening season. The first step was to kill the grass that was growing there. There are really three options for doing this: removal of the grass, smothering, and chemicals.

When we built the raised beds last year, we used the chemical approach, which involved spraying with Round-Up a few times. This worked fine, and the Round-Up disintegrated within a few days. A more "organic" approach is to smother the grass. This can be done by laying a few layers of wet newspaper down, and covering with compost or topsoil. After a few weeks, the newspaper will decompose and you can till the compost into the soil. We haven't tried this yet. The third method is to simply till the green grass under, which is what we did with the field behind the garden. This works, but must be done several times, staring in the fall and through early spring.

Once the grass was dead, we needed to amend the soil with nutrients. We used the organic approach to this, which involved adding Plant-Tone, greensand, and rock phosphate. Plant-Tone is an organic plant food made from compost and supplemented with microbials. Greensand is derived from sandstone that has marine sediments in it, and is high in natural potassium. Rock phosphate is a sedimentary rock that is high in phosphorus. We added 5–10 pounds of each of these per 100 sq.ft. of garden. We also added Osmocote (2 lbs. per 100 sq.ft.), which is a slow-release chemical plant food that releases over a four to six month period.

After we added the supplements, we topped with "Booth's Blend" (a mixture of compost and manure supplied by a local farmer) a couple of inches deep and tilled the entire mixture to a depth of about six inches. Then we planted (or transplanted) and mulched with a couple more inches of the compost mixture.

Once the soil was prepped, we planted a few things (yes, already!). It is now three weeks until last frost, so we transplanted the cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. We also planted lettuce and potatoes. To plant potatoes, we dug a trench about a foot deep and planted the eyes of the seed potatoes in the trench. We then topped with about three inches of soil; once the potatoes sprout, we will "hill" them by adding a few more inches of soil at a time until the sprouts are back to ground level. We also transplanted leeks and onions.

I recently learned something interesting about cabbage. I knew that cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts were closely related, but what I didn't know is that they are actually the same species. They are all cultivars of Brassica oleracea, which is wild cabbage in its uncultivated form. Other cultivars of B. oleracea include kale, collard greens, and kohlrabi.

Well, that's all for this week. I will end with some assorted pictures of the seedlings and the garden. A few weeks ago we extended the split rail fence around the raised beds and added green netting around the wheat and the bed in the back of the garden. We also placed chicken wire on the lower part of the fence to keep the dogs out of the garden!