The soil in my vegetable beds could do with a lot more organic matter, so I’ve been on a compost mission in preparation for the next warm season planting. I had dug in some alpaca manure (very like sheep manure) for my beets, tomatoes and tomatillos, but wanted something more like a soil conditioner for the next bed.
Another task was clearing some of the dam. It is very overgrown, and in order to launch our little boat to get out and fix the pump I first had to clear a path through the bulrushes and sedges which have formed a thick raft quite a few metres out into the water. As I laboriously pulled smelly clumps of gunk out, I got thinking it would actually be good for the garden, as it is organically rich and largely decomposed already.
I left it for a day to drain a little, and this morning bagged two lots and brought it up.
Back at the house, one bag went on the old lettuce bed, and the other into my new compost piles near the chicken coop.
The new compost piles are built to be right by the source of my richest fertiliser; the cleanings from the chicken house. These are hay with chicken manure, so with some green weeds and garden waste, it should make a rich pile. In the dry weather it needed a bit of extra moisture though, so a bag of dam sludge seemed a good thing to try.
That reminded me that I had given up on my original compost heap, just made from hay cut from our paddocks. It has been so dry that I didn’t hold much hope it had rotted. When I took the dry top off though, there was a good stash of composted hay, still wet after weeks of dry weather. So I collected two bags of that, one to add to the new vegetable bed, and one for later.
Now the new vegetable bed is looking fit to dig. I was going to leave it to dry out a bit, but I think I’ll get straight into it. Then there are some capsicum and eggplant seedlings that need planting out and I think they will appreciate the fresh bed.