Karl's Garden Blog

‘Till? No, not until. Till. As in, mix. As in, mixing the compost with the loam that was delivered by the garden center. My arms are noodles and I still have another cubic yard or so in the driveway.

First, before I get into details, housekeeping … JD at Get Rich Slowly has posted his January Garden Update… I wish I could do something permanent like trees. Second, I’ve added a solid page on Square Foot Gardening and started logging the different varieties of plants this year as they sprout or I plant them in the yard.

Loam is a sandy soil made up of even parts clay, silt, and coarse sand. It retains water very well (but drains what it doesn’t use VERY well, thereby avoiding rot) but is a bit short on nutrition when you compare it to black dirt. The compost should have more than enough nutrition in it, which I’ll verify later with a quick nutrient test.

The loam arrived Friday morning. My plan was to mix it in the bed with the compost that I got last weekend as I brought the sand back there to ensure an even mix.

The bed with compost in it, before I started adding the sand.

For various reasons, this wasn’t among the best of my ideas… even with the bed only half full, it turned out to be really hard to move three cubes of dirt around in a cube. By the end of the day Saturday, I was so tired that I wasn’t physically able to lift the wheelbarrow to dump a load, and the weed barrier is in shreds from shoveling and hoe-ing. Oops. Might need to take this slower. Thank god for Advil. A better approach would have been to keep both loads on concrete (or a tarp or something, and mix them appropriately in the wheelbarrow.

It was a beautiful day for a hoe-down.

The structure of the bed has changed a bit. After a good hard think, I raised it to 20 inches and am thinking about going to 24 instead (by adding another 2×8 all around) and using the extra 2×4s as supports. The depth is necessary in my climate and soil, which is “hot and dry” and “hard packed clay” respectively. By “hard packed clay,” I mean that it wasn’t even possible (or desirable) to flip the grass over. I just threw a weed barrier and the soil down on it.

Tomorrow, my goal’s going to be to get all the sand moved into the backyard and at least on the porch if not in the bed. If I don’t get the bed tilled, oh well… it still needs to sit out for a while anyway. Then I need to get the chicken wire wrapped around the structure and the gate built to keep the dogs out of it. After all that’s done, I can think about the walkway and possibly even planting something frost-resistant. Planting? Shocking.

Fully framed out, but still lacking chicken wire and a gate. And a walkway.