Today dawned in marked contrast to the last few days. In place of cool mist and fog were bright sun and almost 70 degree temperatures. I seized the opportunity to complete the year’s final tasks in the garden that surrounds the house.

I started by robbing my compost pile that’s been in the making for almost a year. It’s a mix of garden waste, grass clippings, soiled chicken house bedding, and kitchen scraps. Instead of engaging in a hot composting process, which requires a more precise mix of nitrogen-rich greens and carbonous browns, plus proper moisture and aeration, I just throw everything in a pile in the woods and let time work its magic. Which it does, yielding a worm-full and deeply nutritious mix that every fall gets spread about the farm.

I forked the compost into the big tractor bucket. I prefer using this large bucket when dealing with bulky materials because it can carry much more than the smaller bucket. The downside, though, is that I can’t dig or scoop with this big bucket without damaging the tractor’s arms, so that means lots of hand forking. In many ways this is still necessary, though, as the margins of the pile aren’t well defined and the pile isn’t large enough to efficiently scoop with a small bucket anyway.

I managed to eek two large buckets of compost out of my pile. It’s not a ton, but I spread it almost an inch thick over all the exposed dirt in the garden and even had enough to pile some extra around heavy feeders, such as the roses.

Once the compost was down, I went back for mulch. My target was the remnants of the ten yards that were delivered in early April. They’d been spread about a bit in the field and briars and grass were starting to grow up in the pile.

This required lots of hand forking and tedious, prickly picking through, but I managed to get four big bucketfuls out of a rather insubstantial looking pile. Not only did it feel good to reclaim something for which I’d paid good money, but the eight-month rest in the field had decomposed the mulch the absolutely perfect consistency—damp, dark, crumbly and ready to go to work building soil. It makes me realize I should be ordering all my mulch at least half a year in advance of when I want to apply it.

Anyone who’s been reading this blog for a while knows that when it comes to mulch, I prioritize its soil-building properties over any aesthetic contribution it may make to the landscape. The key to building good soil is keeping it mulched with an appropriate material, one that breaks down and adds organic matter to the soil. When you’re working with what I’ve got here—compacted red Virginia clay around a construction site—short of digging out all the native dirt and replacing it the only way to create great soil is through repeated application of amendments such as compost and mulch. Do that for ten or fifteen years and you might get somewhere. I am three years in and my fantasies of dropping a trowel and having it sink blade deep in rich, black soil are a long way off.

But I work at it. And will keep working at it every year as long as I can wield the pitchfork.

By sundown I could barely move but I was finished spreading compost and mulch, and I felt good about this final gardening act of the year. This is always one of the most physically demanding days of the year, and I am glad to have it behind me. Now I celebrate, and rest easy knowing I have left a nutritious blanket over my garden that will nourish it through this winter and into the spring to come. It’s a good feeling, despite the protest of every nerve  and muscle in my bone-tired body. I’m headed for the epsom salts and a scalding bath, and most likely a well-deserved beer.

This spring I was lucky enough to get my hands on some “Glass Gem” corn seeds. Glass Gem is not a sweet corn. It’s an incredibly beautiful heirloom flint, or popcorn, and it’s quite a phenomenon in the gardening world, spurred on by photos like this that have been circulating online for a couple of years. You can read more about it here.

(Photo from Native Seeds/SEARCH)

Everyone was nuts to get some Glass Gem seeds, but they became available only this year from Native Seeds/SEARCH, a Tucson, Arizona-based nonprofit that works to conserve seed from plants of genetic and cultural importance.

I first discovered Native Seeds when I lived within walking distance of their retail store on Fourth Avenue in Tucson. It was one of my favorite shops in the city, filled with Native crafts and, of course, unusual seeds. One year I bought my dad a bunch of hot chile pepper seeds and sent them home to Virginia, where he planted a giant chile garden. For years my parents had hot peppers languishing in the freezer from that massive experiment.

I was on a waiting list for more than a year until I got an e-mail this spring saying I could purchase one packet of Glass Gem seeds. Which I did, immediately. People are so nuts to get this corn that I’ve seen online auctions and stores selling each seed for a dollar or more, which is crazy because it’s still for sale on the Native Seeds Web site. It’s also nuts because corn is wind-pollinated, which means you need a pretty sizable stand (at least 40 plants) in order for cobs to set, unless you want to hand-pollinate.

I received 65 kernels in my allotted packet of seeds. I have never grown corn before, so this experiment has required quite a bit of research as well as some garden plan drawings before I could start. And then I had to wait for the soil to warm up…

On May 11, I marked out the placement for each kernel using sophisticated measuring apparatus. Don’t laugh. It worked. I planted seeds one foot from each other in both directions, creating the suggested “block” configuration that helps insure pollination.

Glass Gem corn, ready to go in the ground. We had some nice rains in May and after about a week the corn germinated. Sixty-three of the sixty-five planted kernels came up, which is a pretty amazing germination rate: 97%!

I’d like to take a moment now for some soil appreciation. The darker soil, above on the right, is what most of my vegetable garden looks like now, after three years of concerted effort to build soil tilth and fertility through sheet mulching, composting in place, running chickens in the garden, and adding homemade compost at regular intervals. The red clay blob is the native soil, dug from just a foot away at the edge of the garden. Quite a difference, huh?! I know it’s nuts to be proud of your soil, but that photo above represents countless hours of my life spent in research and hard physical labor, so it’s wonderful to see such an obvious improvement.

The corn is now about eight inches tall and this week’s heat wave (highs above 90 degrees) has had a noticeable effect. Corn loves heat, and just as I’ve heard in gardening folklore, you can watch it grow.

Many other bloggers are growing Glass Gem and writing about it, so it will be interesting to compare experiences. Some gardeners are really coddling their Glass Gem, but coddling isn’t really my gardening style and I am prepared to accept failure with this experiment. It’s a big risk as I devoted a relatively large section of my too-small garden to this corn, but I figured I had to at least give it a shot! We’ll see what happens!