Mary Cook

One quibble. I don't want to save my own tomato seed, or to buy seed from tomatoes grown in my area. I mostly buy from Pinetree and Fedco, both Maine-based companies, which is likely not ideal for my West Virginia garden...for them the issues are length of growing season and chill hardiness. Not issues here. In the Pacific NW, the issue is summer coolness and dryness...not issues here. The problems I have are mostly because we have plenty of summer heat and summer rain (most years)--and so fungal infections are my biggest challenge, and one I have to deal with every year in tomatoes. Some of these can be carried over on the seed, so I want seed grown somewhere that's either dry in summer, or barely warm enough. Maybe I could learn to sterilize my seed in a way that reliably kills the fungus, without killing the seed. Then I could experiment with tomato breeding...although my top goal is blight resistance, and the most resistant ones are hybrids.
Also I note that other growers in my town don't necessarily have similar conditions--I have clay soil and my nearest neighbor a mere 700 feet away has sandy soil. We are on the ridge and people in the "hollers" have significantly different challenges.
My current breeding experiment is with corn--after reading about how potent hybrid vigor is in corn, two years ago I grew two compatible varieties in alternating rows--Bloody Butcher and Blue Clarage. Last year I used my flat ground for blackeyed peas, but this year I plan to plant the crossed red and blue corn seed, hoping for a vigorous corn in shades of purple. If it works I'll probably just keep planting seed from the best ears.

It happens that expanding a hugelkultur is my project for today. But mine are not huge mounds; I just dig a foot deep, maybe a little more, throw in half rotted logs, then add in a mix of the topsoil, sand, peat moss, manure, rotted leaves, and smaller branches and cover with soil. First I tried this with elderberries in orchard, and they thrived until deer ate them to the ground. But when I moved my blueberries to a new location, I tried putting them on a hugelkultur bed, WITHOUT concrete blocks at the base of their bed, and they've done much better. I don't worry about either rodents or freezing. I do mulch them heavily with leaves every fall. Now I've decided I need to expand my blueberries, since that's one fruit my husband will eat, and likely good for my macular degeneration, so I'm digging a new hugelkulture. For blueberries a lot of the additional matter needs to be peat moss as that's the only thing I know that's sufficiently acidic.

Jen--couple things. I tried using wood ash for traction and wondered if it was a good idea but now you've endorsed it.
And, I've read that when composted, coffee grounds are no longer acidic. I've also read this about oak leaves and even pine needles. But I throw my coffee ground, still in their convenient paper filter, into my blueberry bed starting in February--a reminder it's time--and ending about September. I'm in West Virginia, so my February is your March or possibly even April. Today we're going to tap maple trees. I think the coffee grounds help, but I've been using sulfur too--actually I use it about everywhere as a soil test showed it as my one deficiency.

Okay, sorry if this is too gross. We have a composting outhouse. In late summer, there are some little worms that hatch in those buckets somehow (how do the flies get in?) and crawl up onto the seat sometimes, and onto the lid (which doesn't change while the buckets do). Sprinkling wood ash beats them back, so we save as much as ten gallons of wood ash for this purpose.

I thought I'd already posted on this. Now I'll have to settle in because I have a lot to say.
In 2001 my neighbor died suddenly. Because I had a Death and Dying course, I knew that there are virtually no laws restricting burial here in West Virginia; but because he had no history of heart attack, though he was 75, the sheriff had to sign off before the coroner could be allowed to release the body back to us. Meanwhile my husband organized a gravedigging crew, my neighbors didn't go to work (or came back in one case) or school, we began cooking and another friend put together a simple wooden coffin. Unfortunately the sheriff was tied up in court till 5; we were all gathered and ready by then.Two of us accompanied the new widow to the coroner's to wait on release of her husband's body I remembered being on edge from the sound of an unseen two-year old's crying, and thinking afterwards that the usual funeral (my father-in-law died two months from that time) was as artificial as the plastic cherry tree blooming near where we waited. Finally we were on our way; as we climbed a hill and came around the bend at dusk, to suddenly see 50 people with candles--a moment I'll never forget. The coffin was borne to the grave and lowered on stout ropes as we sang Amazing Grace and Will the Circle Be Unbroken, and recited a Buddhist prayer (this couple had been part of a meditation group).  The widow told me later, "I felt borne aloft by the caring of all those people," and "I didn't know how I'd get through the rest of my life without Ted, but I knew then that I wasn't facing it alone." And I thought: Doing this the simple way our ancestors did it for thousands of years is a comfort; it's like we're connected to those people, however unknown. And I thought--what the undertaker adds is an interfering stranger in the midst of a group of people trying to come together around a hole that has opened up in their midst. And a big drain on the family's finances.
There was a book I learned a lot from Called Your Final Act of Love, which spelled out the reasons it's best to do everything for a dead loved one yourself, and what the laws were in all 50 states--it's probably out of date. But it emphasized a point I want to lean on hard here: the time to find out what the laws are where you live, and where your parents live, and to have conversations about what people want for when they die, is NOW. If you're unprepared, and suddenly someone is dead, you're vulnerable to that funeral director saying he'll "take care of everything<"--which he will, for several thousand dollars. It's overwhelming to deal with these decisions on the worst day of your life. But if you've already made these decisions, then you just have to carry them out, and the most stricken persons will be assisted by more peripheral people in doing so. They want to help, they just don't know what to do. Sarah told me she had trouble convincing Ted to have this conversation; finally she said, "Ted, let's just pretend for the moment that you're mortal, so we can talk about this," and that worked.
Since that time, a neighbor and my sister died, and we dealt with it the same way. My husband built coffins for both of them, and the funeral home (Involved because they had to transport the bodies from hospitals) said they were the best simple coffins he'd ever seen and could he get the maker interested in building more--also said when someone else made Ted's coffin--but in neither case was there interest, they were willing to build a coffin as a gift but not to do it as a moneymaking operation. And when I go, my request is no coffin at all just a sheet will do.
So. You DON'T have to hire funeral director, or have embalming or an absurd, horribly expensive coffin to interrupt the body's return to the streams of life; it need cost very little; and you should look into the laws, and the preferences of your loved ones, now.

In August or September I make a new garden plan for the next year, which is a map, of the 24 permanent 12 foot by about three feet beds in my main garden, the six in my North Garden, and the open space in Central. Because I do this every year, I have records of all my previous gardens, including colored markers around the borders to indicate amendments to each bed. I write my proposed crop in pencil--when I actually plant, I'll erase it and use pen for the actually planted crop, and the date.
I try to do most of my soil amending in the fall, so I don't have such a rush in spring. Usually I turn an emptied bed with a shovel and add perhaps an inch of compost, manure or leafmold, depending on what I've got and to a lesser degree, what crop I plan to plant--leafmold is supposed to be especially good for brassicas and carrots, and not good for peppers. I also may add sand depending on the condition I observe when turning the bed, and to some degree what I plan to plant. If the next spring's crops will be early, I cover it with hay; and if it needs a fine seedbed I work the soil with my hands to get it smooth. If the crop is not going in until April, I may plant winter peas or hairy vetch as a cover crop--especially if I don't have enough organic matter to feed all the beds. For a crop not going in until May, I may plant wheat or rye, to cut at pollenshed when it's easier to kill off the roots after cutting the tops to use as mulch; l sometimes I'll let one bed go to maturity to harvest the grain. I used to have my husband till Central before planting a cover crop, then again to get rid of its roots in spring. But I didn't succeed in getting a cover crop a couple of years and the soil got very heavy; I never seem to have enough manure and sand for that space--and I've succeeded a couple of times now in getting a cover crop established in September without tilling. This space is used for wide-row crops, mostly field corn but sometimes sorghum and one year in three it gets the tomatoes. I get big pieces of cardboard from furniture and appliance places in town and lay this between the rows--this serves to suppress weeds and hold in moisture and needs only a little hay on top to hold it in place, not a full covering. Often I have hay used for goat bedding, so the nutrients from the goat manure leach in to feed the plants. So, in September I pull up this cardboard and scatter rye and vetch seed, try to rake it in and where the ground is too hard I add a smattering of compost or bits of hay. If we get decent rains this suffices to start a good cover crop.

John--on the question of humanure being C rich. Ours is mixed with sawdust (and TP of course) and used almost exclusively on fruit trees (I have some doubt about the safety of using it in the vegetable garden but it all gets used up in the orchard so it's a moot point). I've noticed that it doesn't seem to be that potent and concluded that it's because we don't pee in the outhouse--we have a pisseria in the house, and I dump the urine bucket on various compost piles--some next to gardens, some woodrot piles on the edge of the woods. I saw a chart in New Internationalist years ago that showed that most of the Nitrogen and phosphorus humans excrete is in the urine. So if I want to goose a fruit tree more I try to find some manure--because animal manure is pretty much always mixed with bedding (high C) but the animals are peeing into it too so, assuming their N and P is similar, this is more potent on the nitrogen. If your arrangements are similar that might explain the surfeit of clover.

Doug--where does your NPK come from? Sometimes you have to jumpstart the refertilization of your soil. I do bring in manure from outside, as well as chicken manure from my own chickens; compost from my kitchen, the chickens, leaves, weeds from the garden, and sometimes from my woodrot piles in the woods (whose decomposition is hasted by getting urine dumped over them). Taking leaves from the woods is not good but I clear our nearly mile long lane, where the fertility from the leaves is undesirable, chop them with a lawnmower and stash them in wire bins for a year to turn into leafmold. So not all the fertility is coming from within the same garden but most is coming from my own place. I don't apologize for bringing in manure when I can get it--it helps the soil so much, and the person with pet horses and the one with goats are both glad to get rid of some surplus as they don't use it all themselves.

Well I'm gonna contradict others and say, if leaving my land alone was what improved the soil it would have been in great shape after a couple of decades of just being mowed every three years. It may be true that a couple of centuries ago, before anyone started farming here, this ridgetop was wooded and had good soil. Likely prior to 50 years ago when this became a land trust, it was farmed in non-ideal ways that stripped the soil. But also likely that it was always heavy clay. It varies--I put my orchard at the uppermost end where there is more sand in the soil, thus good drainage deeper; next my main garden in the next best soil. Adding a lot of organic matter, whether compost or leafmold or manure, is what has helped the most I'd say; I also add coarse sand. As for mulch, that seems like a given rather than a soil amendment. Although I've wondered how people with larger acreages manage; seems like it'd be hard to come up with enough mulch. The downside is mostly the mulch I can find is hay, and it all has clover and grass seeds in it that sprout and then I have to spend lots of time digging them out. What makes the MOST difference? Really, it's all these things. In my opinion you HAVE to add organic matter or some sort, to replace what you remove and feed the miniature livestock in the soil--and you have to mulch to keep the soil cool and moist in the summer and weedless--ha ha, okay, fewer weeds. Cover crops over winter help too, though I think of them as sort of a substitute for compost/manure/leafmold--if the cover crop doesn't take (usually either because it was too dry or because I got the last crop out and the cover crop seeded too late and winter set in), then I'd better be sure to add some kind of OM in the spring. My worst bed is the flowerbed, which is in a place with especially heavy bad soil, but the real reason it hasn't improved much is that it's mostly perennials so I'm not able to work amendments into the soil every year. I can add enough OM and sand to get a spot in good condition before setting a new plant in, but over years the soil reverts to heavy clay.

Dave's post is another example of how different places require different management--a place where fire hazard is high and pines are the tallest trees.