Fresh Spring Soil

Fresh soil. Nothing better than coming back in spring to find nice, soft soil, ready for the new season. Shovel in hand, digging slowly into the thick clay to find that it falls easily past the blade, aerated and well broken up. All that hard work in autumn paying off.

In Fall at the end of the season, we turn over the whole plot. Well, I turn over the whole plot and Leonie watches and gives advice. It's good though. It's can be a very meditative experience. A few hours of hard physical labour, focused on the task at hand, at one with the earth. Something like that, anyway. But seriously, it can be pretty mentally relaxing to do manual labour. No bullshit, just working on one specific action.

The winter frost will break up all the large clay blocks (our garden is all heavy clay) and turn it into well developed soil. This year it turned out very well. In Fall of '09 I didn't have enough time to do it properly, and only did half the plot. The difference between those two halves last spring was ridiculously obvious. One half was like concrete, and the other was much more malleable.

This past November I also emptied our whole compost bin into the garden before I turned it over, as well as some other amendments like the dead stalks from our corn plants and dried leaves. The soil this year is the best yet. All I had to do last week was rake the top layer to even everything out, and we're ready to go. Next week (when we're back from vacation) we'll add some organic fertilizer and a bit more compost and let it sit for a week to get ready for this year's plants.

I'm hoping the improvement in soil quality will yield a good increase in production quality this year. Especially for the pumpkins, which didn't do very well last year.

I think soil quality gets under-appreciated in our daily lives. I know I never worried about it until I started gardening. Think about how much of the things we eat come from the earth. It's important to protect the quality of our land. Not in a "earth-mother" hippie kind of way, but more in a chemical/fertilizer/soil structure kind of way. What ever is in the ground will end up in your produce and you'll be eating it. Do you know where your broccoli has been?