This is just another look at how I prep my soil for the next year. As mentioned in the previous post, I only use 3 things: leaves, manure, and my homemade compost. After removing the plants and roots, I make sure to really clean out the entire box-especially all the corners as this is where little critters love to hid for the winter. Then I remove several inches of Mel’s mix to make room for the amending ingredients. This picture is the first thing I add and it’s a pretty heavy layer. I then add a thick layer of horse manure followed by compost. All the leftover soil I have is then piled up in the box so that it’s actually higher than the box in the middle. After warming the soil and fluffing it up in the spring, I’ll have a fair bit of extra soil because of this. I’ll store this soil in a protected and covered bucket. This then becomes my soil amendment after my first harvest in early spring-which is too early for me to produce compost in Utah. I’ll still have several weeks to go before I can make a good batch of compost during this early part of the season.  It works out perfectly. Just some ideas for you.[ois skin=”below post”]

This is the method I’ve used for 13 years in my square foot gardens.  It’s worked perfectly every single year and one of the greatest things is that it’s all free!  At the end of the season you’ll notice that you lose volume in your SFG boxes.  This is because the soil in a SFG is made up of at least 33% compost.  It continues to decompose and breakdown over the course of the summer and your job at the end of the season is to build it back up again.  I’ll post a couple more pictures in the coming days so you can get a look at how the process looks but it’s all very simple.  The first thing I do is empty as much of my finished compost as I can and put this in a container(bottom item in picture.)  I’ll then get my bucket of horse manure and a bag of leaves and put them right next to the SFG box that I’m preparing for spring.  I empty my garden box of all garden waste and put it in my compost unit.  I then loosen up the existing soil, level it all out, add a big layer of leaves followed by a thick layer of manure.  It’s true that this manure is not finished, but that doesn’t matter so much in the winter when your not going to be growing anything for several months.  That would not be the case in the growing season though as you’d want to avoid using unfinished compost.  This unfinished compost would heat up too much and burn whatever you’re trying to grow.  After that I add my last layer of compost.  I’ll add enough of all these ingredients so that it will be 4 or 5 inches higher than the box in the middle of the box.  Through the winter it will rain, snow, hail, sleet, and freeze.  It will also get sunlight.  It depends on how I feel, but I generally start to warm my boxes up by the first week of March.  Covering my boxes with plastic will have them ready in about 4 or 5 days.  At that time I’ll go and uncover the boxes, fluff everything up, and virtually all those leave will be gone.  My soil is now perfect to grow whatever I want to grow.  It’s been given everything it needs from leaves(carbon), manure(nitrogen), and compost(a rich mix of nutrients made of both nitrogen and carbon.)  This is a great and simple way to prep your SFG boxes.  Your soil is now on high dose steroids!  Not really but you get the point.  If you’re not making your own compost, you really should give it a try.  It’s doing a lot more than just reducing landfill.  Compost done right in your backyard will be superior to any commercially purchased bag of compost.

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We had our first snow last night. Whatever has been in the garden up until this point is now done except for a brussel sprout plant and a couple squares of lettuce. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is take a quick peek at my garden-I even do it in the dead of winter-I don’t even know why I do it. Since it’s the Halloween season, I thought I would put a little holiday decorations in the garden to match the season. It’s not a lot, but it’s fun. My wife says “but nobody will see your garden!” Maybe-but I will. It was quick, cheap and easy to do. In a couple of weeks, I think I’ll decorate with a Thanksgiving theme followed by a Christmas theme shortly after. That way when I look at the gardens in snow, it wont’ be so boring. I don’t know if I will be gardening all winter now-I need a break from the season. Maybe I will only do 1 small SFG box, we’ll see. My squashes are hardening up in a dry place, as are my onions for winter storage. I will be digging up my potatoes in the next 4 or 5 days and putting those away for the winter. I’ll talk about how I store my potatoes in the next post. It’s important if you don’t want them to rot over the winter. My carrots and beans have been blanched and put in the freezer, along with my whole red tomatoes. Maybe I’ll include what I do with my tomatoes at the end of the season to preserve them. I can’t take the time to process all of them so I take the easy route.[ois skin=”below post”]