What I love most about living the farm life is constantly learning new things.
Often it’s because I must — there’s some kind of emergency or need, and I have a knowledge gap to fill — but just as often, it’s serendipity. I peruse Pinterest and spot an article relevant to my interests, or I pick up a library book that just happens to impart some useful gardening wisdom.
Right now, I’m on a bit of a no-dig gardening kick. Reclaiming the old ways of doing things, yo!
I’m sure my keen and sudden interest is part of the global vibe in people of my age and sensibilities. Several people in my life who have shown very little interest in this kind of frugal or green living before are suddenly making “garbage soup” (another post for another time) and composting. And once you go down a rabbit hole on Pinterest, well, that algorithm hardly wants to let you go. So it’s not like I think that no-dig gardening came to me through some weird twist of fate, or that I “discovered” anything.
But… more carbon sequestration? Richer soil? Less breaking my back and shoulders? Oh yeah. It’s gonna be awesome.
We already have a giant raised bed garden, but it’s fairly old now, and the local logs they used to build it up are getting a wee bit sad and buried in the ground. I’m just going to build up the areas of the raised bed garden that our friend helped us carve out last year and treat it like a bunch of smaller raised beds. Magic!
J has reclaimed a ton of wood from some ill-advised projects the last property owner ventured on, so he helped me measure and cut that up into roughly proper-sized posts and boards to start putting some structure around those sub-beds.
The corner posts, which we screwed the boards into.
Then, after J showed us how to do it, A and I managed to be semi-competent farm hands and assemble two more. Ta-da!
One down, 17 to go! 😅
All that’s left now is to start building the “lasagna” layers inside these frames — I’ll start with newspaper to act as a weed barrier, followed by various layers of green material, brown material, poop (thanks, goaties), and soil. In a few days, maybe a week or two, I’m expecting I can plant some of my cool-weather crops and try to overwinter some of them in these nice and toasty raised beds.
