Thom Bri

Dan Robinson wrote:

...Generally speaking, it takes about two years of industrial experience before an engineer proves their worth to the company...

This is also true in nursing. 2 years to be a competent, safe nurse.  5 years for true competence. I know some exceptions, excellent young nurses who are safe sooner than that. The scary ones are the RNs who come out of school thinking they know something.

And capped with a thin layer of dirt

Filled with leaves and wood

I returned to college at age 50 and got a new degree at age 55, as a nurse. Great job. Never a shortage of job openings.

Wood layer. This is the wood from last year. It was so dry last year it hardly rotted at all. Wood closer to the surface rotted some, and the small sticks did.

Harvest is all done, frost has killed all my veggies except the greens. It's time to think about next season.

Where I live, west of Chicago, we can expect snow from November through March, some winters a month earlier and later than that. The ground is typically frozen hard December through the end of February. So anything I want to do needs to get done now.

I have a typical suburban lot with lots of trees around it, so lots of leaves. I also have very heavy clay soil. The topsoil around here is normally excellent soil but of course it was all scraped off when the lots were prepped for building, so we have no topsoil at all. It makes gardening and even growing a nice lawn very difficult.

Below are some pics. I dig a deep trench, 3+ feet (about a meter) and lay down a layer of sticks and wood. The wood is a mix of carpentry scraps, green logs and rotting wood, really whatever I have on hand. I'll be trimming trees and cutting out all the saplings that grow up every year so lots of small green wood too.

On top of that goes all the leaves. Some years the neighbor contributes many bags of leaves too. Mixed in goes more sticks and wood and all the kitchen garbage. After the first layer I shovel a layer of dirt on top to hold everything in place. Then another layer of leaves and wood and garbage, then another of dirt. This continues until I have a large mound and can't go any higher without it sliding off. A layer of leaves 3 feet deep will squeeze down to about a 1 inch layer by next fall.

Then I dig another trench and start over. The final trench stays open all winter and gets all the winter kitchen scraps, all the fireplace charcoal and ash and a layer of dead leaves in the spring. In March this last trench gets filled in and  topped with soil.

I immediately scatter lettuce seeds all over the top, regardless of the weather.  Lettuce will sprout and grow even if there are hard frosts and snow after sowing. Cold won't kill it, and I can get early lettuce. Radishes and carrots can also be planted with no worry about cold at this stage.

Be careful out there folks. I've been using an axe since I was a kid 50+ years ago. If I hadn't been wearing glasses I might not have an eye right now. Busting up branches and a broken end flew up and smacked me a hard one. Never in 50+ years had this happen.

Honestly I'd just throw them out on top the garden and if some grew next year fine, and if they didn't, that's fine too.

But 20 Lbs? I'd hate to throw away that much food.

Finished shelling the corn. Roughly 195 Lbs. or 3.5 bushels. That would be about 50 bushels/acre (1270 Kg/hectare).
Last year was 59 bushels/acre (230 Lbs.).
Not too unhappy with that. The weather in May and June was miserably dry. Also, 1 out of 16 rows of corn was a different variety that pretty much failed to produce anything.

I need to do a full and accurate measurement of the corn weight, but the above shouldn't be off by more than a few pounds.

Picked the last of the peppers yesterday, over 100 counting the small ones too. It was supposed to frost hard last night but didn't. Brought the frost-intolerant plants inside too.

Plan for today is to start a giant trench in the back yard garden for all the fall leaves. I found an almost endless source for rotting tree trunks so will be adding that into the lower layers. Very interested to see how much what I added last fall has decomposed.

Shelled about 150 Lbs. of corn so far. I am guessing maybe another 30 or 40 pounds left, then done. If so that will put me down 30 or 40 pounds compared to last year. Sad, but not at all surprising considering this year's dry weather, and also the failure of the glass gem corn this year.