Life in Cowtown

While learning to take care of my yard, (and I use ‘take care’ very loosely, it’s much more try not to kill), I read an excellent bit of advice by a local Calgary blogger on top dressing your beds with compost. The idea is not to rake the topsoil which loosens up weed seeds and brings them up to germinate, but to simply pile a thick layer on, like mulch. The compost will break down over time, feed the soil and you get a nice thick weed suppressing layer.

When we were building the raised beds we ordered some garden soil and compost, which we subsequently proceeded to spread all over the lawn, in the bed, in all the flower beds, and in general shared the bounty over several hours of back breaking labor.

Heavily composted bed

Since I’m still a beginner enough gardener and yard care-taker that I get excited every time we cut the grass and pull some weeds, I wanted to share with you the fact that top dressing with compost is a phenomenal way to control weeds, a fact that I discovered this weekend, and that delights me to no end. Since we piled on the compost like it’s going out of style, the weeds that grow through it pull out with a phenomenal ease. Remember that we have clay soil and typically pulling weeds is like wrestling an alligator, requiring some upper body strength and stamina. But the weeds in the beds just slide right out, tap root intact. It’s like pulling candles out of cake. It’s magic.

Clean exit

If anyone else has nifty techniques for fighting weeds, please share. I’ll need all the help I can get.

And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Monday was a massive yard cleanup day. Massive. Lets see, we had to mow some long dead grass that obviously died like that last year, rake the entire yard, do some preliminary weeding, and spread 2.5 cubic yards of material in strategic places. Do you know how many wheelbarrows 2.5 cubic yards is?  LOTS. Luckily, J had half of it done before I even came home from work, and it still took us three hours to finish.

By the time I came home the raised bed was proudly filled with premium gardening soil – the kind that comes premixed with compost and manure. J was on the couch taking a break and as soon as I walked it he switched into drill sergeant mode ‘C’mon lets go, we have to finish all this tonight’. The urgency was compounded by the fact that there was rain promised for tomorrow, so everything we didn’t clean today would become a muddy messy pile of heavy… wait for it… clay. Or at least clay like substance. And trust me, after stripping the sod off for the bed no one wanted to touch clay or mud with a ten foot pole.

lots of wheelbarrows...

So off to work we went. Rake, mow, haul, swear at the gale force wind, haul, spread, weed, remove old mulch, haul and rake. Three hours of it. And internet, this is one prime example of why men can be so very handy, despite their many obvious flaws. They work faster. And are stronger. Which means that anything we did, I contributed about thirty percent to. Not in effort mind you, just in results. No matter how you look at it J can haul more, spread further, and finish everything faster than I ever could. If I had to do it all alone it would take me a weekend. And I would likely do what I usually do, and call in reinforcements.  

When all the excess soil was in a nice pile waiting to become a strawberry bed, and there was still a ton of compost left, we started playing a fun game called Let’s See How Much Compost We Can Dump in Each Flower Bed. It had to go somewhere, the lawn was covered with a nice thin, loosely raked layer, and the rain was still a threat. So each flower bed got an obscene amount of compost – 2-4 inches worth. It sure looked good – covered up any remaining weeds and debris, gave a nice groomed appearance to each bed, and it has to be good for them, right? Then it was a huge pile of garbage to disperse, grass clippings in a compost pile, weeds in a garbage bag, tools to put away, sweeping of bricks to be done, and finally, exhausted we collapsed on the couch smelling faintly of manure.

post-compost, pre-sweeping

 And the rain? Never happened.