Tuesday, January 1, 2008

new bed

garden bed of course. Started to make another raised bed this morning. I removed all the tyres from my potato tyre experiment and the yield was dismal. Compared to the beautiful and bounteous yield from my raised punga bed, the potatoes in the tyres were pathetic. The straw was full of worms though, so that is a useful product of the experiment.

I've got Bokashi to bury and nowhere near enough compost for all the places I need to put it to make a no-dig raised bed. So I need to work with the soil already there and raise it gradually. Tomorrow I hope to dig it up and bury the Bokashi and remove at least some of the major weeds and then cover with peastraw. It is currently lawn, with strong grass and a significant presence of docks, dandelions and daisies, narrow leafed plantain and some funny dense feathery stuff which is really hard to weed out but which I haven't learnt the name of. Will get a photo on here sometime. Actually I neeed to weed everything out of the soil for good long term results but it's not a sexy job.

Had been thinking of another bed beside it for asparagus and rhubarb but my latest thought on that is to give the asparagus the best drained position on the section, which would be to build a bed around where I plonked a zucchini in the middle of the lawn in our most recent Spring.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you are clearing the grass for planting next year, now is a pretty good time to start a no-dig alternative.

The basic idea is to cover with something that kills the grass and weeds over time.

I think the most common thing is to use cardboard or several layers of newspaper, covered with a mulching material like straw, hay or wood chips or even compost. With a bit of luck, this will mostly decompose in place and you can plant right on to it.

You can also use black plastic. I use a black plastic called landscape cloth (usually printed with a grid pattern), because it allows water and air to pass and doesn't 'kill' the ground (destroy all life).

I've never tried it, but there is a technique called solarizing, which involves covering the ground with clear plastic and letting it bake and dry out in the sun.

All of these methods take about 6 months, and work best when the ground is covered through the winter until at least early spring.

This is a lot easier than digging up the grass by hand. These methods work better than digging too, because digging always leaves pieces of root in the ground that keep growing.

Whatever you do, don't let anyone talk you into using a garden tiller to dig up the grass and weeds. All this will do it chop it up into tiny pieces that will keep growing for years!

If you are looking for reading material on this, Ruth Stout (American) and Ester Downs (Aus) have written some books on it. I'm not sure they are still in print, so they may be hard to find.

January 2, 2008 at 2:58 AM

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