Scorching the Garden 2021
Part 4
May
We are celebrating our 4th documented grow. Not much is going to change, but there is still a ton to learn. Let’s see if we can learn a few pounds.
Turns out, we did have enough cardboard to finish the first plot along with adding the wood chips. Not all of the piles of compost have been placed yet, but the fencing is up.
It rained for a couple of days which had mixed blessings.
- On one hand, it makes it pretty impossible to lay cardboard, shovel soil, or push mulch
- The flip side is, with the rain catchers up, in less than a week, we captured like 70 gallons of water.
We picked up more cardboard from COSTO and sourced some rolls of semi-corrugated cardboard. Rolling it out was fun and easy. Keeping it down when the wind blew, not so easy.
The solution: roll, bucket of compost, roll, bucket of compost, and then weigh down with anything and everything. The buckets of compost got very heavy after the 40th and even heavier when we hit 80. Not bad, but we still have about 140 to go, plus mulch.
We are using a special mix of compost this year. It’s a blend of topsoil, mushroom manure, and leaf compost. Its something we used back when we first got started and really liked it. We liked it so much, we got 5 tons this time.
We also received our CHIP DROP from M&S Tree Services this year. Just like every other tree service we have worked with in the past, these people are polite and very accomodating. The chips smell amazing.
Now what? The plants are hardened off, but will it stay warm enough at night to put them in the ground?
One of the plots is carpeted, just one more to go, and we have all the supplies we need, but its raining. Will what we have done already survive the storms or will it have to be redone?
We’ll let you know the answer to these and other questions as soon as we find out ourselves.
