Re: “*MAYBE I'll drag it near my garden. ”
"My garden" is the subject of this Update #5.
If I've failed in anything to date, it's the garden. It's already June 6th and I haven't got a garden. I'm not beating myself up too much over that since it's only been 52 days since I left Virginia and I spent 21 of them in California but . . . I'm still disappointed.
A successful garden requires a certain amount of preparation, and maybe this year's goal should be to prepare for NEXT YEAR's garden. If so, I'm on track. I'm creating compost now. And I've selected an area for the garden - a nice flat piece of land not far from the street.
Last week, I took it a step further, moving the tractor to the selected land and using its bucket to scrape the grass off of an area that's roughly 20' by 40' (I haven't measured, so I'm just guessing.) Unfortunately, the scraping revealed a lot of rock and hard pan. I won't be able to grow much in THAT. My compost won't be ready for another year, and it would cost a fortune to buy enough compost or manure to completely cover an area that size.
Then it occurred to me that when I pulled leaves out of the forest to compost, the ground beneath the leaves had looked pretty darned good. And why shouldn't it? It's just leaves - decades of leaves - already composted and converted to soil. It's probably lacking in nitrogen, but it's loamy and rich it should have tons of other nutrients.
So for the last few days, I've been in the forest digging up dirt. It's surprisingly hard. There are tons of small roots near the surface, and roots have a way of capturing baseball- and golfball-sized stones - that make the shoveling difficult, so I'm contending with them as well.
In 2.5 hours, which is as much of that type of work as I want to do in a day before my back starts to hurt, I'm able to load and haul three tractor buckets of dirt. So far (two days), that's resulted in covering less than a quarter of the new garden. It's going to take time. I'm retrieving really nice soil, though, and it's worth the effort if whatever I wind up planting likes it.
| 
