By Alex Kaiser and Angela Hoy
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Alex pointed out the oat grass growing in the straw which needed to be removed, as well as other newly emerging grass, dandelion in the beds, chickweed and hairy bittercress.
Dry straw is great for mulch but always contains some grain or grass seed. For this reason it’s a good idea to let straw bales stay out in the rain for a few weeks (or months!) to let these germinate before you put them down.
This fall we we’re a little over eager to get our beds covered for the winter, so we are seeing the results of this now, but luckily the oat grass is very easy to remove at this stage.
Golden oregano plants were divided and moved into some patches of bare soil in our espalier orchard beds. This is a great ground cover, a good culinary herb and a fantastic pollinator plant as all kinds of bees love oregano flowers.
There are many kinds of ornamental and culinary oreganos, but the golden variety is great because it checks both of these boxes and also has a lovely creeping and mounding habit that sets it apart from other oreganos!
The weed removal in beds is important now in preparation for adding compost and shaping beds in the next couple weeks. We should have compost delivered by the end of the month to give seedlings and early plantings a much-needed boost of nitrogen for the growing season!
Recent soil testing showed that we have a high amount of organic-matter content in our soils, but adding more is almost never a bad idea as it improves moisture retention, acts as a buffer and retains nutrients.
Work on Sunday the 15th was limited since we only had four people and very, very wet conditions! We took down a bee box to replace the tubes in preparation for the mason bee cocoons we’re getting this spring, and we harvested a handful of leeks from last year.
We are so grateful to have our greenhouse on the wet days as we were able to stay fairly dry by doing a bit of tidying in the beds.
We checked on our beet, pea and komatsuna seedlings. We also harvested the remaining ruby chard in the greenhouse as it will go to seed soon and we will need the beds for other groups shortly.
