Two Feet in the Dirt

What a difference a few days make! On Monday, our field was basically a big dirt pile. Now, it is mostly the precise raised breads you can see in the picture above. The benefit of raised beds (and the reason we chose to work with them) is that the soil warms sooner and dries faster, enabling earlier planting in the spring and helping keep the drainage as good as possible in our somewhat clay soil. After the initial plowing, this was the next big jobs for our BCS walk-behind tractor. Using the rotary plow attachment, Mike and the BCS were able to accomplish in just three days what would have taken us weeks to do with shovels. 

The reason for the push to get the beds built was twofold- firstly, we need beds ready so we can plant the garlic at the end of this month (our first crop to go into the ground!); and secondly, having the beds built allows us to get our cover crop in as early as possible. Hopefully the weather remains warm enough for a bit longer in order to allow our rye cover crop to sprout and grow a bit. This will help hold the soil in place over winter and reduce compaction from snow and rain.

The other notable event of the week was that, right on time on October 17, the first frost of the season arrived. The first frost always makes me feel a sense of calm as it is usually the sign that the hectic growing season is winding down. This year, however, it has a slightly different meaning. Because a lot of what we are doing (plowing and building beds, waiting for cover crop to grow, putting in our deer fence) requires unfrozen ground and/or warm weather, seeing the arrival of frost means we are officially in a time crunch! Fortunately, building the beds has been the first thing we’ve done that hasn’t taken longer I thought it would, so I’m just hoping everything else we need to get done plays out the same way.