Turning Sod Into Garden Soil

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Whatever your technique of breaking ground, it may be a stretch to call that newly chewed up sod garden soil. It is still clumpy and full of organic matter from the plants that were growing there. Raking it is a chore that provides limited results, and you can't just remove the clumps that are left, because they contain much of the richness of the soil. In those early years I just dealt with it as best I could. When preparing a bed for small seeds like lettuce and carrots, I worked over the soil with a rake, getting some of the soil separated from the clumps of roots. When I got tired of raking or the bed seemed reasonably smooth—probably the same thing—I would have generated a row of material that had been pulled from the bed. I just left this aside as part of the walkway.

Expanding the Garden

It took us three years, not counting the hand-dug patch, to reach vegetable selfsufficiency. Each year the garden expanded and I became more efficient. I also learned that a packet of peas was not enough and a packet of lettuce was too much. Each garden after the first was planned during the winter and plotted on paper. Before spring came, I knew what was going to be planted where and I even had a target date for the planting.

Once we were growing and storing all our own vegetables, the next challenge was to see if we could make some money from the knowledge we had acquired. The move to a market garden happened two years later.

I started preparing an acre the fall before. I spread rock phosphate and winter rye seed on the sod and lightly tilled it in. It was pretty lumpy but I didn't care. I was all through until spring other than taking soil samples to test the fertility.

The rye got a good start that fall and started growing again in the spring. I spread lime on the rye as the soil test had indicated, as well as a helping of seaweed to provide other nutrients. ( We live seven miles from the coast.) I tilled it twice this time. That made a big difference, but I still had to rake the beds. Tending a market garden without any power tools is a challenge but it can be done. I found it to be much easier than I imagined, although it took a few years of practice before I learned the techniques that you need when you garden on a larger scale.

A tool that was indispens able in the market garden was the seeder. Pushing it along the row, it opened the ground, dropped the seeds at just the right spacing, closed the ground over the seeds, firmed the soil around the seeds and marked the next row. However, even with two tillings, there were soil clumps that would snag on the planter and create problems.

Then along came my neighbor Ed, extolling the virtues of his rear-end walks-behind tiller. I'd read all the advertising, but wasn't convinced. Ed loaned-me his and I found that it had a place in my market garden, even if it meant betraying my principles slightly. I used it to prepare beds just before planting and then several more times throughout the planting season to prepare the beds so the seeder would operate well. The lap of luxury.

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