A Time For Planting...

I remember the warm spring and summer evenings before dusk and Mama behind the tiller, turning the soil and making rows for planting.  I remember the smell of the freshly turned earth and the damp coolness of it under my feet as I stepped in the fluffy mounds of dirt, even the feel and sound of the paper sack and the slickness of the dried seeds as I held them in my hand and dropped them from my fingers into the rows.  I can hear the freight train going past and can remember looking up to see Melvin Loyd flying his plane above us almost every time we were out there.  At the time, I didn't appreciate all of those things, but now I sure do. 

With Spring just around the corner, I wanted to do a blog on gardening, pre-gardening to be exact. I don't know of any place you would consider having a garden that wouldn't require some preparation before you began.  Whether it was soil amendments, a fence or even deciding what to plant that would grow best in your area, there's always preparation.  Growing up, I never paid any attention to anything garden-related.  I was forced to help in the family garden when I was young and I hated it.  I couldn't figure out why my family was so old fashioned and they insisted on having a garden every year, why they didn't just go to the store and buy food like everybody else did.  When my mother would drag me out to the garden in the evenings and hand me a sack of seeds, I would dump handfuls in one spot just to get it over with.  I, in my ignorance, never imagined I would ever be found out because when the seeds came up in clumps they'd know what I did! Or, when it was time to shell  peas, instead of  really shelling them, I'd throw handfuls of the unshelled ones in the trash along with hulls, to get my pan emptied out faster and get finished.  I look back now and think of how I wasted those precious seeds and peas and I cringe.  My family wasn't rich and those things cost hard earned money and I was so selfish that I threw it away.  I also think back and wonder why they never got me for it.  I'm certain they had to know I did it!  Even so, with the constant drudgery of gardening as a youth, I grew up with a love for it that far outweighed the labor. 

Up until last year, I thought the soil of Gilmer was just special or it sure seemed so for my family.  I thought that powdery dirt was going to be the perfect media for my first garden since moving back here from Dallas....oh how wrong I was.  It was poor and drained far too quickly and got too hard and compact.  When I walked in the dirt it would rise up in wisps of fine, sandy smoke and curl around my ankles.  This was not the soil of my childhood at all....it was horrible.  I don't know what my family did to that soil to make it grow things, but grow them it did.  I assume it was from years of amendments like growing a crop and turning it under at the end of a season and using the cow and chicken manure we had to enrich it.  Not to mention there wasn't a drought back then like there is now.  That's what I've come up with after a hugely failed garden last year.  This year I'm doing something different.  Since you can't grow Pizza Rolls and Corn Dogs in the garden, and that's all my son will eat,  it's basically just me I'm feeding out of the garden.  I decided to have a smaller, raised bed garden and use a technique called Hugelkultur.  It involves digging holes where your bed frames are going to be and filling up the holes with a mixture of dead and green limbs and brush and covering that with dirt.  The general idea is the limbs rot under the soil and become spongy and then absorb the rainwater which they store for up to a year.  The crops are then planted in the soil that above the limbs and the water in the limbs is released into the soil and plants are kept watered as needed from below. According to what I've researched about this, only a single yearly rainfall is needed to provide enough water for plants with no additional hand watering or rainfall required for the entire growing season.  With the heat and drought in Texas, that will be a miracle.

Here are a couple of YouTube videos that will explain the Hugelkultur process:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sso4UWObxXg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lkx2JFO0Dhw

I had a friend of mine build me (4) 4x8 frames and (1) 6x12 frame and then in November, I hired a handyman to do the manual labor of digging the holes under the frames.  I had him dig them 2' deep and we filled the holes with about 20" of limbs and covered them with the local sandy soil that was left from digging.  Over the next month it rained pretty frequently and the soil settled into the spaces and around the limbs and we added more local soil as needed until the limbs were encased.  Once it was solid, I went to the local composted soil place and bought truckloads of a premixed raised bed mixture to top the beds off with.  Since I have chickens, turkeys, horses and donkeys, there's lots of poo at my place so in between the layers of the purchased soil I added layers of manure and some kitchen scraps and finished it off with more soil mixture.  Along with my chickens, rabbit and deer are a huge problem where I live so I also built a fence around the garden, allowing enough room to plant some fig, olive and fruit trees at the ends. 

Here's a picture of the Hugelkultur project in progress:

I planted some late winter crops of kale, spinach, lettuce, rutabagas and radishes a couple of weeks ago and they are coming along nicely!  Good gardening ya'll!