Hard Gardening

Today, Pramod and I had a hard day of gardening... and all we really did was prepare 4 beds to transplant lettuce plants and plant seeds.

It's amazing how much work goes into preparing a bed. At home, we just pull out the weeds around the planting spot, dig a hole, and put the plant in. Here everything is on a much larger scale. The 4 beds were all about 1.5 feet by 30 feet and they had all been worked over before. First, Pramod went through with a "broad fork", which was a pretty cool tool. It basically pulled everything out from the roots. Before using the broad fork, Paul had gone over all of these plots with a machine that does the same job but not as thoroughly. (I have a picture of Pramod doing that to a different plot at a later date.) While Pramod used the broad fork, I went along after him and pulled out the clumps of weeds and roots. Then we had to add fertilizer (2 year old horse manure)--which first had to be de-grassed and dug up. Pramod then went through with the broad fork again to mix it up while I pulled out the clumps of weeds that were just added with the fertilizer. Afterwards, we fluffed up the dirt with the rake and smoothed it out so that the seeder could go over it easily and smoothly. At this point, the dirt was fluffy enough that you could stick your hand straight into it up to your wrist. In the bed that we planted the lettuce, we added an irrigation hose under the dirt, and that's pretty cool. It's kind of cool to know how to do that. All of that took a lot of hard work, sweat, and about 6 hours of our time.

We also put in a permanent fence for the cows. This involves stringing a lot of wire and pushing a bunch of poles into the ground. Paul's working on getting an intensive grazing rotation for his cows, and so we have a lot more fences to get up.

I don't know how Paul does all this gardening by himself, it's more than a full time job. He has said that he could use another full time worker plus the WWOOFers who come in to make it more manageable.