Some interesting reading

I love to read in my not so spare time. I spend most of my time reading articles or books or book reviews of books I think I might want to read...so let's just say I am fairly well read ..granted reading sometimes means I get 3 or 4 words in before I hear a kid say Mom I have to tell you a question but eventually I plug my way through whatever I am trying to concentrate on.

An article that fascinated me and I could not tear my eyes off of is in the most recent issue of National Geographic

It is called Where Food Begins

It is a story about dirt

It is about how we are neglecting our dirt and how we are destroying the very thing that gives us our food.

The story goes into great detail about what we have done in many parts of the world (the WE here is the human family)

From poor soil management and chemical usage to deforestation and compaction of the soil using heavy equiptment

This to me is very relevant the magazine showed a map of places where the soil was the best for growing food and guess what

where I live in not one of the best areas

Does this article only speak to doom and gloom of destruction

NOPE it even talks of ways to make the soil better and you guessed it there are tons of things we can do to our soil to "fix" it

first is to ..well not compact it

Next fertilizer, poop, compost, charcoal (no not the briquettes you buy in a bag)

Basically all the thigns an organic gardener does to make thier dirt the best

so there you have all the "kooks" and granola crunchers have been right all along

I sure hope they don't get all smug about it

LOL

So with this lovely article in mind I went out to work in the dusty compacted soil that Dave had tilled up for me it is a great spot for planting right in my front yard full sunshine warmed first in the spring and really a good place

too bad the dirt is nasty dust hard as a rock full of rocks and so compacted it is hard to till even with the tiller

so I was out there using my gardening fork to dig deep I came up with

a couple of grubs

YUCK those are so gross and nasty I gave them to the boys to feed to the chicken I should have the boys grab me some chickens in a cage to stick out there for a while to dig up some grubs and let the chickens take care of the problem for me

So I tilled up one side and got some carrot seeds in the dirt probably won't have carrots from them but who knows

and then I tilled up another section and planted some shelling peas

today I will dig up another section and get the spinach and some lettuce in just for the S&Gs

So much to do and so little time

we are already getting nights that are quite cool (low 40s) so soon we will have frost warnings and that will be the end of my gardening adventure for this year

I will be able to get the garden area cleaned up and then prepped for next spring and start the whole mess all over again after Christmas by starting some seeds indoors (Dave will be so happy LOL) I just have to remember to not start the tomato plants so darn early