The Good Earth

This garden is on its third year from the scooping and poop piling stage.
You can see it below after Jade put it up in beds and Liz planted part of it. It had Zucchetta the first year, beans and peas last year, and this year onions and probably carrots.

There is pretty good land around here. Not all of it, but a lot. our front fields are slate, which is good stuff, the back clay, which is not so much. We make our garden beds over about two years. First the boss scoops out  the weeds and such with the tined rock bucket on the skid steer. Then he applies rotted cow manure a good foot deep.

Before Jade came, I planted it to squash or some other coarse, heavy-feeding plant the first year and then raked it off and grew whatever I wanted to in subsequent years.

Now Jade rototills it and kicks up raised beds or lays out flat places. Badda bing, instant garden.

Yesterday, the boss skimmed off an old garden I made the hard way...with a shovel and spade....when we moved up here. I had given up on it. Huge nettles and millions of reed canary grass rhizomes made it impossible to care for. We made quite a discovery while taking out the old fence and leveling the ground. 

Everybody gets in the act. This is a new bed Jade made where the old apple tree had to come out.

The telephone pole that feeds the house has been leaning a little for several years. At the base, where it had been hidden by a gigantic wild rose bush is a gigantic woodchuck warren, going right down the pole into the ground!

No wonder!

He called the power company as soon as we came back in the house. Don't know if they will do anything about it but.....

Some of the Candy Onions Liz put in. We ordered them in December
and finally got them late last week, in a totally crushed and open box. I think they will grow though

Anyhow, here are some of the gardens we are using.

The bed pictured on top two years ago just after the first frost nailed the Zucchetta