Soil structure improvement

Much of the leaf compost that was included in our soil delivery in the spring has decomposed and the soil left in place has a fairly high clay content. Our plan over the winter is to improve the soil structure by building up humus by mixing in a copious amount of mulched leaves and some well composted manure.

We expect the leaves to fix nitrogen as they decompose and hope the manure will provide more available nitrogen for plants this spring. We are also planting crimson clover and hairy fetch for cover crops and a spring nitrogen source.

We are going to take soil samples for analysis now, in the winter and spring. We will make final nutrient ph corrections prior to planting in late May/June.

We are excited about this phase of soil structure improvement and the subsequent soil-based experiments and we look forward to collecting these data points.