First 4 x 4 plot planted!
So, in a surfeit of work, I shifted 16 cubic feet of soil on Saturday night while everyone was partying. I dug a 4’ by 4’ hole, and then I sifted it all back in. The result was a nice, soft, loosely packed soil. That took about 3 hours. On Sunday at twilight, I laid out the grid and used a small 1 1/2” bowl to make indentations in the right
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I'm glad I clicked on your lj handle in one of Terry's posts -- Instant Bonding on two currently-significant points. I'm in the process of switching plots at the Baldwin Park Community Gardens (still only c. 9x20 feet, but this one is in full sun) and am gradually prepping the soil by digging down a good foot, adding about 30% (commercial bagged) composted manure, and sifting it through a 1-inch mesh screen (mostly for through mixing & aeration -- the extant soil is a pretty good silt, but it's imported fill and below about 8 inches there's some demolition debris from the Mexican restaurant formerly on the site).
Yeah, processing 16 cubic feet of soil seems like a surfeit of work. I've fallen into a pattern of doing about 4 cu. ft. at a go, three mornings per week (mind you, when working at the Arboretum I used to mix, load into the sterilizer, and unload, 27 cu. ft. of seed-planting mix in a day, but I'm now about three times your age and starting to show the wear).
And the Community Gardens seems to be a favorite vacation spot for at least seven cats, with precisely the results one would expect in areas where the soil is nicely pre-fluffed for them. Old wooden chopsticks, stuck in pointy-end up, seem to be a moderately-effective deterrent, but I'm about to try chicken-wire cloches or bird-netting.
Make that three points of Bonding -- "thinking it looked neat and nice" dovetails with my "I wouldn't object if someone looked at my Plot and said 'this was done by someone who'd almost certainly get an A+ in a Cake Decorating Class'". (My yard at home is Forest Primeval, but there's something about a neat and fairly small rectangle that brings out The Perfectionist in my nature. And The Putterer. I've not gone so far as to remove every other green cabbage seedling in the row and replace them with red ones, but would have to confess to having thought seriously about it.)
Most soil produces better for the addition of more organic material, and about 1/3 horse manure sounds good -- with some caveats. Composting first, hot enough to destroy most weed seeds, might be a good idea (though composting is not a quickly-learned art). Fresh manure is likely to release so much nitrogen that carrots will develop branched roots (still edible, but annoying to prepare) and tomato plants may grow vigorously but not produce those red (or yellow or purple) things you presumably want. (Actually, with tomatoes, it's not so much an excess of nitrogen as an imbalance, so adding more superphosphate and calcium can be effective.) For most cool-season crops, though, horse manure is great, and I envy anyone with access to an abundant supply.
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Thanks for your reply. The horse manure is composted in 8x8x6 squares surrounded by snow fencing and with pvc tubes put through the center with holes in them to provide air. This is all done by the landlady with her small tractor. I'm lazy, and haven't bothered to tote the manure from the back of the property to the garden (about 25 yards). We have a LOT of it, and it's free for the taking, so if you have some bags or a pickup truck and a tarp, you may have as much as you need. The stuff on the outer edges doesn't compost as well as the inner stuff, it tends to look more like horse manure, but from about 3" on in, it's soil, mostly. Since I'm in Arcadia, we're not very far from you at all.
Alternatively, if there's enough people interested at the community garden, Pat might deliver a pickup load of composted horse manure.
Someone on the Yahoo! SFG list suggested white plastic forks, tine side up, placed every 3", which is sort of like the used chopsticks option. This is what Mel Bartholomew trains his instructors to do. I was thinking concertina wire and landmines, but that's just because there was another incursion last night. I went with Juice_Weasel's suggestion of vinegar this morning--it was like a pagan ritual, me pouring vinegar around the square. I planted a defiant garlic clove which had sprouted in the the area where the most cat's business had been conducted.
I'm really disliking the cats right now.
On your sifting screen, what design did you do? Mine is a piece of 1/2" steel mesh, about 1.5' x 2', which I've bent on two sides. I was thinking of nailing it to a wood frame for more capacity, and I was thinking a sort of rocking frame like the gold miners use would be ideal, with a 2" x 8" box around the soil over a 1.5' x 3' grid of 1/2".
And a mixer... boy, that'd be kind of cool. Was the soil mixer just a cement mixer or something else? Of the remaining top soil I've got to move, I will try to enlist the landlady and her tractor to move it, and I need an efficient way to sift it, as I've got about 128 cubic feet of soil to dig up and sift. My back is already pretty sore from the previous work, so I need to figure out a better way to do things.
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At home, my sifting screen (used mostly for compost, which I like to apply while still rather coarse) is just a c. 2x2-foot piece of old 1-inch-mesh hardware cloth (heavier-gage wire than is now available at Home Depot or Lowes), used with a 5-gallon plastic bucket. Works okay because I think small, prefer the results when the compost is rubbed through by hand, and have arthritis that requires stopping as soon as the wrists begin to hurt, lest I be out of action for about three days. But yes, for somewhat larger-scale work, mounting the mesh on a frame is probably the best way to go. At the Community Garden, someone with rather good carpentry/joinery skills has made a frame of 2x4s (with four handles, so two people could use it) that perches atop a wheelbarrow -- which has some advantages. (I could wish it a bit larger, to cover the barrow completely, but then there'd soon be a problem with the screen sagging under the weight of soil, and deteriorating rapidly.)
I'm guessing, on the basis of sometimes-ambiguous or cryptic remarks, that Pat = your landlady = Maia's mother, and that you're living in the house where Pat's parents used to live, where the stables & paddock are. And that your garden is on the North (as I recall) side of the house. If that's correct, I have some idea of what your situation is -- twice, a few years back, I took care of the plants and animals there & at Pat's house for a total of about a month while practically everyone was away Doin' Stuff. (And yeah, just about every day I returned home with four tote-boxes of that great manure.) It's not far, as you say, but I have problems with the Carbon Footprint of driving it just for the relatively small amount of manure I can schlep in the Toyota. Not to mention the budgetarily disastrous temptations of the Fancy Expensive Restaurants & BrewPubs in the area.
Regrettably (as far as I'm concerned) the Community Gardens are run by the local School District -- with Policy being set at the level of the people who show up only occasionally (wearing Dressy clothes and unsuitable shoes), have no clues whatsoever about plants and soils, and want anything like soil amendments or manure to be in sanitized plastic packaging. *sigh*
Yup, moving/sifting/mixing five cubic yards of that heavy sandy soil by hand could be a real pain in the back, but I have no helpful ideas for mechanizing the process. My approach would be to do a very small area (possibly up to a maximum of four cubic feet) at a time (absent rain), and it would be likely to turn into at least a year-long project. This probably would not fit your situation or requirements.
Actually, for the seed-starting and potting mixes (mostly combinations of peat moss, sponge-rok, and redwood shavings/sawdust) we used in the Arboretum Greenhouses (we didn't sterilize the heavier mixes used for canning the plants in the outdoor Nursery -- and for them we sometimes had a small cement-mixer or plaster-mixer) _I_ was usually the mixer (with the aid of a shovel, on the blacktop next to the steam chest). Not really hard work, because the ingredients were all light-weight, but tedious and uninteresting.
Oh, good luck with the beans and tomatoes -- they both (except for fava beans) seem to want soil/nightime temperatures above about 50 degrees F., and despite the remarkably warm last few days that probably won't settle in for at least a couple of months. (Mind you, there are volunteer tomatoes popping up in my back yard, and I don't think all of them are the (relatively cold-hardy) Cherry ones I originally got from Terry, but I'll be surprised if they persist though February and March, or do well next summer.)
One additional thought just occurred to me. I don't recall all the trees over there, but you might want to be cautious about compost containing Walnut leaves -- they (and the roots of Juglans nigra, at least) produce a chemical that can persist for several years and is toxic to tomatoes (though apparently not to many other annual plants).
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