The garden, I have to say, has not been hugely productive, at least not in the areas that I sheet mulched this year. Everything seems to be growing VEEERRRYY slowly. I have some hypotheses about what’s happening here. My soil, it turns out, though easy to work with, is probably not very rich. The sheet mulching should improve this next year and compost in years after.

Where I have had good success was in the raised beds I sheet mulched last year. I put in a polyculture seed mix of lettuces, calendula, chamomile, carrots, beets, kale and beans at the north end of one bed, and this has done really well. I’ve been cutting the lettuce for about 6 weeks now, but most of them are going to bolt or have already started, so I’m harvesting full heads now. In the other bed I started with garlic which I put in as an afterthought last year, but I have about 15 medium to small heads. The heads in the raised bed (sheet mulched) are about twice as big as the heads from the herb garden (single dug, with topsoil added and bark mulch). I’m thinking now I need to pull all the herbs out in the fall and sheet mulch the herb garden to get that some nutrients.

The broccoli is looking pretty decent, but I need to start cutting it as it is bolting rapidly. I understand you can cut and come again, that heavy mulching and water help, so I’ll see what I can do to extend the broccoli harvest.

Meanwhile I’ve started thinking more about echinacea, which does really well in this sandy soil, unlike the clay we had down in Honeoye. Originally we wanted to do echinacea there as a cash crop and I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t a good place to try that experiment.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Permaculture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.