During the first weekend of March, I prepped my garden beds for the Spring. And by “I” I mean “we” because my wife fortunately helped due to the back-breaking nature of garden tilling.
This year, I wanted to double-dig my garden beds to really churn the dirt. So, Chrissi started by loosening the top soil with a twist tiller.
I followed with a shovel – digging down 8-10″ throughout the beds.
In bed #1, we added a layer of new (store-bought) top soil. In bed #2, I dug a moat around the edges where I would be growing carrots and filled the moat with top soil – intending to have as few rocks as possible (rocks impede carrot growth). In bed #3, I added some excess old soil from bed #2.
What I didn’t anticipate is that digging much deeper than usual would surface a lot of rocks. Seriously, a lot of rocks. And debris – lots of old glass, tile, and misc broken objects from the former owners and/or flippers of our house.
It’s now 3 weeks later and I am still having rock problems. I spent this weekend using a queen excluder from my beekeeping equipment as a sifter to try to remove more of the surface rock.
My only other prep for the year was some minimal structure building (as noted previously most of the upward growing will be accomplished through co-planting this year).
So, I used 8′ stakes to build my tomato structure. There are tomato cages at each end for tomatillo plants. And I’ve added some netting for my pea plants, which will grow in the same space and be removed when it’s tomato time.
