Ready to Sow!

We spent a lot of time this weekend digging in the dirt, literally. We just about finished preparing the garden beds and I thought I'd share a little bit about the process. When we first built raised beds, we used Mel's Mix from the Square Foot Gardening book we picked up years ago. This consists of:

• 1/3 vermiculite
• 1/3 peat moss
• 1/3 compost (from as many sources as possible)

Around here, peat moss and vermiculite are not all that cheap. I also had to call all over the surrounding counties to find vermiculite, but it does make for a lovely planting area with a fluffy feel that retains moisture. This made a particular difference when we were in a severe drought with water limits a few years back. 

While I wouldn't use this soil mix for acres of land because it is downright cost prohibitive, it does perfectly in the raised beds we built. I think we also get a lot more from our small space than we would otherwise if we were farming the Georgia clay. While clay is mineral dense, it gets packed like cement after a rain and tender young plants have a time of getting their roots down into the good stuff. We remedy this by adding a lot of compost back into the clay, which changes the whole overall texture. I knew this would be a challenging year for us though, so I am letting the in-ground beds go back to grass for the time being and am focused on raised beds and containers.

Incidentally, after the first year of Mel's Mix, we've never purchased anything else besides the occasional bag of organic topsoil and heirloom seeds. Everything else we add back is from rabbit manure, compost, cuttings from our harvests, etc. This system works very well to ensure that nutrients are available for the next year. We also frequently rotate our plants from year to year (and season to season) to reduce the chance of disease, pest outbreaks, etc. So far our biggest foe has been deer and we hope to rectify that with leftover rabbit wire and posts to create cover.

In other news, if you haven't been to your local Tractor Supply in a while, we went last night and they had a boatload of seeds, including some heirlooms. I couldn't remember if we had found any cucumber seeds from the missing stash, so we picked up the Straight Eight Cucumber for the summer (which I remember growing before successfully):

Can you tell I am excited about growing more of our food again? There is just nothing like sitting down to a meal that you harvested fresh and prepared from scratch. So rewarding!