Keep it covered!

We weren't fast enough and we broke the rule.  The one cardinal rule of organic growing (other than don't use chemicals) is Keep the Soil Covered!  We had all the dirt work done last fall and the soil has been bare since.  We planted grass seed, but not in time to prevent some significant erosion from the recent rains.  This means that the swales we carefully built a few weeks ago are now full of topsoil.  They also ran over in several places creating washes down the hillside. 

The good news is that the swales did their job and kept most of the soil on the hillside.  The straw we spread around the garden also helped - the erosion was much less severe on those slopes.

You can now guess how the kids and I spent Saturday!  Yep, we moved a lot of straw.  The kids spread straw all along the hillside to cover the bare ground while I moved bales to create temporary retaining walls to prevent further runoff with the next rain.  I also fixed the places where our swales had been overrun.  The hillside now looks like this:

New bale swales and mulch on the hillside.

There's still more work to do to move the topsoil that washed down back up where it belongs, but this will hopefully hold it while the grass grows in.  There is a fair amount of green coming up under the straw and in some of the bare places, so we're crossing our fingers that it will  hurry up and grow!

Green grass sprouting..hurry up and grow!

On Sunday, Jeremy and I pruned the grapes at our house in town, started some more clippings, and removed the last parts of our old garden fence.  This puts us one step closer to having all the plants moved to the farm.  We still need to move the raspberries, grapes, more asparagus and a host of herbs before the spring gets much farther along.  Never a dull moment here!


Since we were making a trip to the farm to take the fence poles anyway, we also picked up some bagged leaves from our neighbor's to mulch the blackberries.  They now have a nice, thick layer of leaf mulch to help keep the moisture in the soil. 

mulched blackberries