The Farm - doing the chores
Here is the most fantastic garden tool for those who don’t want to kill all the earthworms using a rototiller. My lovely broadfork. It makes turning soil a hundred times easier than a regular garden fork. It aerates soil 12 inches deep and doesn’t hurt your back at all. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

The broadfork in action
Here is The Farm with cover crop in its full glory. The fences are five feet tall, so you can see that that cover crop reached about four feet tall at its highest point.

Before
The cover crop was chopped down in layers in an attempt to keep the pieces as small as possible so I would stand a chance of actually turning them in. Tremendously exhausting. It’s impossible to cut the cover crop into small enough pieces to make it is easy to work into the soil. You can’t “turn” soil with a broadfork. You can only loosen it and in the process allow amendments you’ve sprinkled on top to fall down. If you succumb to the urge to turn the soil with the broadfork your arms will burn with soreness. The entire process is an amazing forearm workout. It took three long sessions to finish the entire 400 sq ft area.
You could knock it out with an expensive rototiller in half an hour, but then all your earthworms would be pulverized and your soil will be so finely chopped that it will compact more completely with the first rain.

After!
The East 80 is actually the largest section of this agricultural operation, even though you can barely see it in these photos.
Last year’s agricultural haul:
35 zucchini
18 watermelons
13 brandywine tomatoes
5 santa claus melons
11 cucumbers
5 cantelopes
1 34-pound Big Max pumpkin - a loser in the family pumpkin competition
1/2 cup dried beans - a late-planted afterthought crop
several buckets full of cherry tomatoes
Accounting:
$27 - soil amendments
$13 - seeds, tomato plants
Total . . . . . . . . . $40
2011 was a terrible tomato year where the brandywines refused to ripen until the end of the summer. Probably a dozen pumpkins formed, grew to baseball size or larger, then lost their will to live and shriveled. The sole survivor was on a vine that crawled up a rose plant and grew three feet off the ground. This year I’m planting fewer watermelons, more beans and lettuce.

Gratuitous pic of a feral cat sleeping inside a semi-abandoned car in Sacramento. I SO want to adopt her.


















