Feeding The Soil

Over the holidays I ate a lot.  The gumbos, rice & gravy, traditional holiday meals, not to mention the sweets and goodies that I always have trouble saying "No" to, have made my pants fit a little tighter than I'd like.  In addition to eating more 'comfort foods' during the winter months, the short days leave me with fewer daylight hours to work those additional calories off.  It is only in the spring with the longer days that I am able to bring some balance back into the "eat less and move around more" axiom of weight loss and health.

While I need to feed myself LESS, I'm always looking to feed my soil more and that opportunity presented itself recently.  A dear friend of ours had raked her yard. She's a big advocate of composting and put many bags of leaves into her flower beds, but had 18 bags of leaves left that were going to go to the dump.  She knew that I would be appreciative of them and called me.  You've never seen anyone more excited about bags of leaves!  Russ drove over in his pickup truck and loaded them in, strapping them down so they wouldn't blow out on Interstate 10.

I had the perfect spot picked out for the leaves.  The land slopes southward and the lower end of the garden stays muddy, despite the raised beds.  I determined that I would dig trenches between the rows of turnips and bury all of the leaves.  I've found that trench composting organic matter attracts earthworms and improves soil fertility.  In the summer, digging these trenches would have been a real chore, but with all of the rainfall, it was easy.

Digging a hole

I know the depth of the hole is hard to see in the photo above but I dug the trench about a foot deep and about two feet long, laying all the dirt on the side.  Then I dumped the contents of the bag into the hole.

Emptying the bag

The leaves billowed out of the hole, but I had a plan to fix that.  I jumped on top of the leaf pile like a kid, stomping the leaves down.  Like a compactor, I mashed the leaves down into the hole until they filled the 1 foot deep by 2 feet wide trench perfectly. 

Making them fit

Then while I was standing on the leaves in the hole, I grabbed my shovel and pulled the dirt over the top of the crushed leaves in the hole, filling it all in.  Then I moved over and began the hole err whole process again.  I repeated that down two 30 foot rows, filling in the space between the raised beds. Over the course of the next year those leaves will decompose and add organic matter to the soil.

Filling in the hole

Here is a photo of the finished process after I had completed the first row.  Then I moved to the row on the right.

One down, one to go!

Although it is a little hard to tell from the photo above, burying the leaves raised the level of the grown between the raised beds almost level with the rows.  In the past, the trenches between the raised rows held water during rains.  Now that water runs off into the pasture, eliminating scald damage by standing water that I had experienced previously.

Each year I rotate the position of my rows.  In year one I grown crops on a row.  In year two, the trench area becomes the row that I plant on.  This allows me to "rest the soil" each year in the same garden plot.  Next year the vegetables will send their roots down into decomposed leaves with a nice population of earthworms.  That will translate into nice vegetables for our table.  The leaves that were heading to the Landfill were used in my land fill.  Nice!