Where it Started…

It all began with an empty horse pasture. Well, horse pasture is probably overstating things a bit. A horse paddock albeit a large one is more apt, I guess. The space had been traversed by goats before the horse, and the small stand of ponderosa pines had long since succumbed to the pine bark beetle. With the trees now felled, and no gelding stomping about, the space was free for the taking. I had decisions to make. I could grow weeds, or I could grow food. The weeds, well, the weeds were a given. I was already a skilled weed grower. I could grow them fast, and lush, and new and exciting varieties were popping up every day! Nature abhors a vacuum after all.

To an outside observer it might appear that I had hit paydirt literally. 10 years of “free fertilizer” in the form of horse manure sounds like a dream garden in the making. However, my soil was, and continues to be, poor.

Luckily, I now have access to quality resources on how to correct my poor soil (essentially just dirt at this point) and bring it to balance. I was introduced to the no-till method in an extension class on soil health (go figure) and 2 books that would cement my mission to transform my space. “Kiss the Ground” by Josh Tickell, which has been made into a documentary that you can watch on Netflix, and “Growing a Revolution” by David R. Montgomery. I highly recommend them.

Having spent 17 years as a home gardener, there was a learning curve, I won’t lie. I had tilled my main garden plot every spring and switching to non-tillage was largely a mystery to me. Especially since I was now expanding that area three-fold. So much of what I was reading on no-till and minimal tillage methods were for large scale operations and use large machines and/or incorporate livestock. None of which fit the scale and size of my gardens. There was very little that I had found to date that translated into the backyard home garden setup. Thankfully there are pioneers like Eliot Coleman and Jean Martin Fortier. I also highly recommend their books “The Four-Season Harvest” and “The Market Gardener” respectively.

Now armed with a solid understanding of what I need to do to begin, I purchased a broad fork thus making 2019 my last run through my garden with a tractor tiller. This is my soil building journey, and it has just begun.

The long road ahead