bed preparation

Rain was forecast for the past five days, but so far it has remained suspiciously dry.  Thinking that this luck will not last much longer, I spent the morning pushing the tiller through some beds that I had been working by hand.  The days of uninterrupted dryness assisted in turning in the last bits of cover crop with smooth ease.  While not technically perfect, a good raking will be enough to get some bed space ready for my first sowing of beets and radishes.  A fine, even seedbed is important for good germination; soil contact on all sides is one of the best ways to ensure that a seed will start successfully.  Clods, rocks, or decaying green matter in the bed all prevent this from happening.  The goal is to eliminate as many obstacles as possible before planting out.


Which brought me to my next task, the one that I named my garden blog after: picking stones.  Picking stones from the garden is an endless job.  It seems that one can spend hours, seasons, years pulling rocks from the same garden beds.  No matter how thorough you are, the stones persist.  They are like kinks in the hose or slugs in your lettuce.  Some things just don't go away, and the challenge as a grower is to learn to be at peace them.  Luckily, I had helping hands in the form of my friends Serena and Theodore to speed things along.  I was thankful for their assistance, especially after I made the mistake of watering a block of garlic with buckets of watered-down fish emulsion BEFORE we combed through it for field stones.  Consider the lesson learned. 

We spent the end of the day tossing down another layer of straw mulch over bald spots in the mulch that the wind had blown away.  Now I'm actually hoping for some rain to tamp things down.  If any of the forecasts are true, that will be tomorrow.  But if not, I'm sure there will still be some stones waiting for me.