MAY
I went into the garden and took samples of the soil from different parts of it. We added a pill and water to it. It turned out our soil was too base. We had to add sulfur to it. First we had to get some sulfur. I’ll see you when we have some.
To make our garden more acidic we added ammonium sulfate. But we had to do two things before that. First I measured the ground in the garden. It came out to be 12 feet by 14 feet. That’s about 168 square feet. That means we’d need about 7-1/2 pounds of sulfur or 1-1/2 bags of sulfur. Before that, my dad tilled the ground so it would become soft.
Finally it was time to spread the sulfur. I walked around the garden sprinkling here and there. I sprinkled everywhere except the strawberry patch (bottom right), which was doing fine by itself. After that, Dad tilled the garden just to make sure the sulfur was mixed in.
OOPS!!! We used aluminum sulfate as our sulfur source and it made our garden non-organic. Aluminum sulfate is synthetic (man made) so it cannot be used in organic farming. It is hard to be perfectly organic because if you do just one thing wrong your garden won't be organic. In every other respect, our garden was organic. |
Dad found a problem: a tree was blocking the sun from coming into the garden. It was only one branch that Dad had to cut off. My brother helped him climb the tree and get the saw up. Finally, Dad cut off the branch. By this time, all our plants were doing very well. We would have to plant them soon.
First we had to shape the rows. The thing was, all of the plants had different sized rows. We made all kinds of rows, and some of them were up to four feet wide. Then we had to be gentle. We planted all the small plants in their own rows. Then we had to sprinkle some seeds in other rows. When we were done, it looked like this.
| April | May | June | July | August | September | October |
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