Some Pre-gardening Work

Earlier this Spring, DH and I did some work in and around the garden.  Some was in preparation for planting, other work was the type that either had to be done before the garden was planted or not until after everything is harvested this coming Fall.

Because it was a dry, but not consistently warm enough to plant Spring, I asked DH to turn the garden over with the 2-bottom plow we bought last fall.  It hadn't been deeply plowed since I carved it out of the main crop field (that we rent out to a local farmer) 18 years ago when we were finishing up construction on the house. Prior to purchasing the property and building our house, it all was crop field with the exception of the 10 acres of woods.

In the 18 years since designating the garden space, I added in literal tons of composted horse manure, changing the soil from extremely nutrient deficient dense clay to nice friable loose soil.  But, it had gradually developed a hardpan about 6" down due to tilling with the rototilller year after year.

I was hoping that by turning the garden with the plow, we could break up that hardpan.  And we did, but the clay that it brought up reminded me of how nasty the original garden soil was.  I'm hoping I didn't make a mistake. . . I guess we'll know by the end of this growing season if it was a good idea or not.  Meanwhile, I will be scouting a source for lots and lots of free composted manure this Fall.  LOL.

The plow that I failed to mention until today, was part of what we purchased from the estate sale of my friend and mentor who died last year.  We also bought her small set of discs (which we used in the garden after plowing and before tilling) and barely used brush hog.  Our own brush hog had rusted into Dangerous To Use condition (it was ancient) a few years ago, and DH is loving having a working brush hog again.  The perimeter path is once again mowed and walkable, hooray!  (For those who don't know, we've created and tried to maintain a path around the perimeter of our property.  The four sides add up to enough linear feet to make approximately one mile.)

The "new" brush hog

The other heavy-equipment related project at the garden was to add some very large rocks that DH was tired of mowing around (and also needing to weed whip around) from various points in the yard.  All of these rocks (as all of the rocks in our rock wall that separates the yard from the garden) had come from our property.  Some were excavated when digging the basement of the house pre-construction.  Some came from the hay field before we planted it in hay and the front and back yards before they became lawn.  Some came from various rock piles we found when cleaning up overgrown fencelines and along the road frontage.  

Anyway, DH decided he didn't want 'statement' rocks anymore, and we added them to the lowish part of the rock wall, moving them with the tractor one at a time and setting them in place.

We would like to move one more big rock, that marks the west end of the rock wall, as well as about a 6' section of the wall that proceeds eastward from that large rock.  Over the years they have become buried underneath the lower limbs of a now 25+ foot tall spruce tree that was just a wee seedling when we planted it 6 feet away from the wall 17 years ago.  But that will have to wait until Fall, or next Spring, since we ran out of non-gardening weather this Spring and now it's full on grow vegetable season!