Great Expectations

The disappointment of not getting done everything that you set out to do , well, you learn to live with it. It was easily doable, had I pushed myself harder.But, you see, it's Sunday, and I don't want to push myself . So, I reconcile myself to the fact that I'm going to get an acceptable , but not optimal, amount done . I'll get it done during the week... sure.

Today, it was over 90F again, but still it was nice, especially in the shade. I managed to clear, prep, and plant two beds, one to leek plants ( King Seig?), the other to onion sets, a red torpedo type, and a yellow variety. That's 60 leeks, and 142 onion sets, plus a couple six packs of lettuce, and two of cabbage. More onions, this time plants, should ship out to me this week, and may be here by the weekend. I have much more prep work to do this week, and that's after the ten and a half hours I am gone each day. We'll see what happens.

Each bed was cleared, the residues going into the compost pile. After forking over the soil,  I added aged horse manure, compost, a bit of steer manure . The top of each bed is dusted with a combination of blood meal, bone meal, fishbone meal, greensand, and poultry feather meal. All is then incorporated into the top 4" of soil, raked smooth, tamped down with the back of the rake, and finally planted. 

This is pretty much what I do to my beds each time I replant, changing the amounts of each amendment according to what I have on hand. The greensand, which adds necessary trace elements, need only be  added every 2-3 years. In the future, I fully expect that I will be planting more and more of my small kitchen garden to green manures, or cover crops, in winter. The soil, very sandy, is improving each year, as I up the organic material. My production is getting better. Additionally, we are fine-tuning the quantities we grow, deciding what we really like/dislike, what we can grow lots of, what we 're really wasting time on. 

My greatest costs are for commercial composts, and those expensive organic soil amendments. My sandy soil seems to dissolve organic matter. That's where growing my own compost crops will help, as purchasing bagged compost is expensive. But it is difficult to produce compost in the amounts my soil uses it, so making my own  means I need to grow the raw materials. Unless one saves seed, starts their own seedlings, and produces as much compost as possible right on ones' own land, it is not really either cost efficient or sustainable. Might as well buy expensive food at Whole Foods.