It sounds kind of weird to say that you’ve been saving poop for a special occasion.
We actually have been doing that, though. We have been composting our chicken manure and a huge pile of horse manure, waiting for it to be cooked enough to use as a garden building material. Happily, today was the day we started our long awaited crop bed project!
We measured out eight beds measuring three feet by twenty five feet each, and began layering material down.
The first layer was flattened cardboard to act as a weed suppressant, followed by a layer of rotting bark from the wood shed. This was followed by a layer of composted chicken manure and broken down shavings.
After that was laid out and leveled, we added a thick layer of vegetable compost, a layer of rotted manure, and finished off with a fine layer of fish compost. Between the two of us, we were able to finish four of the eight beds this morning. Success!
We will let these new beds sit and warm up until later in the spring, when they will then be ready to plant out with choices that need a lot of room, like the sun and can be stored. Squash and potatoes will be some of the things that you’ll be seeing out here in this new growing area, and we’re pretty excited to be expanding beyond the potager. We’ll eventually be able to take our produce to the local market for sale, too
The string that you see measured out in the photo below shows where our deer fencing will be as well as the perimeter of our garden road. The remaining four beds will be on the left, a mirror image of these four. We have left enough room between the beds so that a wheelbarrow and garden cart can easily be pulled through, and the area between each set of four beds will have space to back in with a vehicle…and a few rose bushes for fun.
