The class garden for Intro to Sustainable Agriculture is going to be a food donation garden this spring. This blog will document our progress as we get growing.
Thanks so much to Zoe and Isabel who came out to help this week! If anyone else is available to pitch in please let me know. I'm looking to Monday for my next work day.
On Monday I borrowed a mower from John in Landscaping to try to tame the weeds and grass before tilling.
On Tuesday, Zoe joined me and we fired up the Garden's BCS tiller. The BCS is an Italian-made walk-behind or "2-wheeled tractor" with a power take-off (PTO) and multiple attachments available. (WWC just has the tiller attachment but when I was farming in RI we used the rotary mower and sickle bar attachments as well. At Unity College in Maine we purchased a Grillo brand walk-behind and a rotary tiller attachment. The rotary tiller is a vertical auger that is advertised as being less destructive of soil structure. It worked fine but I'm not sold on that claim.) In general, walk-behind tractors are popular among small-scale growers in the US and around the globe.
The grass was pretty thick in our garden plot so we thought we might need to come back with the tiller later in the week.
On Friday I set out to mark and build beds. In the previous iteration of this garden I made permanent raised beds which tend to do well especially in the case of wet weather. This site slopes gently down towards the river and the beds are more or less on contour. The beds are only slightly raised, but it seems to be enough to help with water management. I've neglected this plot since last summer, and didn't want to wait to tarp it again, so I decided to till it and rebuild the beds.
The beds will be built with 3-foot width and 1-foot aisles (not 2-feet aisles as I say in the clip) . To set them up I got two 100-foot tapes and a bunch of colored flags. The whole plot is about 25' x 70'. I marked the beds in alternating colors: beds are between flags of the same color and aisles are between flags of different colors. To build the raised beds, I started at the bottom of the plot and stood downslope of the first bed. I used a hoe to reach across the bed and chop into the aisle above me, pulling the soil towards me into the bed. It's in this video clip.
Isabel joined me mid-morning on Friday and helped with bed building. There was still quite a bit of grass in the upper half of the plot and she used the BCS to run through it.
By the end of the morning we had tilled and flagged all the beds and done intial earthmoving for 7 beds. We should get 17 beds total out of this garden. If all goes well we will put seeds in next week.
Thanks so much to Zoe and Isabel who came out to help this week! If anyone else is available to pitch in please let me know. I'm looking to Monday for my next work day.
On Monday I borrowed a mower from John in Landscaping to try to tame the weeds and grass before tilling.
On Tuesday, Zoe joined me and we fired up the Garden's BCS tiller. The BCS is an Italian-made walk-behind or "2-wheeled tractor" with a power take-off (PTO) and multiple attachments available. (WWC just has the tiller attachment but when I was farming in RI we used the rotary mower and sickle bar attachments as well. At Unity College in Maine we purchased a Grillo brand walk-behind and a rotary tiller attachment. The rotary tiller is a vertical auger that is advertised as being less destructive of soil structure. It worked fine but I'm not sold on that claim.) In general, walk-behind tractors are popular among small-scale growers in the US and around the globe.
The grass was pretty thick in our garden plot so we thought we might need to come back with the tiller later in the week.
On Friday I set out to mark and build beds. In the previous iteration of this garden I made permanent raised beds which tend to do well especially in the case of wet weather. This site slopes gently down towards the river and the beds are more or less on contour. The beds are only slightly raised, but it seems to be enough to help with water management. I've neglected this plot since last summer, and didn't want to wait to tarp it again, so I decided to till it and rebuild the beds.
The beds will be built with 3-foot width and 1-foot aisles (not 2-feet aisles as I say in the clip) . To set them up I got two 100-foot tapes and a bunch of colored flags. The whole plot is about 25' x 70'. I marked the beds in alternating colors: beds are between flags of the same color and aisles are between flags of different colors. To build the raised beds, I started at the bottom of the plot and stood downslope of the first bed. I used a hoe to reach across the bed and chop into the aisle above me, pulling the soil towards me into the bed. It's in this video clip.
Isabel joined me mid-morning on Friday and helped with bed building. There was still quite a bit of grass in the upper half of the plot and she used the BCS to run through it.
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