I tilled the whole big patch on which I tried the three sisters system last year and a bit more.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I had to use a garden fork, because the tractor is not powerful enough to cut through long-established turf. And most of this soil was undisturbed for about a hundred years, if ever. And parts of it were compacted by the honeywagon driving over it once a year when emptying my septic tank. However, on that front, I found out this spring that I can convert it into proper vegetable patches, because the honeywagon has a long enough trunk to not need to drive directly over it. Thus, I tilled even more than I initially intended – a rectangle approximately 10×6 m. In the first picture, it is almost all done, and I took that picture when fighting the compulsion to make the edges tidy. I lost that battle, and the day after, I spanned a string along the edges, and I did make them nice, straight, and precisely 6×10 m.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I had a race against time when flattening it with the electric hoe. The weather forecast predicted rain, and I wanted to finish flatterooning it before it came. As you can see, I did not manage it. I did flatten most of it, but I could not manage to rake out the big lumps of grass from the last three meters or so. Now it will be a bit harder to do that, because it is all wet. And the wetness also makes sowing it a bit more difficult, because this is heavy, claggy clay that sticks to everything, mainly the soles of one’s boots.

Since I can use it to grow food, I do not actually need to sow it with alfalfa as was my initial plan. I will sow part of it with green peas, and the rest will be sown with alfalfa anyway. This is because I had to remove a lot of organic material when tilling and flattening it, and because the soil is not of particularly high quality. I have grown legumes on it last year, and another year of doing that should improve the soil further.

However, I won’t let the alfalfa grow for several years and use it for compost. I will chop and drop it in the summer, and till it all under in September. Since I disturbed the soil, shredded the turf, removed all dead tree roots (from my late cherry tree), and several buckets of stones, I should be able to use my tractor for that.

At this size, it is not a vegetable patch but essentially a mini-field. Therefore, I would like to grow grains on it next year. Either spelta, oats, or both.

Despite some grumbling about how the rain did not politely wait until I was finished with my work, I was glad for the forced pause today. My whole human hurts, from top to bottom. The good news about that is that I still did not hurt my back; I am just extremely tired. The remedy for that is simple.