On the farm we have been working on our new no-till beds. We started them in the spring, but we are reconstructing them. Before we had a layer of straw on top of the dirt and then compost on top of that. We got the compost from the county (We later discovered that the compost was unfinished.) We had two or three heads of lettuce grow in the beds this summer, nothing else would. We think the failure was a combination of all the nitrogen being tied up in digesting the unfinished compost and the lack of direct contact between the compost and the soil. The beds that have done the best with this compost are the ones where the compost is touching the soil. We think the direct contact helps transfer the soil organisms. We have been calling our struggling beds the Frankenstein beds.
This fall we tore out the Frankenstein beds, tilled, then made new beds with a compost/soil mixture, and are now applying a layer of our home-made finished compost mixed with the unfinished county compost. Our thought in doing this is to keep the soil busy during the winter and keep it from compacting. We are trying out different kinds of nitrogen in our beds to assist in the finishing of the compost. We put feather meal on three of them, fish emulsion on three of them and are trying to figure out what to try on the other four. A lady who came to our farm said that it seemed like there are a lot of experiments here. Amen to that!
Thanksgiving is next week! Happy day!
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