Winter Prep for the Garden 2019/2020
Just because the growing season is over doesn’t mean we’re done. There’s plenty we can do to help out the soil. Everything slows down when the temperatures drop, but, its not always as cold as you may think. Weather patterns are changing. December 26, 2019, it got up to 62 degrees in Pittsburgh. On clear days, the sun delivers more than a kilowatt of energy per meter squared. This is enough to warm soil and encourage fungi, microbes, and insects to become active. There are also periods where its cold and snow hangs around with patches of ice forming at night where the freeze/thaw cycle plays its part in composting.
This year was not a good year for our pepper plants. Among the things that we could control was we should have watered more and the compost we used at first wasn’t all that great.
The watering thing, well, it’s hard to overwater when the temperatures were in the high 80s for weeks. We should have gone out more. Things didn’t start to pick up until we brought in our own personal compost and regular watering.
In 2018, when we shut down the garden, we didn’t know where we would be growing the next year. In 2020, we’ll be using the same locations we had in 2019. This gives us a perfect opportunity to continue to improve the soil as well as get a jump start on planting garlic.
Our goals for the soil are:
- Increase the worm population
- Nurture the fungal network
- Introduce more microbes
- Build up organic bulk
After the first frost, which signifies the end of the plants, the bulk is cleared, leaving behind a decent amount of greens. We flatten out the mounds of compost where the plants grew and level the garden a bit more. Any peppers or tomatoes or whatever that fell are left. We plant our garlic and spread leftover herb seeds around. The herbs may sprout next year, they may not. They might get eaten by some hungry critter scavenging for food in the snow who then poops out a wee bit of fertilizer.
We found a stable nearby that offers free manure to whomever is willing to haul it away. Free…what a great F word!
It took about 3 days total to do all of this with multiple trips to pick up more used horse bedding. All in all, we added more than 6 tons of nutrient-laden material. We expect weed seeds to blow in and start to grow. What we are interested in is how much will grow and how vigorous it will be. All to be carpeted over with cardboard and wood chips next spring.
We have a special pile of compost that we’ve been building for our 2020 grow. It contains a few inches, which translates into a ton or two, of toposil from one of our best producing experimental gardens. Combined with a fungal dominated compost and fortified with biochar, this compost will be ready just in time for planting in June and loaded with microbes that will inoculate the pepper gardens with new life.
