Work, Work, Work

All of a sudden it's harvest time! My vegetable garden is still not a pretty as I would like it to be - no weeds, tomatoes all staked up, beans and cucumbers growing up trellises, but this year has been the best year yet. When we took over our allotment in England, the weeds were tall, but the soil was rich. Our allotments were started during World War II, and had been continuously occupied. Especially in our first year, we grew far more vegetables than we knew what to do with.

It's all different over here in Kentucky. I've had to learn all over again when to sow seeds, when to plant out and when to harvest. What to plant and what to harvest. Since I am converting grass pasture into a vegetable garden, I'm battling grass, giant annual weeds, clay soil, soil compaction and low fertility. At least I have earthworms, now (I started with none). So there's a few things I'm just going to have to give up on for a couple of years - potatoes (ground's too hard) and sweetcorn (not fertile enough), to start with. Globe artichokes are struggling, and cucumbers (ground's too hard AND not fertile enough).

I have a cunning plan...this fall I will create three mushroom beds at the end of my garden. Once the mushrooms have digested all the straw, cardboard, wood shavings and weeds I can gather, I'll move the mushrooms to another location on the garden. The next spring I'll go where the mushrooms were, and plant a soil building mixture of legumes and long radishes, to fix nutrients in the soil and further break up compaction. I'll be able to plant my pickier crops the third year. I'll keep you posted on how the plan works!