Dirt farmer

An unrelated, but great album

As I mentioned in the last post, when we ripped out the landscaping in our yard we found a lot of crap...rocks, broken bricks, glass, etc.  Also, we had heard from neighbors that our yard may have previously been a dump, which was worrying.  To get to the bottom of this, we called Alexandria City Hall, who told us that our yard hadn't been a dump site of any kind.  Still, not really prime gardening material.  So last fall we tried to beef up our soil.

The original plan was to buy fresh fill dirt from one of the many landscaping businesses.  But we needed 2-3 pickup truck loads, which would have cost a couple hundred dollars.  In the process of shopping around for cheap fill dirt, I stumbled across a couple of great resources for DC-area gardeners:  the Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia (http://mgnv.org/) and the UVA ag extension office.

A lady from MGNV recommended that instead of buying fill dirt we improve our soil by adding organic matter.  So over the winter we've added organic matter in 3 ways.  First, we compost all of our food scraps with this:

We manage to fill it up about twice a month with vegetables, egg shells, and coffee grounds.  You can buy it on amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Gallon-Ceramic-Compost-Keeper/dp/B000K76CPK

Next, we took old cardboard boxes (amazon prime!) and laid them over the top of the dirt.  Sounds strange, but the lady from MGNV said it adds organic matter and attracts earth worms.

The last thing was to plant winter wheat as a cover crop.  This site talks about the benefits of cover cropping your garden: http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/factsheets/ecogardening/impsoilcov.html

All this dirt farming isn't attractive.  Our yard looked something like this all winter:

One last thing - the Virginia Cooperative Extension office offers soil testing kits that test your soil's PH, nutrient levels, etc. The cost is only $10 for in-state residents and $16 for out of state.  We didn't get around to doing this, but plan to for next year.  http://www.soiltest.vt.edu/