Least Favorite Tool: the !@#$% tiller

The rented BCS 722 Harvester

So the curse of the blog has struck again! Last Friday, as I prepared for a busy weekend of preparing the raised beds for spring/summer plantings (they have to be tilled before the soil dries brick-hard) the tiller broke down again. This time is wasn't the motor, but the bearings of the fly wheel which engages the tines. C & L Saws was closed most of the weekend, and I'm still not sure if the parts are replaceable on such a cheap machine. The same day, I also noticed potentially terminal cracking around the hitch on my rusted 30 year-old trailer. Hauling manure and mixing it into the soil was looking like a nearly impossible proposition. My checkbook came to the rescue. Saturday morning I went down to Big Mike's and made arrangement to rent their BCS tiller for the weekend ($106 to rent; $3000+ to buy). Picking it up by 1 p.m., I had that awesome machine all weekend!

5 yards of fluffy horse manure

That just left the problem of manure. I'd exhausted my collection of previously collected and home-grown manure and needed quite a bit to blend into the largely un-amended native soil of my large backyard gardens. Checkbook again to the rescue. Holiday Nursery has a nice stockpile of well composted (with some green nuggets) horse manure for $20/cubic yard. I bought 5 yards worth (a dump truck holds 7 yards), and the guys at the nursery promptly delivered it to the driveway. With the standard in-town delivery fee of $30 and tax, I paid $140 for a healthy load of crap.

The tilled field before shaping into raised beds

The counter-spinning rear tine tiller was amazingly efficient, working in about a 1/6 of the time of my regular rototiller, I was able to save most of my energy for the task of hauling 48 full wheelbarrow loads of manure to various parts of the garden. Even with my best upper-body fitness of year from dozens of miles of cross-country skiing this winter, I was exhausted and in bed shortly after dark on both days. In the end, I had prepared the soil for 9, 25'x4' raised beds and felt the substantial hit to the checkbook was well worth it.

'Wild' (last years) green shallots saved from the tillers path

Soil Fertility

Thankfully Rio chose to rest in the leaf mold mound, rather than the chicken poop in the foreground of the 6'x25' compost mixing bed

My biggest challenge in the ever expanding garden is building/encouraging healthy and productive soils. The native soils of Black Diamond Canyon and most of Gallup are heavy clay that's prone to compaction when watered and difficult to work (brick-like) when they dry out. Consequently, I'm constantly adding organic matter, sand, and gypsum for balance. The latter in an attempt to reduce the 'stickiness' of the inevitably high percentage of clay that will always remain in my garden beds. Anyway, the main thing is the organic matter, partly for the nutrients, but mostly for the structure and resilience it adds to the soil. Over the past several years I've added straw (too slow to break down/nutrient poor), sphagnum moss (too expensive at $13/bale), and trailer-loads of brown leaves hard to find/collect-- my favorite leaf producing trees and leaf catching fences in and around Gallup are a closely held secret). I've also added endless bags of $2 mushroom compost from Home De*, organic steer manure from the Holiday Nursery ($4), and chicken manure/kitchen compost from my own coop. And yet, my soil still leaves my wanting.

Dusty but rewarding crap

Luckily, I recently got some advice from Tom and Ella of Connections/CSA. They use manure (horse/cow/anything) gathered from local corrals to improve their soils. The decomposing hay and manure adds desperately needed porosity to the soil, and while the nutrient content may vary with different degrees of freshness/decomposition the slight potential to over or under-feed your plants is more than off-set by the long-term soil structure benefits of tilling manure into your soils.And so, after cleaning out my coop this spring and collecting leaves last fall, I'm on the hunt for sources of manure. Cow Town and M&R Trading Post on 491 have great corrals to empty. The 2 vets in town have corrals, but I avoid them fearing medications in the poop, and then there are an endless list of coworkers with livestock eager for a free barn-hand. There's plenty of manure in and around this town!

The pint-sized powerhead 550

Until I've developed the soils of my dreams, I've used compost tea to deliver nutrients/fertility to my undernourished and compacting soils. Compost tea is made by soaking compost or good soils in aerated water in order to encourage the beneficial bacteria, micro-organisms, fungi, etc (everything good in soil grows better with water and air) to multiply. The compost goes into a pillow case (loose compost will clog any pump/airstone) and the air is usually supplied by an aquarium pump supplying an air stone that diffuses the air into fine bubbles. The problem with that type of air pump is you have to get a pretty big one (expensive to buy and operate) to push any worthwhile amount of bubbles deep into a bucket or barrel, and then the airstones constantly get plugged. I've found a better solution is to use another aquarium tool: the power head. Powerheads are basically a submersible pump that uses the venturi effect to suck air into the out flowing water-stream. I've found they're much more efficient at delivering lots of oxygen to the water and rarely get clogged.

35 gallons of 'bubbly,' on the right.