Preparing the Fall Garden

We have a few changes to make here at the Back Forty gardens.  We are moving one of the garden plots about three feet away from the shade and the woods.

I am not too keen on boxes:  they don't give me enough room to move around in when tilling the dirt.  Boxes do look "cute", but I don't have a cute garden nor beautiful; just a good garden with a bountiful harvest.

This time, however, we are making a big box garden.  We are framing the garden and it comes out to be a 12 x 12 ft plot where the weeds have had plenty of room to grow this summer.

In the three feet outside the garden, there are some good and tough St. Augustine grass that we are tossing to the end that we are closing out, the end near the woods.

Once the timber is laid down and squared, we'll turn the soil and remove the weeds.  The soil looks dark and healthy, free from ants and insects.

Last spring, I bought a bale of straw to use as mulch and it has disintegrated very well into the garden which adds extra nutrition.  It also discourages nematodes to destroy the roots of the vegetables.

We are also going to make sure that we are rotating the crop.  We are planting different vegetables in this new garden, different from the ones we had last year and where the corn grew this summer.  It is still too early to plant: the sun is still too strong and vegetables for the fall have not come in to the nurseries yet.

This may also be a good time for "solarization" but it is too much work with covering the plot with plastic.  We are going to leave it to the sun to do the work without the plastic

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