This year, I decided to plant a garden. We have some experience as both my parents and my wife’s parents had vegetable gardens. Also, we planted potatoes and turnips on our own property. That was over twenty years ago and now we are living on a property that has very poor soil conditions. There is shale about six inches down. It would take a lot of work and bringing in soil to make a garden.
Our daughter has a small plot on their property and they were going to be on holidays and asked us if we wanted to use it. They had brought in a dump truck load of topsoil and had it spread over an area they wanted to use to plant vegetables.
I spent a few hours preparing the ground and making drills. All done by hand with a shovel and a pitch fork. I decided to plant, carrots, beet, turnip, peas, lettuce and kale. The following are a few photos after three weeks.
The above pictures were taken July 23rd. The garden needs fertilizer or manure and kelp. Too late for this year.
My parents and many other families in Newfoundland used kelp and capelin to fertilize the soil. I recall placing capelin in the trenches, covering them with soil and putting the composted soil around the potato stalks. In the spring, we mixed horse manure into the soil.
My friend uses chicken manure from the chicken farm.
Links that may be helpful
Mun Botanical Gardens Gardening