Cover Crops and First Harvest

In early October I returned from tour and tried to put myself straight to work. I spent two full days clearing what will become our garden plot next spring. The space we're using was a pasture for goats and sheep some 15+ years ago, but now it has become completely overgrown with weeds and and other underbrush. Once cleared, we had the soil tilled by a neighbor and found ourself with 2,800 sq. ft. of healthy soil eager for something to be planted in it. For now we've made a late planting of Winter Rye as a cover crop to help protect against erosion and feed the soil additional nutrients until we can start our real work in the spring whwn we will till it under again, adding more organic matter. We broadcast the seed over the soil and even in mid-November we can see a small sprouts coming up everywhere. Now I just need to send a soil sample off for soil testing over the winter.

We made a fall planting of 40+ cloves of garlic in one of the raised beds for harvesting late next summer. A few weeks later I covered the bed with a few inches of straw to insulate the garlic from the frigid temperatures quickly approaching.

Next we used salvaged pallets collected through Freecycle to built our future humanure compost site. We built a simple, three-bin compost container for easy storage of brown materials and easy rotation year-to-year.

We found some old wire fencing inside the old shed adjacent to our garden plot and used it to build two containers for leaf mold. Each container is about 3.5 ft. high and 3 ft. in diameter. We reused fiberglass stakes from an old fence to sturdy up the wire fencing, filled them with shredded leaves from the front yard, wet them down thoroughly, and covered each with a tarp held down by a few rocks. They will now "hibernate" for the winter, as the leaves slowly cook into a leaf mold that will make a great substitute for peat moss in the garden next spring, and also as a mulch to protect against weeds on top of the soil. We stuck our hands down into the leaves a few days later and could already feel the extreme heat building up, even as the cool fall winds blow.

About a week before Thanksgiving we harvested our first salad from the cold frame garden and it was quite tasty. We mixed together some baby romaine leaves, mustard greens, winter purslane and mache topped with apple slices from a local orchard, honeyed goat cheese, chopped pecans and a homemade apple cider vinaigrette (cider also from one of the many local orchards) for a delicious lunch salad.

As the cold moves in the outdoor work begins to wind down but there are still burn piles to tend, leaves to rake and wood to split. Soon we'll be spending more time inside, planning our beds for the spring and pouring over seed catalogs.