Work party success!

Starting at about 8:30 this morning, we all got to work. In addition to Dan and myself, we had four more people and four more kids. We started off cleaning the rest of the debris off the lot, which at this point mostly consisted of little bits and bobs of plastic and metal, lost for who knows how long.



After the cleaning was pretty complete, we sprinkled dolomite lime and agricultural lime over the whole lot, 150 pounds of each, then tilled it in. This is a standard recommendation by the father of Pacific Northwest gardening, Steve Solomon. The dolomite has magnesium and the agricultural has calcium, both of which are almost universally lacking in soils west of the Cascade mountains.



I had a great time running Dan's BCS 712 rear-tine tiller. I've used rear-tine tillers before, but not one this nice. It has a reverse gear! (Great for making tight corners up to a fenceline.)

I ended up tilling for hours and hours (and hours), but managed to get the whole site tilled very well. There was grass in some spots and some strangely extremely compacted soil, which took a couple passes each. We've had close to two weeks of dry and occasionally sunny weather, which is out of the ordinary for this time of year. So I made the best of it - it's supposed to rain or snow tomorrow.





After all the tilling was done, I marked out the beds for the front half of the lot ("my" half, since Dan is using the back half) using wooden stakes. I've got 28 beds, each 36" wide and about 20 feet long, for a total of over 1600 square feet of growing space. As daylight waned, I was able to get manure-compost dumped on a couple of the beds. I'll get the rest of it distributed tomorrow, and will probably mix it in with just a rake, along with some complete organic fertilizer.

It's starting to look like a garden!