Earthworm Heaven

A few posts ago, I talked about a new type of gardening I am trying at our farm. I thought about how to set up my garden long and hard because the best spot for the garden is an area where it stays a little more wet because it is a low lying area and there are some underground springs in the area. After discussing with my uncle who is a Master Gardener, I decided that I wanted to do No Till, Raised Bed gardening. I bought a book about it called The Vegetable Gardener's Bible which I highly recommend to all you vegetable gardeners out there. The book teaches you to use the W-O-R-D system-Wide rows, Organic methods, Raised beds, Deep soil. In theory, you don't have to ever till and you don't have to worry to much about weeds because you use lots of mulch. It is also supposed to produce twice as much from the same size garden because you use wide beds.
Here is a rundown of my garden. For now, it is about 40 feet by 40 feet but it may get bigger. My rows are 40 inches wide and the paths between them are 24 inches wide. I dug out the paths and put that soil on the beds to raise them up. This past weekend I went to the City of Fayetteville's Compost Facility. They take leaves, grass clippings and other yard waste from people and compost it. They have big machines that turn it. When it is fully composted they sell it to the public for $20 a truckload. They even test it to make sure it is safe for gardens and it gets the organic garden seal of approval. This compost is the best compost I have ever seen in my entire life. I was so shocked when I saw how good it was. I highly recommend it to anyone to use in their garden. Back to my garden. I used the compost to put on my beds to help raise them up some more and help improve my soil. I then got some free straw from the UofA horse barn. It is the stuff they rake out after it has been used in the horse stalls. It is about 95% straw and 5% horse manure. I am putting that on top for mulch to help keep the moisture in and the weeds out. After this year I will use old leaves from our place for mulch. In the paths I am using newspaper with shredded paper on top for the walkway. That will keep the weeds away and provide a mud free walking space. By the way, I need a lot more shredded paper, so if any of you have access to shredded paper please save it for me and I will get it from you the next time I see you. Hopefully an earthworm village will move in to the garden soon and they will take care of all the tilling. It is a lot of work getting it set up but once it gets going there won't be a whole lot of work to do except mulching in the fall, and planting and mulching in the spring. I hope it all works as well as the book describes and as well as the picture I have in my head. I probably won't have it completely going until next year but I will get some plants in this year. Here are some pics of the garden so far.

Pre-garden


After building the rows


After putting on the compost from Fayetteville-notice the difference in color from the normal dirt above and the compost.


And finally, after the straw.