Organic Farming from Scratch

I hope you’ll indulge me in a little personal news this time.

How do you attack a new garden plan?

If that Garden is more than 4 times larger than your previous garden, where do you start?

If you have listend to the podcasts or read much of this blog, you know I have been working on
 ”pursuing a country life in the form of looking to build a homestead type hobby farm
 on property I bought in Northern California.
 
Plans don’t always turn out as you think, and sometimes it’s better.

I visited the property and spoke with some builders, both Manufactured Homes and Traditional ( called “stickbuilt”
 in the trade I learned).   And the more we looked the more the costs kept rising.  I even discovered
 California now has a requirement for newly constructed homes to have interior sprinklers, the same as
 a commercial building.  sigh…..
 
Then just as we arrived back in Texas I heard from My Brother-in-Law back in Calidfornia ( who
is a Craigs List junkie)  asking if I had ever considered an existing home.  I replied that I had not,
but I would.  He pointed me to a listing on Craigslist that amazed me.

To shorten up this somewhat lengthy tale, I turned around, immediately flew back and bought this
property, a 5 year old home, 5 acres, fenced in, well already dug, large garage and shop, etc.
In other words – Turn-key.  marketed as a horse property.
 
But now I need to plan, create, and maintian a huge garden, much bigger than I have ever had.  Where do I start?

The first thing is to amend the soil, as nothing has been grown there in a long time.  The previous

Location for New Garden

owners mowed it quite short.  So the first step is to start bringing in a few truckload of manure to spread
around the soon to be garden.  We have lots of horses and some dairy in the area so this is the easy part.

The first year I am focusing on adding to the soil.  Then, later this year I’ll add a cover crop.   This will
remain until Spring 2013 when the garden will be dug up.   Even with the large garden I am not a fan
of a Tiller, so I will probably use a Broadfork from Valley Oak Tool.  A great way to loosen up the soil without
the danger of Tiller-Pan.

As you can see from the picture – I have my work cut out for me.

This will be an organic garden, so I don’t want to plow, use insecticides, herbicides or chemical laden fertilizers.

I guess my point in all this is that if you too are dreaming of a home or homestead in the country, start now. 
And if your garden is a smaller one, the same steps will apply:  Amend the soil building the bed, and then turn the
soil making it soft and easy to work with.

Dream, plan, study.  Do what it takes.  I wish I had started decades ago.

Don’t you wait as long as I did!

Now, where did I put those seed catalogs?

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