We’re not in San Francisco, but these old lady cactus wear flowers in their hair.
I picked these little plants up at a plant sale in 1998.
In that twelve years they have gotten to nearly six feet tall. They have bits of the oak tree blossoms in their hair.
Timing is everything….
The best times for roto-tilling vary on location, soil types, prospective crops, cover crops and local weather conditions…
In this area, we get most of our rain in the winter… and the temperatures in winter are usually pretty decent.
Most of the native forbes growth here is in the winter when the rains enable growth, and the nice temps encourage lush growth. I like to let the winter-time native weeds and grasses grow through most of the winter. They can form a nice dense carpet of green that I can then roto-till into the soil… putting that nourishment back into the soil, while simultaneously adding a huge amount of green matter to the soil. This will in time break down into that soil-building material called humus. An abundance of humus is usually characterised by a dark soil, with excellent friability (workable, breaks apart easily, has air/water pore spaces). These same characteristics enable easy penetration by roots, and a flourishing soil micro-fauna/flora environment…. this is the true key to building soil. You need to get those little critters that are in the soil to high numbers…. they will secret enzymes that help plant growth, and further break down the natural soil particles, freeing the good minerals for the plant growth.
Soil must not be tilled when it is too wet, nor when too dry… it is something you have to learn for your own soils…. if you really must till today for some reason, but your soil is too dry, you should have watered it a few days beforehand, tilled dry it can turn into a powder that repels water, and when still dry can easily blow away. If it is too wet, you will beat it into a mass much as a potter expels air from clay.
Treat your soil right…. if you don’t, you’ll lose harvest. Your soil will also be harder to work… weeds will be harder to pul out….. and you’ll have more hard or powdery patches where nothing good will grow.
This is one of our terraces…. it has not been tilled for nearly a year… and the native nettles (a really excellent green food source full of minerals) have grown pretty rampant at this end…. the other end of the terrace has more shade, and the chickweed (another wild edible green) have grown heavily at that end. This is a good stage to till them into the ground… they have not yet set seed, but are just now starting to open flowers… so the top growth has nearly as much nutrients as it will ever carry, and it is still no risk at all of having viable seeds that will mean a quick resprout.
Continue reading Tilling time
