by Rosalia McKean

I love gardening.  I love talking about gardens.  I love garden tools.  I love garden shops.  What can I say?  I like to play in the dirt.  Many folks talk to me about starting a garden, but when I hear the words, "I'll start my garden in the spring," I know they won't have a garden next year.  The main challenge to gardening in the greater Colorado Springs area is soil condition.  This problem can be easily remedied if you begin in the fall, so please, fellow gardeners, fall into gardening.

This is the best time to prepare the garden for spring planting.  Select a location that will get enough sun and might enjoy some protection from the elements.  Consider the water source for your garden.  Can you hook it up to your water line? Do you plan to hand water with a hose?  Do you want to bury soaker hoses in the spring?  Decide on what type of garden layout you want.  Personally, I'm into intensive gardening. Lots of walkways just seem like a waste of good gardening space. Once you've selected the best location, the real fun begins.

Gardeners in our area deal with two basic soil types, clay or sand. If you aren't sure which you have dig a deep hole, fill it with water, and leave it for about ten minutes. If water remains in the hole, then it isn't draining properly because of an abundance of clay. A dry hole indicates sandy soil. The remedy to fix either soil condition is not to add the other; you'll just end up with a nice batch of cement-like soil. The addition of organic matter will solve both soil problems.

I'm a big fan of organic gardening because composting makes it so easy. My favorite book "Let It Rot" by Stu Campbell is marked up, highlighted, and dog-eared.  By the way, if I loaned it to any of you, I'm really missing it.  Organic matter is great for gardens because it amends the soil, helps hold water and provides slow-release nutrients to plant roots.  Fall is the time to add organic matter to soil so that it can break down over the winter.  Who said a garden rests during the winter?

The nice thing about organic matter is that it is free; free is good.  Organic matter includes: untreated grass clippings, leaves, sawdust in limited quantities, limited wood ash from a fireplace or wood burning stove and all those fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps.  A favorite Saturday activity is to drive to a local horse stable and pick up a free load of aged horse manure and then spread it over the garden.  No, it isn?t smelly.  Manure helps all that organic matter break down better.  Another great activity is to drive to a neighborhood blessed with lots of leaves, I mean trees, and pick up a few bags of free leaves.  The kids love to jump on the leaves before we turn them into the garden.  The kids don't know that they are doing me a favor by beginning the process of breaking down the leaves before they even make it into the soil.

I've tried the traditional compost box in Colorado with little success.  A compost box needs to be "hot" and moist. It's pretty hard to keep it warm enough to encourage decomposition.  I've developed a cheat method that works just fine.  In the fall we turn the leaves, grass clipping and manure into the soil.  I keep two 6 gallon buckets in my garage.  As I'm preparing meals, I just save all the organic clippings (banana peels, orange rinds, damaged lettuce leaves, etc) in the buckets.  When the buckets are full, I dig holes in the garden and dump it in.  A covering of 3 to 4 inches of soil seems to be enough to keep critters out.  By early spring I've managed to dig holes in most of the garden.

For those gardeners who want to begin preparations in the spring, please reconsider.  There is nothing greater than turning your soil in early spring to find that dark, rich soil waiting for your plants.

Happy Fall Gardening!