Ready to Get the Garden In!

Ugh, it's supposed to rain all weekend.  But my beloved husband got up early and tilled my garden this morning!   The birds are really having a feast in it now, too.  We are blessed to have wonderful soil and lots of little wormies. 

Today the boys and I are going to rake through it and pick out the rocks.  Tonight we will hopefully (in-laws willing ☺) have a date night that involves a stop at the feed store for lime and manure.  I already spread all the compost I had on the garden last week, and my hubby tilled it under.  For anyone who is interested, here is my composting technique:

I have an old laundry basket on my deck right outside the kitchen door.  I put a layer of soil from our yard into the bottom of it, and I throw all my compostable kitchen scraps right in:  fruit & veggie peels, tea bags, coffee grounds, eggshells, high chair scraps (anyone with a toddler knows what I'm saying here:  all the pieces of cooked carrot, green beans, pancake, etc. that land in the radius of kitchen floor around the high chair), etc. 

When I get a layer of "green" compost, I add another layer of dirt from the yard and continue in layers until I'm ready to dump the whole mess into a designated area of the yard/ditch near the garden.  We give it a stir with the shovel every once in a while and add all the grass clippings, mulched leaves, and ashes from the woodstove to it.  If I had access to some cow manure-caked hay, that would be even better... but we just have to make do with what we have!

We annually spread all that compost on the garden plot before tilling it under, and we also use it to mulch the plants in our garden occasionally. 

Another little tidbit:  we save our fish guts to plant beneath our corn seed.  Corn needs the nitrogen.