santa barbara country n news-lets make garden soil

SANTA BARBARA COUNTRY N NEWS-LETS MAKE GARDEN SOIL

thats what i said to the 21 kindergardeners when i met them last week
lets make garden soil
did you know you could make garden dirt
no they said
well you can i said
heres how we will do it

so i went over how we would do it
here is what i told them and what we did

the bed shown above is 3 ft x 6 ft x 1 ft bed made of what is the new treated wood
it was originally built for veggies but we opted to not use it for that but instead to use it for our flower bed where we will plant wildflower seeds some we saved from last years plantings and a cover crop mix of oats peas hairy vetch and what i call our  jack in the bean stalk bean
we let the beans grow tall to see if they will get taller than all the kids
last year the bean almost won           
all of these plantings will flower and attract butterflies and bees and humming birds and help enrich the soil even more

this bed was about 1/3 full of old dry garden soil
we removed it and put it in a pile

in the bottom of the bed i layered it with two layers of cardboard soaked well with water

here is the picture of our ingredients for our garden soil mixture
first the pile of old garden soil
second bags of green grass clippings
third pile of leaves saved from last years fall leaves
fourth stacks of old newspapers
fifth a pile of coffee grounds from starbucks and other coffee houses
fyi many of them set the grounds aside in bags for gardeners to use
also worms love them
sixth a pile of compost donated from the communty garden
seventh some organic granular fertilizer
eighth a mix of liquid fish emulsion seaweed molasses diluted in water

so each kindergardener took a coffee can full of each item and scattered it over the bed
they also tore the old newspapers into shreds and scattered it in the bed
then the final step was they filled the coffee cans full of water and poured it over the bed

i added a sprinkling of the organic dry fertilizer
then
soaked all this in good with a few gallons of the liquid fertilizer seaweed molasses mixture

i then completed and evened out the beds upper layers
and
covered it well with this big ole piece of cardboard
to keep it moist and to keep the varmints out

we will keep the mixture moist until it all breaks down
in texas it takes less than a month
here it make take longer since its cooler here

when its all done we will do our plantings

so
that how we make our soil in the kindergardeners garden

next this week we will do our worm composter

here is a link to how dr deb tolman does her soil when she builds her keyhole gardens
here is a link to her talking on the central texas gardener about how she does it

here above is one that i did at the austin country n using an old watering trough


the organicgreen doctor