Podcast coming – sorry for the delay…

Soil Prep

Time to get those seedling gowing. If you haven’t already the warmer weather signals it’s time to start prepping your back yard garden for this year’s growing season. It all starts with the soil. Whether your soil is sandy or clay the best way to improve it is with organic matter in the form of compost. We’ve got a beginners video guide to composting with master composter Elisa Margarita at newlygreens.com. Ideal soil is deep, loose, and well-drained.

1. Spread 2 to 3 inches of compost over your garden
2. Turn it in with a pitchfork or tiller.  Loosen soil to a depth of 12″ or more, this gives plants more room to spread roots and gather nutrients.
3. Give any existing media time to break down,  at least a couple weeks before planting.  If you have have material like straw or leaves that are not completely broken down you may have to add some nitrogen to the soil for your plants as these rob nitrogen while they are breaking down.
4. Do this process again in the fall and cover your garden with mulch or a cover crop.  I tried leaving my leaves in the garden this last winter as mulch.  I’m hoping these leaves will eventually become compost at the end of this season when I turn things in.  There is a link to a good guide about using leaves as compost and one to the difference between mulch and compost.  This is my first year to try it so I’ll report back in the fall and let you know what I did wrong.

Finally if you are in the Montclair area, Terra on Church St. has a nice selection of organic herloom seeds available.  Nice if you did not get your seeds on order yet as they usually take a few weeks to arrive and it’s really time to get things started.

*SUPPLEMENTAL INFO*
I was just speaking to our friend Matt (Episode 3) who spent a couple years working on an Organic CSA (Episode 4) about soil prep and he had some great additional advice:
Greg: I recall you using some kind of organic plant feed, like seaweed or something. Where did you find that?

Matt: It was Neptune’s Harvest Seaweed Extract. You can also purchase Kelp Meal (dry seaweed) which feeds the soil. I am going to be tilling in Kelpmeal in my garden next week. I got it from www.gardensalive.com

Greg: Any experience using leaves as mulch or compost?

Matt: We always used leaves in our garden, straw resists more weeds through the season because it breaks down slower.

Greg : There is still straw in my soil and I’m a little concerned its going to burn up my nitrogen. I hear pee’s got a lot of nitrogen in it. . Any thoughts?

Matt: Pee is actually a great fertilizer, 10 parts water to one part urine. If you ate a lot of seaweed you could do away with the kelpmeal
You could also use bloodmeal (not smelly) or fish emulsion (which smells awful but works great, wear gloves). Blood meal would be tilled into the garden along with kelp meal, compost etc to build soil. Fish emulsion is a concentrate (same brand as that kelp extract, neptunes harvest) that you mix with water and feed like conventional fertilizers.