INDEPENDENCE DAY

A beautiful, sunny, long summer weekend in my gardens.  We grow our own food grown using local inputs.  That is independence worth celebrating!

Freshly weeded greenhouse, leaving a couple of Kale plants

This weekend I prepared two greenhouses, one for zucchini and the other for tomatoes.  We are half way through the year and I want a consistent supply of my favorite veggies throughout the Fall.  First, I removed the old vegetable plants and weeds, putting them in my compost pile.  Then I mixed mature compost and bio-char and heaped that mixture over the top of the bed and then mixed that into the bed with a shovel about 18 inches in depth.  That mixture is in the cart in the picture above lower left.

IMO #4 spread 1/4 inch over bed

grass clippings tops the bed off

This bed hadn't been amended for over a year and I wanted to add bio char, the hotel for micro-organisms.  The mature compost has humus, available carbon for natures combustion with oxygen.  After raking it smooth, I spread IMO #4 over the surface about one quarter inch in depth and covered that with grass clippings to prevent weed growth, hold moisture in the soil and prevent sun from harming the IMO.  With the beds nicely prepared, I transplanted the seedlings in the evening, then watered them in.  Watch for posts in 6 to 10 weeks and be looking for mind blowing growth.  Oh.  Is this what nature intended?  Healthy food, no petro-chemicals.  Microbes doing God's work.

Bio-char pile, I add a little of this to every garden

Not to be lazy, I also prepared a 40 foot section of my lower garden using the same technique as described above and planted sweet potato with my daughter Kaitlin.  I got to plant sweet potato and taro once every month.  It's my independence savings account.