Compost!!

Because the soil here has lots of clay in it, although it's much better than the brick red heavy clay in many parts of the South, there is very little organic content in it from years of farming with deep tillage and industrial synthetic fertilizer.  What I'm saying is - there is NO topsoil.  The answer is COMPOST!  Lots and lots of compost.  I can make enough compost from the abundance of fallen leaves plus grass clippings, veggie trimmings, and a future supply of chicken manure, but I can't make enough to give the garden plot a good dose to amend and improve the soil initially.

I attempted to have 70 cubic yards of compost delivered from an outfit about an hour north of here, but despite long and involved phone conversation about our narrow country road, long narrow driveway and so forth they sent an 18 wheeler with an extended wheel base cab hauling a 53 foot open gondola used to haul sawdust from the saw mills.  There was no way he could make the turn off the road and onto the property.  Back he went up the road without delivering the compost.

I found a much better supplier, very professional, who delivered 60 cubic yards of beautiful black compost in 3 loads of 20 cubic yards each using a quad axle dump truck that could make the turn onto the property and dumped the loads right at the edge of the garden behind the house.

60 yards of compost!

Now 60 cubic yards of compost is a pile 10 feet wide, 30 feet long and 5 1/2 feet high.  It seems like an impossibly huge amount to till into the garden, but actually is only a layer 2 inches thick over the entire plot when you scatter it all out.

As always - my very helpful and generous neighbor came by the next day with his son and two tractors to disk harrow the previous deep plowed ground, load the compost into a manure spreader, scatter the compost over the entire garden plot, and very lightly disk harrow the compost into the top few inches of native soil.

Now I can finish the seed bed preparation and maintain and improve the soil over time with my rototiller by adding adding more homemade compost and tilling in cover crops of clover, buckwheat and winter peas. Hopefully in a few days we will be ready to plant the cabbage and broccoli seedlings, plant the onion plants and seed potatoes and plant some spinach, peas and lettuce.  With the exceptionally cold winter and wet spring we are about 10 days to 2 weeks behind schedule with planting.