Soil prep and tilling suggestions?

[mal9680]

Hi there! My boyfriend and I just became proud renters of our first community garden plot. We live in the rainy Pacific Northwest, and took advantage of a rare sunny day last week to prep/till our plot. We used a pitchfork and a rake, and built long beds with walkways. We direct sowed some early spring veggies (snap peas, beets, baby green lettuces). Since then, it's been raining. A LOT. We went to check on our plot today, and the beds are still intact, but it's bordering on a muddy mess. We also noticed that our soil seems much chunkier than the soil in neighboring plots.

So my questions are...

Do our sown seeds have a fighting chance?

And is it ok for our soil to have chunks?

Should we scrap last weeks efforts, wait for it to dry out, and start over again?

Any advice is welcome! Thanks for your time!

[JosephsGarden]

mal9680: I bet that your plants will thrive in chunky soil... The seeds will be loving all the rain.

[rainbowgardener]

Just as a garden geek quibble, it sounds like you did not till your soil. Tilling is done with a roto-tiller (or a plow if you have a farm). You just turned your soil. And it sounds like 1) even though it was a sunny day, the soil was still too wet from the previous rains and 2) you didn't really work it enough. Starting a new bed is a LOT of work to break the soil up thoroughly, which I would do with a shovel and hoe. But 1) is the worst part.

However, the damage is done now. Once you have worked wet soil and it has clodded up like that, it is very difficult to undo. So, you may have to just live with it. It's not ideal, but you should still be able to grow things with it. The next question will be if the seeds you planted got washed out by all the rain. That's just a wait and see.

For next time, the test if your soil can be worked is to pick up a handful. You should be able to squeeze it into a ball which holds it shape, but you should NOT be able to squeeze any water out of it, and the ball should fall apart again readily when poked.

[JosephsGarden]

I planted Fava beans this afternoon. The mud (more like slime) on the bottom of my shoes was a few inches thick by the time I finished. It snowed this morning and a few times last week. If I only worked my garden when the soil was dry I wouldn't be able to plant much before June, and by then it would be too hot for the cool weather crops. In nature seeds fall where they will -- all helter-skelter -- and they still manage to grow.

[mal9680]

Thanks so much for the feedback everyone! I guess we'll keep a look out and see what happens.
Gardening is such an adventure!