The Challenge: To turn an existing garden to an organic one

I've been excited at the prospect of gardening again. The last attempt was a few years ago when I bought the Jamie At Home cookbook. I was inspired by all the things I was able to make at home in the book and also the many gardening tips to grow my own food.

mother's garden

I bought containers and grew my mini-garden from scratch on my condo balcony. I started out with green beans, purple beans, rhubarb, carrots and onions. The beans worked out great! The carrots ended up being as small as my pinky finger but hey, I'll take that. And the rhubarb and onions were no shows, but that's ok. Seeing the garden grow before my eyes and eating my own veggies was the best reward of any novice gardener. Then I took a break travelling and will be doing container gardening again in the spring, but until then, my new challenge is to revive my mother's garden and change it all to organic.

My mother mentioned that the soil hasn't been the greatest. So as any novice gardener does, I went online to find some help.  I found this article called, Building Healthy Soil, and gave it a try. The first thing was to find out what the current condition of the soil was. So using the article as a guide, I filled a glass jar 1/3 with the garden soil, shook it, and sat the jar on a windowsill as all the particles took its rightful place. The sand was the first to settle after a couple of minutes, followed by the finer silt after a few hours and lastly the clay after leaving the jar undisturbed overnight. The result of this test identified that the soil my mother had was sandy (see Soil Texture and Type in the article). So next I read how to improve it on the next section and it mentioned that I would need about 3-4 inches of organic matter like compost added to it as it lacks nutrients.  So I started with a trench compost on the end of the garden as a band-aid solution until I was able to find a composer that would work for me to make my own compost. I hope to compost in the fall and winter to have some fresh organic compost in the spring - in time for planting!