the terrace beds: Balyn's feat

Today was a very important day for PICA, and especially for Balyn. After we had finished the morning part of the day, Balyn invited us to plan out what the two terrace beds on the Farm are going to look like this coming spring and summer. Balyn has been working on those two beds for a year or so, cultivating them and growing cover crop, and now he's handing them off to PICA (sadly, he's going up to Mendocino after graduating this quarter). The hope is that they will be able to provide food for the Short Course happening this summer (every other year it meets here), as well as give more to seminar and PICA in general. Balyn's worked so hard ...he wrote a senior thesis on his work. As soon as he prints it out, we'll keep it in the PICA library.

The two terrace beds overlook the bike path as it goes from above the A-Quad to beneath the Farm - they point slightly southeast, towards the center of Monterey Bay. Balyn has ideas for planting the hillside with native plants. As for the two beds... they've seen two quarters' worth of covercropping, and they were recently tilled in. Balyn suggests making one bed the dried goods bed - the one in which we save seed and store the crops for wintertime - in other words, the one which saves the most for future PICAns. The other one would feed PICAns and Short Course participants.

Mike had said some ideas for potential intercrops: corn-bean-squash (milpa), eggplant-potato, and tomato-basil-marigold. Balyn says we can divide the beds into smaller-sized chunks to work out the intercrops or crop schemes. He decided not to leave behind a crop rotation scheme, because he wants the ideas to come from the PICAns themselves. Gulliver has stepped up and offered to become the coordinator for the two beds. Gulliver is so awesome.

Back in the garden I was exploring the soil tilth of bed 5a when Mike arrived and clamored for a double-digging. The bed had been partially double-dug by PICA seminar on Thursday, but they had not been able to finish it. The soil, past the first spade's depth, was much too compacted still, and I had irrigated it since then to help soften those deeper layers.

We decided to smoothe the soil back over the bed (it was in mounds), put a layer of compost on top, double-dig the trenches in conjunction with a hoer (breaking up the dirt clods) and a bucket of compost per trench, and start on one end of the bed and work our way to the other, without subdividing the bed. Once we had agreed on these things, we were ready. Without further ado, Rain, Sarah, Mike, Billy, Matt, Gulliver, and I set to work.

We took turns cutting the bed and bottoms of trenches with a pulaski, moving each trench sideways and breaking up the clumps with a hoe, gathering compost from the tarp near the gate, and forking the rock-hard bottom of the trenches. Tony came and helped us out at once point. The eagle flew by overhead. Turns out there was quite a heavy layer of clay there (still is) that we can barely penetrate still. There are other areas in the Garden more easily penetrable than that bed, I must say. But our little team, amidst the banters, managed to break the soil a few inches further down. We finished three hours later, stopping only for cookies and coffee.

Mike raked the top of the bed smooth, and elevated higher than the other four beds. We left that bed as an example and will most likely double-dig bed 4a tomorrow. The sun was sideways in the sky as we finished, a little before sunset. And at that point, Ngoc and Diane had gone to town making sushi. We went inside to help them, ate some, and then went to see David perform with his Taki Ñan ensemble at Family Student Housing, which was amazing...