This is a small portion of George's Italian beans. He has them along the south side of the house, so they get manximum light and heat. He's strung heavy chord up to the eaves of the house, and has staked them at the bottom. When George comes home from work, these beans are the first thing he checks, and he putters around them like a mother hen. This photo was taken a month ago, when they hadn't yet grown up to the rain gutters. To pick the beans up there, he'll have to use a ladder.
Anyway, to get to the real issue of my post - Compost Soup.
When I first arrived in Tacoma, I joined a Community Garden Program, and rented 4 garden plots from the city. I worked with a lot of nice people, many of whom were Ukrainian, and one of them said to me, "We watch you!", which was her way of saying that they had to learn new ways to garden over here in the Pacific Northwest.
Every spring, the ground was extremely wet, from a winter of rain. I showed them how to dig trenches, and double dig, to make berms that stayed dry. They could plant all their onions, and they would be up, out of the water. If you didn't dig trenches for water, your bulbs rotted in boggy soil.
By doing this, all the rain went into the trenches. One spring it backfired a little, though. There was so much rain, everyone had to replant - except me. I went and collected grass clippings from neighbors (here they bagged them up and put them out by the curb to be hauled away by the garbage collector). They gave me enough bagged cut grass to fill up all my trenches, and I just put my wading boots on and mashed it down. Goopy, yes. And stinky.
It all rotted into a compost soup that seeped into my growing beds in July, and my plants looked twice their normal size. Everyone who had to replant, had puny stuff, then there was this one plot that was phenomenal! People would drive by and ask me what I'd done to get such excellent growth. Well, you can imagine my amusement when I told them about the misfortune I had in the spring, with so much rain...
After that, everyone was digging trenches, filling them with grass clippings, and making "Compost Soup".
