PLAYING IN THE DIRT

Remember making mud pies and letting them dry in the afternoon sun, just in time to serve "oatmeal cookies" to all your friends? As a grown-up, I am now reveling in the opportunity to once again play in the dirt. The smell of fresh soil alone evokes so many comforting images for me including afternoons in the sultry greenhouses or Saturdays spent scooping out hands full of moist Monroe dirt to create holes for leftover seeds from my foray into seed-sales. I'm not sure I ever understood how important good dirt is for gardeners, but it didn't make me love it any less. The early part of dahlia season is often spent trying to get the soil composition just right for optimum growing conditions. The Tony DeRooy Memorial Garden is an ongoing challenge to those of us with rows there. The decision about whether or not to add organic materials is often a bone of contention and I'd swear that we propagate rocks and stones during the winter season! We tilled in several loads of leaves since the end of last summer, and are hopeful that these will enrich the sand, clay and rocks that we regularly deal with. We also hired someone to level the surface of the garden, leaving us with fewer low spots for the water to pool up, which promotes algae grown and swamps our tubers. Each member is responsible for adding further amendments, so this year, I added alpaca manure and peat moss. When I plant, of course, I always add bone meal for tuber health, and may still put some mulch on the top, once the babies are bigger. My home garden has been another story completely. I added a 5th raised 8x8 bed, so needed to start from square one when filling it up. The other four beds are filled with a combination of composted topsoil, sand, horse manure and Ellensburg mulch. On Saturday, I hopped into L'il Blue (my dad's old pickup) and headed out to Bob's Apple Barrel Bark to get a load of 4-way topsoil - a sandy loam soil, fine bark mulch (like peat moss) organic fertilizers and touch of lime to keep a pH of 7. I mixed in a bit more peat after filling the bed, and dampened the whole mix slightly, since it was dry as a bone. I then pounded in 12 stakes, and planted my last 24 dahlia varieties. It will be interesting to see whether or not there are big disparities between the plants that emerge from these different soil mixes. My shoes are always full of dirt, and my socks are always black by the time I finish this kind of work. After picking up the soil at Bob's on Saturday, I think my entire body was covered with a thin layer of topsoil dust - I could even feel it in my mouth! By the time I finished moving it from L'il Blue's bed into the garden, I needed a shower. In fact, I probably should have had a bath, but didn't want to have to clean out the black bathub ring that surely would have been left behind after my soak! Don't let anyone tell you that girls don't like to play in the dirt - I'm here to tell you that it is one of our favorite things to do!