Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Preparations for Planting

Heirloom Gardens is a "multi-plot urban farm." This means that we work our land like a farm, but it's broken up into several different pieces. This year we have 11 separate gardens, mostly front or back yards in the northwest Denver area.

The queen garden is our space on Lowell Blvd. It's a full lot -- around 6250 square feet. Last year we transformed the space from bare dirt to this:


But, once the season was over, everything growing was either pulled out or died back. So, this year we began again with removing weeds, marking garden beds, spreading composted manure, and tilling it into the soil. One of our gardeners brought her son with her to help (he definitely has the best footware of all the gardeners!).

See the slideshow below for a few photos of our Lowell garden preparations. Thanks to Brian Kraft Photography for the photos. (Note: the slideshow does contain music.)

3 comments:

US Recall News said...

WOW that's a heck of a garden! Any bigger and it should be called a farm.

I know you probably have already thought about this, but just in case - cover crop this fall.

Take care!

Everett

whiteplum farm said...

I'd love to know what song is this in the slideshow?

Unknown said...

Everett -- Thanks. We do cover crop our paths, but haven't tried cover cropping the whole garden yet. My only hesitation is whether my little tiller could effectively break down all the plant materials in the spring...

White Plum -- My husband is in charge of all the music for the photo slideshows! He says that it's a Will Johnson song called "Little Raider."