the first big garden
bottom land, lowlying enough that I wanted to have raised beds (to keep the plants out of the standing water that was common during floods or even heavy rains
Matt and Allison were wonderful in letting me at some land to plant and work right there near the stream (so that I could water with a little 2-cycle gasoline pump when needed, which allowed me to grow in raised beds (more like mounds as I didn't build structures)). I found a place (in Sheffield) offering free manure and I drove my pickup over a dozen and a half times and got a few tons of horse manure mixed with wood shavings (all by hand with a shovel, 95% of it just me alone) and since that needed to work (in order to break down the wood shavings), it sat there in the corner of the garden for a month or two before I came up with one of my brainstorms. One of the other vendors at the GB farmers market (where we were selling our produce and plants that we grew in the big garden) sold smoked fish. He smoked his own fish and at one point we had a conversation about what sort of waste products he had. I had just read something about how great a source of nitrogen and all kinds of trace minerals fish bones and rotting meat parts could be. So the fish guy (I'm thinking John?) happily agreed to donate all his extra waste to me. He actually got the fish shipped in to him in very large styrofoam boxes, which worked great for transporting all the bones, guts and "juice" back to the big garden. I just started burying fish in the giant manure pile, and all through the fall (and even the winter after the market stopped) I remember going up to grab fish and then coming down into the field to bury it in the manure pile. Every now and then I'd hit an earlier pocket of fish when I was trying to bury a new batch and boy there were some foul smells arising from around my bare feet. Unfortunately I don't think I managed to spread more than a third of that manure pile (probably a lot less) before we ended up moving away from Matt and Allison's.