You might be familiar with another blog of a similar theme. However, that blog seems to be focused more on farming babies than food at the moment. Don't fear, though, the Miller Homestead blog is here to take up the slack.
Actually, I just figured that since I was going to write down info about my gardening and winemaking experiences for my own records, I might as well make the information public in case anybody happens to be interested. I'm hoping to record things like planting dates, how well certain varieties grow, what processes/ingredients or didn't work for winemaking, etc.... Perhaps there will be a few sporadic entertaining posts thrown in just to confuse people.
The story begins in late June of 2009 when I closed on a new home in Rochester, NY
One of the first projects that I wanted to do was to turn the back yard into a vegetable garden. This backyard is almost ideal for it. Its too small to be really useful as a yard, and the bomb-shelter of a garage on the side makes it rather unsightly. Besides, who really wants to mow grass? It has reasonably good southern exposure(for a small urban backyard) and is just about the right size for a beginner vegetable garden. Here is what it looked like when I moved in. Don't mind the lack of sun. The picture was taken pretty late in the evening.
I dug a hole in the yard to get some dirt for a soil sample. As I dug in, I discovered that there was a VERY hard layer of clay-like soil about 6-8" down. I decided to take a sample of the surface layer and a sample of the hard stuff. Both were sent in to Dairy One Soil Laboratory. (Cornell stopped doing routine soil samples and is sending their customers to Dairy One so they can focus on research) After a week or so, I got the results.
Good news on most fronts. Soil pH is between 6 and 7 (which is ideal). The top layer has an exceptionally high CEC, which measures the ability of the soil to hold nutrients. The lower layer has an OK value for CEC. Base saturation levels (which I don't really understand) for potassium, magnesium, and nitrogen are in the OK to ideal ranges. Also, the Phosphorus, Potassium, Calcium, Magnesium, and Nitrate levels are all in the "very high" range for both samples. That apparently means that the "nutrient is present at a level higher than required to support crop growth". So I don't know where this super dirt came from, but my plants are going to be awefully happy about it. Actually, I remember reading that one of the reasons that the original Biosphere II project failed was that the soil was too rich in nutrients, which caused a massive soil microbe bloom, which then sucked up all the oxygen. Hopefully we have enough oxygen floating around our backyard to support both us and the microbes.
In september I finally got around to starting on my garden. Renting the roto-tiller was easy enough, though getting it to the house and back to the rental place turned out to be a bit of an ordeal. Here is a picture my wonderful wife took of me tilling the yard.
The tiller was able to get through the top layer easy enough, but the tines didn't seem to want to go through the hard clay layer that was about 6-8" down. I went over the garden several times, but the tines were pretty much bouncing off the clay layer. Ugh. Nothing I could really do about it.
This is getting to be a bit too long of a post, so I will break it up with an intermission.
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