Today I spent several hours prepping the garden for planting cover crops and garlic. I tilled approximately 1,200 square feet, and will probably go back over tomorrow and do another couple hundred square feet. We realized that the original estimate I gave Andrea on the amount of area we need to plant in covers crops was very low.We are going to have to order more Winter Rye before planting.
I did run into some problems while tilling. After my first pass with the tiller I had to stop because of the weeds that had gotten wrapped around the axle. It took me several minutes to get them all removed. It took a bit, but I finally came up with a process that worked fairly well. I found that by only stepping over a few inches at a time, the tines were able to cut through the weeds without getting tangled up too badly. Progress was slow, and I still had to stop several times to clean weeds from the tines, but it worked much better than that initial pass.
I did end up with a large pile of weeds that will go into the compost. Even with this, however, I'm pleased with the amount of vegetation that was chopped up and worked into the soil. There were also several dead leaves that were also worked in. While I'm sure it is nowhere near enough, there is certainly more organic material in the soil now than before I began.
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