Having our soil and eating it too

We’re not just gardeners.

We’re tightrope walkers, balancing that thin line between squeezing as much out of every garden bed in our minuscule garden all the time, while nourishing the soil that we’re growing in.

Since we started growing two years ago, we’ve been trying to negotiate the delicate space between these two gardening extremes and slowly but surely we’re finding the comfy space that enables us to build soil while ensuring a viable harvest.

We’re also crystal ball-gazers. The most important of all our tools is our calendar. We have every bed and every crop planned out across the seasons, which means that sometimes it feels as though we’re working backwards - we know our tomato seedlings will go in in mid-October, so the covercrop occupying what will be the tomato bed needs about a month to six weeks to break down, which means that we need to have chopped and dropped and tarped that covercrop at the end of August.

Never before have our lives been so well mapped out!

The plotting of time, the use of covercrops, are all part of our objective to cultivate our small piece of land without relying on trucked-in inputs. By deliberating growing covercrops, chopping them above the roots and letting both the plant material and root mass decompose, we’re building well-aerated, moisture retentive soil teeming with biological activity. Likewise, by chopping most of our cash crops off above the roots once they are spent and leaving the root mass in the ground, we ensure we’ve constantly got something breaking down in the soil and are leaving sub-soil habitat for the critters that are doing the hard work of soil building for us.

The moral to the story for us has been recognising the importance not just of growing as much as we can in each space, but of ensuring there is something dying in each space.

In other words, we want to have our soil and eat it too.