Adding Soil/Fertilizer… Coronavirus Day 36

I gave up on the seeds in the ground. Grandma swears I should give it a little more time. And truthfully my dad always says I’m a little impatient… but they’ve been planted since March 30 and here we are April 18th (that was Saturday this all went down) and no signs of anything. The seedlings I planted were for cooler weather. Not cold… there’s a difference. But they prefer the cooler weather of April, May, and possibly June versus the summer heat of July and August.

3 weeks and nothing. So I pulled the tiller out and said screw it. Hubby started “feeling sorry” for me because I really wanted more soil from our manure pile, but we don’t have a front end loader. I wasn’t in the mood to try and bucket it as we did back in March. And truthfully he’d been wanting to rent this machine because it comes with multiple attachments including one to work on the brush in timber.

There’s a back gate on our property that attaches to my parents and allowed hubby to run through the field. As he brought in the loads of manure, I ran the tiller through it. The manure has sat long enough that while it is a fabulous fertilizer, it is also just great additional soil. 

I have 2 problems with adding from the manure pile. 

1. We live in SW MO and we farm rocks here. I swear. We are in the Ozark Mountains… read that as a hill. Anyway… there was enough rock in the garden before. As we pile up the manure pile while it sits, we pull rocks in. So when hubby was spreading this, it was bringing a lot of new rocks into the garden. I was trying to pick them up best I could but boy!
2. There are some weird weeds that grow in this soil. I’m not sure why or where they come from. They are annoying though! They have sharp spines on them and if you catch them just right, they will dig into your poor fingers. It’s “fun.”

But those 2 things said I am still glad we were able to fertilize the soil with the manure. Perfect fertilizer. And it produces some great quality vegetables. That’s how I set up my raised bed garden a few years ago. 

Possibly at the end of the year, I might send off some soil samples to see what our soil is lacking. It’d be interesting to know!