Making Soil

I have an area on the farm that I want to plant carrots. Not just a few carrots tho'. I want to yield around 100lbs of carrots. Why so many? Well although I'm just guessing, I think that is about how many we need for an entire year.

Anyway, to plant carrots you need good deep friable soil so the carrot root will grow nice and straight, and long. The soil I have is thick and heavy. It has never had anything growing on it other then grasses and I believe it has, from time to time, been under water for a few months some years. It is really dark and full of organic matter, but it feels and handles like modeling clay.

Here is my experiment for making it usable for carrots, and any other root veggie.

I started out digging a trench where I want my row to be. It's about 30 feet long and as wide as my shovel. I used what I'm calling the forking method to dig the trench. Basically I dig out a couple of shovel scoops at the end of the row then jam a garden fork into the ground about 3 inches down the row and push the dirt into the shovel hole. Then I move another 3 inches and push the dirt into the hole I just made. and so on down the row.

This breaks up the dirt really well, and makes it easy to remove with the shovel. I scoop the dirt into a mound right next to the trench so I can put it back in later. I did this twice and ended up with a trench that was about a foot deep.

Although the dirt is broken up really well I think it would just pack down again if I just put it back in the hole without some sort of amendments. So here is what I did.

I took a small stack of newspapers and some grass clippings (that I hand scythed) and ran them through my leaf shredder. The combination of the two made a really nice mulch which I spread on the bottom of the ditch. Then I took the fork and broke up the bottom of the ditch to mix the mulch in. The next step was to scrape in some of the dirt add more mulch and fork it again. Then fill the ditch with the rest of the dirt, breaking up the clumps as I went and fork it one more time. I shredded up some more newspaper and put it on top of the now full trench and then laid some newspaper sheets over that and covered the whole thing with a little more dirt.

Now what I do is wait for a few days, maybe a week and see if the ditch attracts some worms. I saw quite a few while I was digging but I want a whole bunch more. The worms should do the rest of the work for me. I'll need to turn the rest of the newspaper into the trench before I plant but I hope to get seed in the ground in less then ten days.

I'll let you know how it goes.

-dale