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<\/a><\/p>\nFollowing the guidelines for the green manure mix, I waited a few weeks and then turned\u00a0them under in order to kill them off, let them decompose as new organic matter, and give the soil a blank slate for our spring vegetables. I considered covering the soil to block the sunlight and prevent them from reappearing, but ultimately\u00a0decided to try leaving them be. I was careful to avoid walking on the soil, so as to avoid compacting it. I’ve worked hard to bring it up to a friable, spongy texture over the past three years that the plants’ root systems seem to appreciate.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In\u00a0early summer, as\u00a0our young crops were beginning to take off, we installed a drip irrigation system. Furthering my adventures into small-scale farming practices, I wanted a way to reduce water consumption, to save time watering (which takes about 15 minutes on most days and was sometimes making me late for work), and to allow us to take vacations without having to rely on a friend or neighbor to keep up the watering schedule.<\/p>\n I found a kit from DripWorks for about $100. They wisely would not sell it to me without knowing the water pressure and flow rate of the outdoor tap I had had installed the year before. I measured them at 60psi (using a $10 pressure meter) and about 11gpm (using a five-gallon bucket and a stopwatch). This meant that I had to buy a pressure reducer, so that the high pressure would not blow out their system and bring us into a dispute about the warranty. They also wanted me to have a filter, to prevent the system from clogging with particles in the water.<\/p>\n This research and back-and-forth with the manufacturer\u00a0cost me two or three weeks of time in the end, which was a setback but was an important step. I also bought a daily timer which would allow the irrigation system to turn on for specific durations on a specific schedule. All told it was about $150 up front.<\/p>\n There is a single large hose (the ‘mainline’) which runs from the installed outdoor spigot\u00a0all the way around the edge of the garden in a large ‘U’ shape. Every situation is different, but that’s what I decided on as a first run to keep it simple. Then, as shown in this photo, we secured that line to the ground with large\u00a0staple-shaped\u00a0wire stakes, and also attached thinner tubing\u00a0(the ‘dripline’) wherever we wanted water to come out. The dripline we received had pressure-regulated holes\u00a0to emit water\u00a0every 12 inches along its length. So we punctured a couple of dozen holes in the mainline and attached lengths of the dripline to it along the way to distribute\u00a0water from the mainline into to the beds. Each dripline gets a stopper plug at its other end. Just think of a trunk, with branches.<\/p>\n Overall, the system worked well for our needs, but with a lot of tweaking. From this process, I learned a few things:<\/p>\n At the end of the season, it’s time to pull up dying plants and compost any that are more or less healthy. Any plant parts that we suspect\u00a0might survive the composting process and regrow\u00a0to take over the garden rhizomatically or otherwise, as well as any diseased plant parts, we leave out of the compost pile. These we bring\u00a0to one of two local compost operations where the larger windrows should generate enough heat to eliminate that possibility. Healthy plants get chopped up and added to our own\u00a0compost pile.<\/p>\n During the 2015 season, we stepped up our strategy of chopping up waste for sheet composting. Every few weeks we would do another mincing, which might take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending how much material we pulled out.<\/p>\n We also add brown paper and cardboard to the pile, and turn it occasionally to aerate it. When it’s dry, we add water. Within a few months, it’s looking a lot more like something we could be reincorporating into the soil. However, this does take time, and with the small amount of waste generated in our small space, these little piles won’t reach the steaming temperatures of a larger compost windrow. We probably incorporated about three gallons of our own finished compost back into the soil this year\u2014this tiny\u00a0amount represents the final distillation of many enormous\u00a0piles of leaves, stems\u00a0and roots. If it weren’t for the chopping step, we would have a much more difficult time managing the process, and our compost would have a heavy proportion\u00a0of inconvenient sticks and stems.<\/p>\n We added various soil amendments over the season, but did not receive our soil tests back from the lab in time to amend the soil before planting. Sometimes this meant adding amendments around the plants (side-dressing). This is a good way to unintentionally\u00a0hit the leaves in addition to the soil, which is not ideal. I have yet to discover a shovel or scoop that has the precision of a scalpel, so broad distribution it is. I’m trying to bring up the pH of the soil to be less acid than it is now, so I’m adding wood ash from the BBQ and lime, shown here. I’ll test again soon, but these things take months or years to\u00a0take effect\u2014you can’t effectively raise soil pH overnight.<\/p>\n This is something new to me in the last two years, and probably something not often used in urban gardens, or gardens in general. It is more commonly used on farms. But I try to improve the soil every year, and educate myself along the way, learning the methods\u00a0that might be applicable on a larger scale. This is the second year I’m trying out Johnny’s Fall Green Manure Mix<\/a>, from Johnny’s Seeds. Says Johnny’s:<\/p>\n “This ready-made mix is comprised of winter rye, field peas, ryegrass, crimson clover, and hairy vetch. Vigorous late summer growth provides winter erosion control. The peas, clover, and ryegrass will winter kill to provide organic matter and soil cover. The hairy vetch and winter rye will regrow in the spring to provide nutrients for crops to utilize.”\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n So some of these plants will die off and become first mulch and then compost, right on the spot. Others will survive the winter, and can be killed off manually and turned under to produce a similar effect. The legumes, if allowed to survive a bit longer, will take nitrogen from the atmosphere and fix it into the soil, increasing the nutrients needed for crop growth. Along the way they will create a blanket of shade underneath their leaves, helping to suppress any weeds which might have otherwise taken root.<\/p>\n I also am trying out Buckwheat this year in some areas, which is another cover crop. With the small amount of space we have, I don’t have the luxury of pulling up every single late-fruiting plant in favor of starting the cover crop in the same patch. So I either sprinkle the cover crop seeds\u00a0in between while the existing mature plants finish out the season, or else I wait until the last minute and hope that an early frost doesn’t kill off the late-planted cover crop in its infancy. In 2015 we were lucky enough to have warm weather into November with a couple of cold days mixed in, but no frost in sight the following week. The visiting birds may have picked out a few of these seeds, but I applied the seed\u00a0generously to account for that possibility, and the birds seemed more interested in grubs\u2014at least, so we hope. I also threw down a thin layer of compost to cover the seeds. Within about a week of spreading, in late October, I was seeing germination.<\/p>\n A few days later I began to feel more confident that the cover crops\u00a0would work their magic without being killed off by a rogue early\u00a0frost. Our first hard frost was on November 25th, but the temperatures have stayed comfortably above freezing well into mid-December this year, and the cover crops are now about five inches tall in all areas of the garden at the start of winter. So far so good.<\/p>\n With the benefit of unseasonably warm weather after that\u00a0first brief frost at the end of November, the cover crops were coming up nicely.<\/p>\n By mid-December, all three beds were looking happy and healthy.<\/p>\n After looking out upon a bleak, dormant garden scene for a few winters now, I can’t overstate how refreshing it is\u00a0to have so much thriving green life\u00a0in our planting beds in the colder months. They offer\u00a0real benefits to the health of the soil, but I can also recommend them if nothing more than for the visual\u00a0effect\u2014without them, the garden truly looks dead. It gives us a compelling\u00a0visual\u00a0preview\u00a0of all the good things to\u00a0come next season… all of which begin\u00a0with healthy soil.<\/p>\n It’s very common\u00a0for beginning (and even seasoned) urban gardeners to be concerned about heavy metals and other contaminants in their soil. Often, when you tell a friend you are growing vegetables\u00a0in a city, your first response will be, “Really? Wouldn’t they be\u00a0unsafe to eat?”<\/p>\n My research and experience with this reaction is that it is a valid concern, but overstated. If it is an issue, it’s certainly not irreparable. There is one spot in our garden that needs more attention than others in this regard. What I’ve learned is that there are a few things you can be aware of and some techniques that you can put into practice that will help give you high\u00a0confidence in the safety of what you grow.<\/p>\n Springtime Soil Preparation Sometime in early Spring of 2015, we spotted a few bulbs sprouting up in the side beds and the fall green manure cover crop perking up in the rear bed. I knew that the green manure mix was supposed to survive the winter, but I was impressed all the same. It was … Continue reading 2015 Land & Soil<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,12],"tags":[29,83,82,81],"class_list":["post-480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-75","category-land-and-soil","tag-composting","tag-cover-crop","tag-green-manure","tag-irrigation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=480"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1216,"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480\/revisions\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fivefurrow.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>
\nDrip Irrigation Installation<\/h4>\n
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\nOur Composting Strategy<\/h4>\n
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\nCover Cropping<\/h4>\n
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\nSafe\u00a0Management of Heavy Metals in Soil<\/h4>\n
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