Scoopin' and stirrin'... for victory!

Things have been going well the last few weeks down at Zink Square Footage.  April is fickle, and the meteorologists are trying to frighten us with all this talk of potential snow this weekend, but it's simply been too nice out to believe in that right now.  When you get a Sunday afternoon that hits (no joke) 90 degrees on April 9th, snow is about the last thing on your mind.  What has been on my mind, then?  Preparing ourselves for victory, of course!

First things first.  I decided in my last post that our little urban farm needed a name to make it feel legit.  If you head down to the farmer's market and peruse the stands, there will be many differences, but one thing they all have in common is that they all have names.  Coyote Run Farm, Blue Gate Farm, Soder Apiary, the list goes on and on.  So once we added livestock (worms!) to our farm, it was pretty clear we needed a name to really reach the big time.  Stacia suggested a riff on the fairly common (Name) Acres, used by many farmers including her grandparents.  Well, we don't exactly have acres; we have about 100 square feet.  Keeping that in mind, and considering that we're largely following the Square Foot Gardening method, it was pretty clear that we should be Zink Square Footage.

So what's been going on down on our square feet?  A lot, actually!  A week ago the weather turned nice and we decided to head out to our cropland.  We had one raised bed that was starting to come apart at the corner, so we fastened it back down with an L-bracket and screws.  We pulled a few weeds and threw down some mulch on our pathways.  But the big job was getting the soil ready for planting.

The "soil" we plant in really never has been soil per se.  It's a 1/3 1/3 1/3 mix of compost, vermiculite and coconut coir (a sustainable alternative to peat moss).  This mix seems to work really well, as we had good results with it last year and it really hadn't packed down too badly when we stopped by this spring.  Compared to the dense clay all around us, it's 100 square feet of veggie plant heaven.  Well, this mixture worked so well last year that we really didn't fertilize or feed the soil at all, which let me to think we might have depleted it just a bit.  Certainly, though, there's no way we were going to dump a bag o' chemicals onto our precious plot, so we had to find an organic alternative.  That alternative showed itself in the form of...  poop.

Poop of various kinds, actually.  I've already espoused somewhat the benefits of worm compost, organic matter that's worked its way through worms.  Our squirm is a bit young yet, so they haven't processed enough to add to the garden, but we were able to find a few bags of commercial worm castings.  They don't do much for you in terms of Nitrogen, Phosphorous or Potassium (the three chemicals in all fertilizers), but they do add nice microorganisms that the plants like.  We needed that N-P-K too, though.  Fortunately, that is very available in the form of chicken manure, cutely marketed as Coop Poop.  With a few scoops of coop poop (say that 3 times fast) and a half-bag of worm castings per box, I felt confident we'd refortified the soil without overdoing it (which can be just as bad as underfeeding).

Working that mixture and stirring it into the existing material was a fantastic workout for upper body strength, which is nice for me since I currently have none.  With aching arms and beautifully prepped boxes, we wiped our brows and looked out over Zink Square Footage.  I gotta say, it looked goood.  It took all of my restraint to keep Stacia and me from jumping straight into planting seeds everywhere, but weather-people everywhere were promising a low that Monday night in the sub-30 degree range.  Our seeds might have been fine, but I didn't want to run the risk that we plant everything only to lose it in a frost.  One more week, I said.  One more...

Who can say if that was the right choice, since it only really hit 30-even in Des Moines, but either way a little prudence is probably a good trait to have in the garden.  We had marigold and broccoli seedlings, seeds of 6 different kinds that we wanted an early start on, and all the enthusiasm we could muster.  Patience... well, we'd have to work on that.  But victory in our fight for food independence isn't achieved in one quick skirmish.  It takes just as much planning, preparation and anticipation as it does actual work.  So for one more week we were content to gaze at our farm's bare soil.  Within another week, we'd be going all-out, for it would be one of the best possible days in the garden.  It would be... planting day!

Next update, I'll let you know how first planting went, and probably update you on the second planting, currently scheduled for this coming weekend.  Keep growing on!