Magnetic Nord is the story about our homestead in Northern Minnesota on the shore of Lake Superior.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Churning the Garden

The nights have been a little chilly.  It's hard to imagine that summer is already slowly giving way to fall.

We've had black plastic covering our garden site for about one year now.  Our hope is that this would kill a vast majority of the native seed bank.  Last week we uncovered the plot and with the help of our friend Jim we deep-tilled the area.  Tearing into a garden bed for the first time is full of surprises.  For one, you never really know what the quality of the soil will be until you dig into it.  It's the other surprises; like all the rocks and roots and other "artifacts" that make your first day tilling interesting!


The soil will work.  We have a manageable mix of silt and clay loam to work with.  The work we have ahead of planting is soil amending.  Amending soil is simply feeding the dirt the food that it wants in order to be at the optimal chemistry to grow plants in.  While most loam soils in the midwest are fertile enough to grow native species of plants, growing vegetables is another story.

We know that our soil is mineral rich and a little acidic.  As a result we are planning on amending the soil by adding compost and manure to put some organics into the mix as well as a little lime (a base) to help neutralize the acidic clay-rich soil.

Another important element in healthy soil is nitrogen.  Nitrogen is the most abundant element in the atmosphere.  Plants need nitrogen to grow as nitrogen is an important building block of many molecules that are essential to life.  Soil, however, is not always a good source of nitrogen.  To best way to get nitrogen into the soil is to plant legumes.  Legumes are a family of plants that fix nitrogen into the soil.  Roots of these plants contain bacteria that allow the plants to convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia.  Ammonia in the soil is then used by the garden plants as building blocks for growth.  With only a couple months before our first freeze we are planting buckwheat, a legume.  We will till this in next year before we plant our crops.


3 comments:

  1. Progress! I may not comment often but I check regularly and love to read about your homestead, trips, weather...whatever interests you is interesting to me, too. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

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  2. That looks like a huge plot! I'm excited to see what you get next year. All your notes file themselves away for the vaguely distant day when Jay and I will be doing some of this.

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  3. Hi David and Amy

    What nice pictures and story.
    David, you are such a good teacher.
    It's beautiful how you begin with some basic facts
    and build on them.
    Then you weave other basic facts with explanations
    into an understandable whole picture.
    Now, i can picture your garden both in physical terms
    and in understanding the changes it shall be undergoing.
    Thank you for sharing.

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