On May 10 we kicked off our farm season by Sheet Mulching a portion of the alfalfa plot at Prairie Urban Farm. Sheet Mulching is where you layer different materials over a piece of land to suppress whatever is growing underneath and grow something else. In our case, we wanted to get rid of the alfalfa and grow vegetables.
We layered cardboard over the alfalfa, poured stored rainwater over the cardboard, and then spread composted manure over the wet cardboard.
Our next step will be to spread a mulch over top of the composted manure (we have a huge wood chip pile on our site that we will use!) and then we can plant our seed potatoes right into these layers, under the mulch. The wet cardboard, composted manure, and mulch will eventually degrade and turn into beautiful soil and we'll get some potatoes out of the mix too!
Edmonton's weather has finally taken a turn for what appears to be the best. We're looking forward to sunshine over the next couple weeks in which time we're going to start planting our seeds and our little greenhouse plants that have been so patiently waiting.
Check out our cool video here:
