Garden Share Bristol

We've been on a quest for soil to fill our beds and have had success at different places. This is another lasagna bed that was created last week -

First newspaper to provide some barrier against weeds (and hopefully nematodes!)

Here is some straw mixed with fresh horse manure and chicken manure. Fresh manure can burn roots, so we put a thin layer on the bottom so that by the time the roots reach it, they should be OK.

Then we added a layer of leaves that are partially decomposed because they've been protecting our beds since last fall.

Then we covered with a layer of 1 yr old composted horse manure mixed with sand and woodchips. We removed big pieces of bark because it would steal nitrogen from our plants to use in its decomposition.

Then covered with a thin layer of worm castings we had left over from last year....

and look what we found - two worms making a coccoon!! The bands line up and they knot up and slime up (for lack of propoer terminology) and a little coccoon is produced that between 4 and 20 worms will come out of.

We planted aylssum, carrots, radishes, kale, baby bok choy and kale in this bed. Most things were already coming up this week!

We are still waiting for the City to deliver compost to fill the remaining beds, but in the meantime,

A BIG THANK YOU TO NATHAN AND CANADIAN TIRE FOR DONATING SOIL, MANURE AND TOOLS!!

Thanks to this we were able to fill 3 more beds and start planting our tomatoes. It's nice to have good neighbours....

In other news....

....our strawberries are blooming.....finally!

mmmm.....mesclun, we will harvest this next week and plant tomatoes in its place.

a special visit to our garden today!