Veggie Patch Extension

I’m extending my small veggie patch every week. I love to make it nice and big one day so that I can feed myself and my family with healthy veggies straight from the garden. I have a front yard and a backyard to play with, but they both need lots of work before I can plant anything.

My front yard has pretty heavy clay soil, only one corner of it has relatively OK soil for veggies to grow. That’s where my current small patch is. The rest of the front yard has heavy clay that no plant would grow. I need to work on the soil to extend the patch. My backyard, on the other hand, has crumbly soil structure, not bad for veggie patch. However, it’s full of weeds. Some of them are tough invasive weeds. They need to go before veggies can settle there. So here is what I did so far.

Front yard
I dug up the clay soil to aerate and loosen it. With lots of organic matters and fertilizers, the soil should improve perfect for veggies. I added:

• All purpose Granular fertilizer - This gives instant nutrients for seedlings.
• Organic slow release plant food & Organic meat meal - These are for ongoing nutrients over the long term.
• Garden lime - This is to control pH level of the soil. This allows more nutrients to be available to plants, and improve soil structure by promoting composting or organic matter.

I’m planning to leave the soil for two weeks, mixing the soil occasionally to encourage the soil improving process. After two weeks, I’ll turn the soil over again to loosen up about 20 cm of the surface for air & water movement. Then the garden should be ready to plant, hopefully.

The organic plant food I used is based on composted chicken manure. It has strong smell that bend my nose. I sense this smell every spring where keen gardeners live. It was unfortunate timing that my next door neighbors just moved in on the weekend I used this smelly fertilizer. They might be thinking that they moved into the area that whole neighborhood stink like chicken poo. Hopefully they get used to it.

The smell of organic meat meal excited my cats. It’s got tasty, meaty smell for the little hairy critters, but they couldn’t see any meat in the garden. They went around the whole garden to look for meat, sniffing and digging the soil. They eventually gave up looking for it and sat on the garden edge to supervise me working in the garden. What a tough life they have…

Now the front yard is set to cook itself for a few weeks. I’m looking forward to it.

Backyard
My backyard is fairy big and it was covered by full of weeds. I had to use weedkiller to attack this problem. A few weeks ago, I sprayed non-residual weedkiller. That made the weeds unhealthy, but didn’t kill them completely, I also found some areas that I missed to spray. The following week, weedkiller was applied again. Weeds became dead. I dug up the soil to remove the dead weeds, and mixed in some organic plant food to prepare the soil.

While I was waiting for the soil to be ready, I found lots of small weed appearing again! There must have been seeds from the dead weeds. The seeds sprouted. I have to apply weedkiller again. Ever since I found those sprouting weeds, rain’s been falling from the sky on and off. That means I have to wait for a while before another weedkiller application. All I can do now is weeding manually. As soon as I see the sun, I go out in the garden and wear garden gloves. I weed like a crazy because the sun won’t stay for a couple of hours according to the weather forecast. If I weed before they flower, they cannot make seeds, so in theory, I should have less weeds eventually. It looks like I’ll be doing this all week this week thanks to the funny weather. The backyard might take longer than I expected to be ready.

OK, What’s now?
For the next two weeks, I’ll be busy sowing seeds to make seedlings in the seed starter boxes. I sowed carrots and celery yesterday. I’ll be sowing some capsicums today. Lots of gardening books are piled on my desk to be read. In a couple of month I should be able to update you on the veggie patches.

That’s it from me today. How’s your garden looking?