Community Garden

This weekend we became part of a community garden in our small town. Our friends, Rachael & Nate, are hosting it on their couple acres in Dalton Gardens. There are 5 families involved and we are all planning on sharing the work and the produce.

Yesterday Kyle & Nate rototilled the soil and hauled in horse manure for fertilizer. We are going to let the manure soak into the soil over the winter. Then in the spring we will till the soil again to mix in the manure. Manure is the BEST FERTILIZER EVER!

Here is the garden space with ample deer fencing.

Kyle rototilling the hard ground.

Nate shoveling manure into the freshly tilled garden space.

We planted our garlic crop yesterday, too! Now is the time to plant garlic.

See my post last year about fall planting.

I picked up three different varieties from Kyle's grandpa and the farmer's market.

While the guys made trips with manure, the ladies made thai food and shared delicious wine inside. See our thai recipes here!

Autumn Gardening & Our Secret Ingredient

Fall is near. This makes me sad.

We only have about one more month to enjoy our overgrown garden. Right now we are in the peak of tomato season! I cannot keep up with the picking! I planted too many Sun Gold, Sun Sugar, and Grape tomatoes and not enough Romas, Beefsteak, and large tomatoes for canning. There's always next year, though.

Fall also means it's time to start working on next years garden, especially next years soil. My husband came across some FREE MANURE! We were jumping for joy over this because it's not just any manure. It's very rotted, dark, steaming horse manure! The perfect secret ingredient for our garden! We fertilize with a fish fertilizer once a year. Other than that all we do is compost horse manure and till it into the soil in the fall and spring.
The garden loves it!

This Black Gold is sitting under

a tarp rotting & steaming away! We will incorporate it into the garden soil sometime in October.

So you may be wondering what you can do if you have a smaller garden or don't have a tractor. You can start composting now! You can compost any organic materials such as any vegetable or fruit waste from the kitchen, grass clippings, dead plants from your garden, egg shells, tea bags, coffee grounds, etc. You can add dead fish (gardens love this) or farm animal manure such as horse, cow, chicken, goat. Use your judgement...haha!
You can buy one of those fancy compost bins or turners or you can just make a pile out of sight and add to it everyday. It is important to churn it with a pitch fork or shovel once in a while to mix it up! Don't add it to your soil until it decreases in size by about one third to one half. It should be black or very dark brown, warm or steaming, and you should not be able to really see anything in it except a rotted soil looking material.

Hope that helps! Post any questions in the comment box or email me!