Moving into the new house at the end of May, I purposely didn’t plant a garden. I knew life would be too busy and settling in to the inside of the house more important. But now I’m itching to get some compost in the ground and prep it for the spring. I want to have a garden next year, and my thoughts are to do the hard prep work this fall, let the compost sit over the winter and then come spring… viola! Planting time! Of course I’m completely an amateur gardener, so learning what to do in a new state is a bit intimidating, especially since I only had 3 small garden beds at our old place.
The main problem is, we live at the top of a hill that has lots of large granite rocks (read: boulders) in the ground all through the yard. In addition our dirt isn’t, well, dirt. Its Georgia red clay. How do I till that? Without a rotatiller? Ok, that’s three problems, not one.
The debate is- raised beds or work with what I have? Raised beds would probably be easier, but the size of the garden I want hardly makes that economical. But working with what we have, well I don’t know much about how stuff grows in red clay. Especially vegetables, so if we have to do lots of supplementing to the soil that might not be practical either.
On Friday we went to the library and I picked up several books on Georgia gardening and might get a soil testing kit to send to the state for soil analysis. Hopefully both will shed some light on how to make my soil produce or help me make the decision to do a huge raised be garden instead.
I’ll certainly post pictures once we decide what to do and start the work.
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