Beekissed
Mountain Sage
Joel, your mountains look like those here in WV....very blue and lovely in the distance. Your garden is so lush!!!
Usually the ground is dry and warm enough to till and plant early seeds in mid April. Unless it's a very rainy April — in which case the ground might be a bit soggy until around the first of May. We tend to harvest the last of our outdoor-grown stuff by mid November, though killing frost can sometimes occur early in the month. So roughly seven months, in many years.How long is your growing season?
No need to be jealous about our soil! If we didn't constantly work with it, it would be quite infertile. Were on a bench at the foot of a mountain ridge. The better natural soil in the valley is bottom land, to the east - down below us toward the river.Wannabefree said:LOVE the pond Looks like a very nice little place. You have good looking garden soil too...I'm SO jealous I have red clay, but we're working on improving it.
Well it looks great! I wish I was as far along as that and my soil looked better, but then, I am impatient sometimes We have been adding manure, and compost for the last two years. I haven't had time this year for any cover crop. We are slowly building ours though, and hope in a few years it will look as nice as that and have less of the red clay tint to it. It just takes time.Joel_BC said:No need to be jealous about our soil! If we didn't constantly work with it, it would be quite infertile. Were on a bench at the foot of a mountain ridge. The better natural soil in the valley is bottom land, to the east - down below us toward the river.Wannabefree said:LOVE the pond Looks like a very nice little place. You have good looking garden soil too...I'm SO jealous I have red clay, but we're working on improving it.
The garden area pictured is a sand/silt combination, as far as the mineral-soil aspect goes. Our smaller food garden (about 25x30, something like that), nearer to our house, is almost pure sand in the meneral aspect. But we build with mulch, rotted manure, and cover crops. This last fall, we top-dressed with alfalfa meal.
It's silty upland soil. Silty & sandy, tending toward "incoherence" - meaning, if you take a handful of it when damp and squeeze it, it falls apart when you open your hand. We canm and do, enrich it, in terms of fertility. On its own, it doesn't have what's considered to be good tilth - the only (slight) improvement in tilth has been due to the organic matter we're constantly adding.Beekissed said:Your soil looks sandy and dark...is it silty, bottom land soil?