Garden Bed Prep - Two Rows Ready!

Today Tommy and I got two rows ready for planting. We forked the soil into narrow rows about the width of a Weekly Reader newspaper, then covered those rows up with said papers and put a layer of straw on top. The idea is that this double layer will help keep the moisture in and the weeds down.

I had originally wanted to double dig the garden, but that takes a long time and it's really getting late to get these plants in the ground, so we settled for a quick tilling and then fluffing up the rows with a fork. Maybe next year...

While I was digging with the fork I turned over SO MANY WORMS! I kept trying to pick them up and move them over to the dirt I had just previously forked to avoid cutting any of them, and once I suddenly felt a cold slimy thing sliding over my flip-flop clad foot and looked down to see a HUGE worm about a foot long! After my initial freak out and placing him over in the already forked dirt I was pretty happy because worms are a great sign that the earth is going to be well aerated and fertilized.

After we got our two rows all done we were pretty eager to plant something in them, but I didn't want to put in anything before we put up our rabbit fence, and I also needed to figure out how many and what kind of plants we wanted to put where. Then I remembered that the row cover cloth had come so we could put some seedlings in the ground without too much worry of getting eaten by critters, but then I also remembered I had to do my online music class chat so I really had run out of time to work on the garden for today. Still, it felt like great progress, and we are SO close to getting plants in the ground. According to the online moon calendar I found with suggested planting cycles, this is a good time for for transplanting until Monday, so I want to get as many of our sproutlings as are ready in the ground as we can by then.

We'll see how our garden does with these half-assed attempts at biodynamics. I figure if people can grow stuff without using biodynamics at all, even our little attempts have to count for something. We won't use any chemical fertilizers or weed killers. I don't think we'll do any of the preparations or that kind of stuff this year, but so far we've been trying to plant our seeds at the appropriate moon times. Absolutely everything has come up and is looking great except for the cucumbers, I think we might have to do those over because they didn't sprout at all...