Getting Ready for Spring - Amending the Garden Beds

Between crops, we always amend our beds.  There's an exception to that, and it's carrots.  But I digress.  See how dark and luscious that soil looks above?  That's not soil at all, it's a nice thick application of our compost.  It's from the very compost pile that I pictured in one of my previous blog posts dated December 2, 2007.  That 14 month old compost pile is now producing some very good compost.  It is remarkable how fine the compost is.  We don't even have to sift it.

Sara can take it straight from the pile and into a wheel barrow.  We add two barrows of compost to each 50 square foot bed.  Our beds were too full before we started, so we took a couple of barrows of soil out first.  We saved it on a tarp, and will use it for some good purpose later.  If you don't enough of your own home-made compost, we recommend G&B Farmyard Blend or Harvest Supreme, both excellent composts from a local California company.

Once the compost is on the bed, we add about 3 quarts of G&B 4-6-3 dry organic fertilizer and a good amount of worm castings.  To us, since we "manufacture" our own worm castings, that amount is probably much more than a normal farm would add.  To a 50 square foot bed we add about 2 quarts of our pure worm poop.  Great stuff.  Below, Roisin adds the castings while James gets a start on turning the amendments into the bed.  And yes, to all of you Brits following along here, those are your mates in barely-there attire whilst London has ground to a halt with inclement weather.

In case you think that digging is only a man's job around here, Rois works on her technique for getting that compost under ground.  Go girl, go!

Look closely, and you'll see both of them are using my favorite tool, a gardening spade fork.  Every good gardener needs one of these "pitch forks on steroids."  Essential for forking compost into wheelbarrows and turning amendents into beds, we use the heck out of them at Love Apple Farms.

Once the beds are turned, we rake them smooth.  They're now ready to plant.

Comments

[jill green]

Thank you for all the great information. Your website truely inspires all of us out here in the gardening world!

[Sajjad]

very good website

[Love Apple Farm]

Heather: The only thing we do to prep a bed for carrots is make it light and fluffy by turning the soil with the spade fork. If we amend the bed before we sow carrots, the carrots receive too much fertility, and they end up splitting into several taproots. Carrots have other issues which make them tricky, and I'll post something on that another day. Thanks for stopping by, heatergirl!

[Neil]

Not long found your site, but its very good and im learning quite a bit from it. Thankyou

[Heather]

I'm so hopeful that someday you'll talk about your carrot prep! Or did I miss it somewhere in the archives?