Maggie's Farm: STILL MOVING DIRT

turning over raised beds

When we moved down the hill from 8,000 to 5,000 foot elevation, we were so excited about moving out of the snow (for the most part). While it's true that we typically only have to shovel snow a couple days a year now, we find ourselves spending at least as much time moving dirt as we previously spent moving snow. Every year we turn over each of our raised beds. You may ask why? We often ask that ourselves. The reason we do this is to assess and amend the soil. We also find all sorts of surprises in the beds, grubs, hornworm pupae, lots of earthworms (YAY), ants, pill bugs, Jerusalem crickets, and an abundance of tree roots.

sizable grub for "the girls"

We keep and cherish the earthworms and turn the less desirable bugs, etc into eggs with the help of our chickens. The girls LOVE grubs! We amend the soil with "brown gold" our compost lovingly created also with the help of our chickens. It is oddly satisfying to watch the soil quality improve over the years.

prepping a bed for planting

dusting with diatomaceous earth to organically solve an ant invasion

We keep adding raised beds and currently have 15 beds. 14 of these are 4 x 8 foot and one is 4 x 6 foot. That makes 472 cubic feet of dirt we move each year... which is roughly 47,200 pounds of dirt depending on how dry/wet it is when we turn each bed. I think I may have been a bit happier not knowing that last fact! We are hopeful that we will reach a point where we can begin working just the top layer of these beds.

remember the chard that was beets?

Over the weekend we discovered that the chard starts I purchased months ago but wasn't growing as expected were actually beets. Since we had just ripped out the old chard, we decided to try moving these to the root vegetable bed to make room to plant chard seeds.

Jim transplanting beets

root vegetables coming soon....

It is an experiment and we'll see if it works or not. Many of the beets are large enough to cook and eat but many should really grow larger. In addition to our root vegetables, we finally felt frost danger was far enough behind us (one week) that we could plant our zucchini and bush beans.

watering the newly planted bed

summer squash and bush beans

We decided to cover this bed for a couple of weeks since beans are a favorite of birds and lizards and often get eaten as soon as they pop up. We are also not 100% sure it will not get cold again. Hard to believe it dipped into the low 30's a week ago and it is in the upper 80's now!

short day onions and lettuce

Our short day onions are doing really well and the lettuce has been producing. Since some of the lettuce is winding down, we decided to plant some pole beans in it's place and try an experiment with a new pole bean trellis. This will make use of the space between beds, provide shade, and be kind of fun to try.

building the bean trellis and a new shade structure for another bed.

New trellis for pole beans

We might be overly optimistic about the growth of our pole beans but it will be fun to see. Notice the newly transplanted beets don't look so good. We are hoping they are just experiencing transplant and will recover but I have my doubts....