The garden is now back to where we started in April, a blank slate of raised beds and dirt, but with some signs of everything that has happened this season. Since April the cinder blocks have taken on a colorful coat of paint thanks to the kids from Galaxy Youth and the Grinnell Summer Camp and those raised beds have produced a tremendous amount of biomass, which now sits in a tangle of vines and stalks next to the compost bins. The shed next to the garden has also been cleaned out, organized, and prepared for a winter of storage. The rain barrels are drained for the winter and their valves are left open to let any rain or meltwater that comes into the barrel between now and April run out.
The garlic has been planted and mulched under a thick layer of straw for the winter. It will be the first plant to emerge in the garden next March and April. While the mulch seems like it is meant to keep the garlic warm during the cold weather ahead, its most important function is actually to protect the garlic du ring the periods of thaw and freeze that occur in the late fall and the late winter. By acting as an insulating layer and keeping the ground at a steadier temperature during those periods, the mulch prevents the garlic from being pushed out of the soil by
frost heave.
Today we took a composite soil sample of the Community Garden to send in for testing at the Soil Plant Analysis Lab at Iowa State University. A composite soil sample just means that I took a trowel full of dirt from each of the eleven raised beds, put them all in a clean bucket, mixed them together, and then removed a cup and half of the mixed soil as the overall garden sample. For $8 the lab will provide test results for pH, phosphorus and potash. By learning the pH of our soil, we'll find out if we need to adjust it up (with lime) or down (with spagnum peat moss). Plants require a certain range of pH in order to be able to take up nutrients, most plants between 6 and 7 on the pH scale. If the pH is above or below that, the plants have a hard time taking in essential nutrients like phosphorus and potash which, along with nitrogen, are the key nutrients needed for plant growth.
