Tillin' Time

Last summer we made our first vegetable and herb garden. This year we're ready to give it a try again. At the end of fall we turned over the garden and added whatever leftover straw in the hopes that the dead plants and such would add to the helpful organic matter in the soil and help us out this year. The veggies we grew, I reasoned, depleted a lot of the nutrients in the soil over the course of the summer and fall and so we'd give some of it back. The photo above shows how the garden looked last weekend at the start of Saturday before we did any work on it. The black piles are burnt charcoal lumps from last season's grilling.

We discovered that the chives we planted last year (which we never seemed to ever use for anything) seem to be starting to grow back. This one is the larger of two plants, the smaller being about half this size.

We also spotted two little onions left from last year that seem to be showing some green. We dug up both the chives and the onion before we started, to save them.

The tools for the day are shown above. We bought a 5.5 cubic feet bale of peat moss and a 50 lb bag of 4-6-6 Espoma Garden-Tone fertilizer. Conventional wisdom used to be that 5-10-5 was a good overall choice, but consulting my friends at the Hadley Garden Center lead us to go with this veggie specific mix. The numbers stand for the percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potash in the mix, in that order.

(Unrelated: if you google peat moss and fertilizer you might get to this link for a band called Peat Moss and the Fertilzers.)

Once we got the peat moss and fertilizer spread throughout the garden, we used the trusty family tiller to till it all in and cultivate the soil to get it all ready for planting.

The end result is a garden that's ready to go.

And then on Sunday, it snowed. Later in the day it changed to rain, and hasn't let up.

We bought some carrot seeds and some pea seeds and some onion seedlings that we hope to get in the ground once it stops raining.