Author (#18)February 2007 Archives

Well, I finally realized February was truly here and it was time to start the work i'd been putting off since the new year. I do yard work very lazily, maybe taking a whole weekend to prune one plant, and only barely raking up the debris. this had resulted in about 5 different piles of yard debris scattered across the yard. If the work doesn't entail getting food in the end, it's hard to convince me to keep doing it.

So today I collected all the piles together onto the tarp, dragged the tarp up to the compost heap, and layered it in as best i could. I had added some coffee grounds to the heap a week or so earlier, and it had heated up nicely. There's always something about seeing the steam rising off a heated compost pile that warms (no pun intended) my heart. Like peering into the primordial soup.

This year I'm trying an experiment. We have had terrible luck with carrots before. Carrots and parsnips demand softer, sandier soil, and in the clay brick soil that makes up the Portland bedrock, they come out knobby and mutated, spending all their energy trying to eek out a crevasse for their taproots. The solution is to amend the soil with vermiculite, compost, potting soil, moss, sand, whatever can break up those clods into a loose, manageable planting medium.

The previous owners had left us their kid's sandbox, which by default became our dumping ground for yard debris. After a while, I belatedly realized that the wood frame of the sandbox could be put to good use in the garden, but not before some bees had decided to build their nest in the debris pile. But more on that later.

I had already recovered the wood frame and moved it to the sunny side of the yard, so now all it needed was to be filled with soil. And since i wanted a carrot bed, it seemed the easiest thing to do was to put that leftover sand to good use and mix it with some compost. So that's exactly what I did. Unfortunately, i have much more sand than compost (for the moment... after gathering up all that debris I should have more compost than ever in a few months), so I'll need to make some nursery runs to even out the ratio.

To cap off the day, i started the season's tomato seeds, which will stay indoors until late April to early May. So the first vegetables of 2007 have now been planted! Let the fun begin....