The Power of Compost

A tale of wonder and great feats of nature:
When we moved in to this place I started a compost bin and blogged about it in naturalista, I think. Anyways, this spring i moved it to a more hidden and less space occupying location. I turned the dirt the the patch of ground where the compost bin WAS and sowed wildflower seeds. This part of the story might be familiar.
So anyway, there were lost of sprouting things and a big mess of pumpkin volunteers that I dispatched in one way or another. I left two in there, for kicks. And now that it's two months later, there was a lovely verdant patch of plants about knee high and I was anticipating a bower of wildflowers. Well, I ignored the fact they looked a "little" like tomato plants. But of course, they ARE tomato plants, tonnes of them, all volunteers that sprouted up long after I started all my precious little heirloom seeds indoors. I weeded them out, since I want wildflowers there and not tomatoes, but here is the kicker.
The tomatoes are like FOUR times the size of my starts. I kid you not. and the pumpkins I left in there? About 6 times the size of the ones I moved. That garden bed of mine that I so lovingly and backbreakingly amended apparently does not compare to the power of hard compacted clay soil that has had compost happening on it for a year.

Volunteer cherry tomato. The result of the seeds from fruit that was composted last fall of a start plant purchased at Home Depot last year. This plant and it's ilk grew this big in one month. Maybe 2. Same with the pumpkin.

My cute 3' high heirloom tomato lovingly sprouted and tended and transplanted beginning in march.


So the lesson here to day is, compost! Not only that but maybe USE the compost instead of move it to add to your dirt like I will next year...*sigh*

More Garden Nonsense

The yard is all tided up and ready for simple summer things like maintenance, few new plants here and there, watering, pruning, enjoying. No more big projects. The last was covering the back slope of the vegetable garden with weed blocker stuff, plastic mesh that is supposed to allow only thing things you cut holes in it to grow there...it's mulched (as are the other beds), it's got three different ground cover plants started on it and it's got a soaker hose around it to see if I can cut down on water use this summer. It might change position. Right now I figure that it's on the hill, the water will soak into the ground and trickle down to the garden. But I fear it won't soak all the way to the edge so I might weave it through the rows, if it's long enough. We shall see.



The beds are looking well. I pulled a trailing rose from the front of the fence to the back in the new bed, mulched and added some alyssium for ground cover.


The side yard got all neatend up and the hosta is looking lovely this year.


There are new additions to the bed by the porch, you can't see them here. There are 8 new little dahlia starts to go with the dahlia I planted last year which is just beginning to return. Another thing you can't see is the plant I thought wouldn't come back this year. I can't remember it's name, but it had fuzzy leaves and purple flowers and was lovely. I was going to plant a columbine there, but lo! it had little sprouts underground. Annuals may be showy, but perennials are like magic things that you don't expect and POOF there they are.













New additions to the bed: a blue geranium and something called white butterflies or something (have to find it's real name.. ) it's got spotty green and red leaves that are very cool and it will get big with little white flowers that look like butterflies, i guess. It's a cool looking plant. Both are perennial. Also some more alyssium and some ground cover left over from the hillside and chives. Two columbines as well, I love columbine. You might notice there are upside down wine bottles...they are fill of water, sort of an automatic watering system. Another thing I am trying this summer, you can use anything like that to do this, houseplants too, water bottles, soda bottles, beer bottles..just fill with water and invert quickly into soil ( like, stab it into the soil.), reusing and saving water, yay!













close ups of some flowers in Photographia.

Amended!

This shot from Saturday (which I used as a before shot, but it's actually next to the plot I worked Saturday, the other side looked as bad before I worked on it so it made a good before shot)...


is now this...Matt even helped! =D


And, at the end of the afternoon when all the gloves had been washed, they turned into "demented ikebana" according to Matt. or somthing like that.

A Gardening in Spring: Amending Soil

I am going to start posting HERE instead of Naturalista for gardening stuff. Mostly 'cause I think it's excessive to have three blogs when two will do, one as a photo repository and one as a blog. So here the posting shall be! I won't delete NAturalista, but I won't be posting there anymore.

Onto the garden then!

So to day was a lovely rainy day in Portland. Not to cold, not too overcast, not too rainy. Just right as a rainy day can be. Well, there could be some thunder and lightning, that would be fun. Yesterday was spent turning this into this.

That consisted of weeding (a tarpful), digging up the dirt into giant clay clods and breaking up the clay clods. Then adding perlite( with a mask on), adding aged manure (with gloves on), sand and garden soil. Then, I mixed the lot up together by turning it in with a shovel, repeatedly, breaking up large clods by hand or with the spade.
This took about 4 hours, for half my garden plot. Toilsome and back breaking (or at least aching). There was a 30 min trip to home depot for more dirt. And a few little 10 min breaks here and there to rest. The results are worth the effort, and here's why.

City yards, and sometimes suburban ones and rural ones, are usually composed of hard, compacted soil. Ours happens to also have a large clay content, being near a river and all, in the path of former alluvial plains and near the path of a former creak that now runs under the city. It is no longer an alluvial plain, but it has been lived on for nigh over a century. In that time, it has not been aerated, dug up much or amended in any way. Usually city soil is also compacted by whatever equipment went into building the building it's next to. Big machines( and likely for our place, animals) tramp dirt down good.

Clay soils are heavy, retain water, are hard to aerate and it's hard to all but the most tenacious of plants to sink their roots in well. Plants like light, airy, loamy soil it's fluffy and soft and crumbly. It;s rich with organic matter, minerals, and it drains excess water while keeping moist. It's what you buy in a bag at the hardware store. How do you turn hard clay soil into soft loamy soil? With time, and a lot of other "dirts".

Soil is a mix of minerals (clay particles,sand, grit, gravel, rocks, shells, etc.) and organic matter (decomposing plants and animals). The amounts of each of these makes different dirts unique. Clay has a lot of very very fine particles of what were rocks, this is so fine that the dust is bad to breathe, and it makes cool stuff when you stick it together and apply about 1400 degrees of heat. Clay is good, silty soil is wonderful stuff. Too much clay, and you have something like what you use to make pottery...in fact, you can. Some soils have too much sand, or too many rocks. Some soils have too much plant matter, which is good for some things (peat, marshy loving plants, mushrooms), but will rot others.

So, for my soil, I needed more organic matter (garden soil and manure) and more large particulate minerals(sand and pearlite). Pearlite is a lot like pumice, it's a volcanic rock ground into small bits. It's the white stuff in your garden soil. Large particles keep the dirt particles for getting to close together, it keeps it full of air pockets and helps water drain.

Last year I added only garden soil and manure. This year the soil was almost as bad as last year. Which explains why my garden didn't do as well as it could have. So this year it's getting a bigger over haul. And next year, when I dig it up again, I will adjust it again. I will keep doing this until I move, or I dig the soil up in spring and it's soft and crumbly and a rich dark brown.

I moved all my starts into the newly made rows and they are very happy today, most of them have grown noticeably. I also put in some seeds. Tomorrow or maybe next week, I will tackle the other half.

And a side note, I move the compost bin. And then I turned the lot it was in into a wild flower bed. The soil there is the same hard clay as everywhere else, but I am not ready to turn this into a new garden bed. Wildflowers are tenacious and strappy plants that will survive in poor conditions. They are also a good cover crop, for now, it will keep weeds out of that area. And they make good cutting flowers.
But I had pumpkins in the compost bin all winter. And the spot where one of them was (the pumpkin is long gone.) has turned into a plethora of volunteer pumpkin sprouts.

There are also two new pics in Photographia.
And if anyone knows HTML for paragraph indents I will be grateful if you share it with me, I hate not indenting paragraphs but nothing I have tried has worked. =P

Updates

New pics in Photographia and Naturalista!