Well, This Didn't Work

I got to work on the planting bed next to the turnips today.  But when I tried to work the soil with the fork, I ran into a tangle of pine roots.  That wasn't supposed to happen, not after I laid all that landscaping cloth over the subsoil before returning the amended soil to the bed.

When I carefully worked my way down to the landscaping cloth, I found a mess.  The pine roots had not just penetrated the cloth, they'd attacked it and ripped it up.  That's what I call aggressive root growth, it's no wonder these pines do so well here.  I've also had them seek out the water in underground plastic pipes and get into those.  Just a small leak is all it takes, then the roots invade the pipe and make it their own.

So I'll have to rethink my gardening plan.  No more landscaping cloth as root barrier, that clearly does not work.  The crops seem to do fine for a while, then the pine roots compete with them and they die back.  There's a pungent odor to soil that's been invaded by pine, it smells like the ground is contaminated with industrial waste.  I've learned though, that it's just the pine trees repelling my crop roots with chemical warfare.  Plants seem so lifeless to us, but put a time-lapse camera on them and you'll see they and their roots are constantly doing things like fighting with their neighbors for the sun and aggressively hunting down little pockets of richer soil beneath the surface where we can't see them.

If you lay a piece of rotten wood on the soil around your crop plants, then lift it in a few days, you'll see how the roots have grown up from below and invaded the moist wood.  Studies of this behavior have shown that somehow the roots smell things like rotten wood and grow towards them.

So I've decided to rework the beds completely between crops and remove all the pine roots...then plant crops that mature quickly so they can stay ahead of the pines.  I want to grow things I can eat, not pine cones.  They say pine nuts are generally edible, but maybe I'm not that hungry yet...LOL.  I'll leave those for the squirrels.

So next step for the South Garden...dig out all the soil from bed S3 and move it to a heap alongside the driveway again.  Then I'll purge the area of pine roots as best I can before mixing the soil with rock powder and compost.  Then I'll return it to the garden.  It's a lot of work, but it's the only way I know to get anything decent out of that ground out there.

I suppose I could buy a roto-tiller and do things that way.  I'm not a fan of noisy gadgets, though.  I'll give the matter some cogitation.