It's funny how quickly things change. A couple of months ago we began preparing our new strawberry bed. The first job was to move the weed control fabric from the old bed to the new one.
The top picture is an aerial shot taken in the middle of May and below it a close up of how the ground looked when the weed control fabric was removed. I tried and it was difficult to even get the tines of a fork into the ground let alone dig over the bed. The ground resembled concrete and I decided to leave it well alone until we got a drop of rain to soften up the soil. It was spring so there were plenty of other jobs to be getting on with.
We had some rain in late May but then June arrived and we've hardly had a dry day.
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| Temperature & Rainfall Records 18-May to 17-June 2019 |
Since those photos were taken we've had 74.8mm (2.94in) of rainfall with most of that coming in the last week to ten days. That bone dry soil has been transformed.
It's not in a fit state for planting but I thought a week ago when I began digging it over that my big cultivator would break it down nicely and we could maybe even plant a few vegetables in it this year. I finished digging the last little bit on Sunday and my guess is that it's now too wet to break down with the cultivator. I might have to leave it to dry out a little bit. I might just test a patch if we get a half decent afternoon this week. There's no point cultivating it if the soil is too wet or I'll do more harm than good to our clay soil.
It is however, a rather amazing transformation over only a couple of weeks from dry, bone hard, undiggable ground to ground that is now too wet to dig.
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We do get crazy weather at times, I'm wondering if we'll actually get the threatened thunder and lightning today - I'm guessing not.
ReplyDeleteLove the overhead shot!
Looks like it's going to be hot and thundery next week. We had a rain fee day on Friday the first one for two weeks. Glad you like the overhead shot.
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