Eleven O'Clockish

I woke up yesterday to fog.  Whoa, was it fun.  Mom and I listened to the sound track for Pride and Prejudice and tried to guess where each song was in the movie.  Yesterday I drove home in the  dark and the fog.  I felt like I was in one of those movies set during World War II, one of those movies where you see headlights beaming into the mist.   We have been working in the greenhouses.  We have learned a bit of handy information, some purchased compost is hydrophobic.  Make sure it will absorb water BEFORE you put it on things.   We didn't know about hydrophobic compost the first time we bought it.  We spread it in one of our greenhouses and it is struggling to get water. Oh well!    

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...