Taking Dominion

My Nanny has a habit of saying to anyone whose thinking or behavior is out of line, "You need an attitude adjustment."

This didn't just extend to her children and grandchildren, but to anything, from dogs and cats to hogs and cows to plants and garden pests. If it wasn't doing what it was supposed to do, it received an attitude adjustment. Plain and simple.

I just so happen to have 80 square feet of earth that has needed an attitude adjustment.

I have pioneers and homesteaders on both sides of my family, so showing uncooperative clay soil who the boss is nearly qualifies as a birthright with me. From my earliest memories I can recall the lushness of Nanny's vegetable garden, where I would hide under the plants and pretend to be any number of creatures from a fox to a deer.

And my mother's thumb? It's as green as her eyes. To this day I really can't drive past our old house out West without feeling a twinge of sadness. When we bought that house just before I turned five the lawn was pure dirt. By the time we moved, just after I turned ten, Mom had turned it into a lush oasis full of thick shade grass and plants, roses, vegetables, and even a little bed of desert plants where she had left the clay soil as is. It doesn't look like anything when you drive past it now, and it breaks my heart. But that's another post.

The point is, I have quite the green pedigree. And this 80 square foot bed complex, you see, well, this last summer? Refused to grow much beyond tomatoes and basil. I like caprese salad as much as the next girl, but come on, bed. The pumpkins barely came up, the squash succumbed to pests, and when it was all said and done we left town for a weekend and came back to a dead garden.

Using vinegar I performed a highly unsophisticated pH test that revealed that my clay soil caused a reaction not unlike baking soda. It was unforgivingly alkaline.

Double digging in some cotton burr compost revealed that some of the manure from several years ago hadn't yet fully decomposed, so packed down was the clay. A lone earthworm dug around, as did a grub that quickly got cut in half by my shovel. What was dry on top was wet, wet and warm in November, down at the bottom and full of clay "rocks."

So I gave it an attitude adjustment.

My recent pH test revealed that my cotton burrs had lowered it down to neutral. But now it appeared the three most essential nutrients for plant growth, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous, were almost completely depleted from several years of neglect.

So this morning, I gave it another attitude adjustment.

I hope by now this bed understands that I will have my way. I hope it understands that come Spring I'm going to expect it to grow things. Because if it doesn't? I'm going to keep adjusting it until it does.

Giving up? It's not really something my people do.