01/27/2022
Today I'm thinking about dirt. Well... soil. Everything comes down to soil. Depleted soil either won't grow things, or grows things poorly. If the things are meant to be food, they will be less nutritious. So - soil.
I amend the soil here at LOT. Our biggest amendment is manure - of the animal kind. Rabbit manure is great during the growing season, as it's a "cool" manure that doesn't burn plants with excess nitrogen. I have no shortage of rabbit manure!
Usually in the fall, and sometimes also in the very early spring, we amend with barn litter. That's a very polite name for waste hay, pine shavings, chicken p**p, and goat manure and urine. It builds up, especially in the goat stall, and it's a big, heavy, stinky job to move it, but boy howdy, plants LOVE it. When I have bagged leaves available, I usually cover the barn litter once it's in the gardens.
We don't actually compost much here. Anything that can be eaten by our critters goes through them first. Fridge leftovers, the bits of cat food rinsed out of bowls, leftover spaghetti, soggy cereal, stale bread... that all goes to the hens. Banana peels, orange peels, apple cores, carrot peelings and ends, artichoke stems... those go to the goats. Once they've digested it, it reaches the gardens through the barn litter. What does go into compost is used paper towels, muffin papers, potato peels, and cooked artichoke leaves. That's about all. It breaks down nicely, though.
I empty the ash pan from the wood stove onto the gardens in the winter. Lots of minerals there. Some years I get the goats' Christmas tree skeletons chipped and use that as a mulch, to keep the soil from drying out too fast - and it breaks down over time. Even grass clippings either get run through the goats or go onto the garden beds as mulch.
So yeah. It's bitterly cold here, and it's too soon for me to start seeds, but I'm thinking about the gardens all the time. I did inventory my seed collection yesterday, though. I can say honestly that there's a short-season variety of artichoke at Burpee's that I'd like to try growing, and I could probably use a 2nd packet of parsnip seeds, but aside from that, I will not be getting any seeds this spring. I hope.
