Hello Form the Bitterroot Valley of Montana

Newbie to SFG but after taking an SFG class this winter I am one enthusiastic girl..  Have read the book, Thank you Stone (our Master Gardener), done more research, have a new backyard to start fresh, a small greenhouse and away we go... Am so looking forward to this growing season.

Mtcrewsers, Welcome to the Forum from California! You are light years ahead with All New Square Foot Gardening by having taken a class.

Hi MTCrewsers. Welcome from Atlanta, GA! Glad to have you here!

What are you planning to grow? How many square feet?

We like photos......... :-)

Mtcrewsers, Welcome from the Gallatin Valley of Montana!

  from Northern California. What a great start, taking an SFG class. Looking forward to see where you go from here. I still remember my first year -- exciting stuff!

Welcome to the group!

Hello Sanderson! Thanks for the reply and for the links to the threads. 

I'm thinking I'll add 6" to the 3" of topsoil I have in there and leave 2" of wiggle room for mulch and a top off next year. 

I compared prices of the vermiculite from the sources you mentioned and found when shipping is factored in both the PVP course and super course were cheaper from Amazon, which will give free shipping on this order. The most expensive was AML as the shipping charge was more than the order! Amazon has two 4cuft bags of coarse for $104, and two 4cuft bags of super-coarse for $114. (As much as I would prefer not to buy from Amazon, my budget means I have to either hold my nose closed or my wallet.)

I just called the city to ask about the composition of their Class-A and top-dress compost to see if they add anything to it. They get the 'cooked' bio-waste from the waste treatment plant and it makes up 75% of the compost, with yard and kitchen waste making up the remainder. (Of course they tried to sell me on their pre-mix, which is the wrong ratios/ingredients and contains perlite instead of vermiculite. They also warned about vermiculite as we live in the vicinity of Libby and that vermiculite was used widely all over the valley on things like parks and playgrounds, etc.. They said the clean-up is still ongoing here. ) 

Do you know how the bio-waste portion of this compost will work with Mel's Mix and if I should make any further adjustments? 

Yes, the local compost is relatively cheap. The top dress runs $35/yard. Since I'll need a little under a yard for these beds (for the non-animal composted manure portion) plus a little over another yard for some containers/towers, etc., I'll get two yards. A friend has offered to haul it for me in his pickup which will save me over $140 or more versus having it delivered from one of the local little dumps services. If I need more, I can get it a bag at a time, which is 1cuft for $4. (The delivery truck tacks on about $10/yard to pick up from the compost yard, then another $75 for a local delivery and since I'm in the extended delivery area about as far out as they go, they tack on another $50.) 

I still haven't found a local source available for manure but the little dumps truck will deliver dairy, poultry or mushroom compost by the yard. I don't need that much and I haven't found where they get it yet as it's not coming from the city waste collection compost yard. They also deliver a locally sourced peat moss by the yard. I think I'll get this for the beds and save the compressed bales for my containers/towers. If the 3cuft bales expand to 4cuft, I'd need to get 8 more of them (which would be equal to just over a yard). They are available on Amazon for $54.99 with free shipping, which would be $439.92. Two yards delivered to me from the local source would be $315. 

WRT red wigglers, I checked into them while shopping for worm bins and no they won't survive the winter here in-ground (I currently don't have a sheltered spot to keep them alive over the winter). I'll have to buy more every year, but dying off means they won't become invasive since they are being released into the wild. (I recently learned that the native worm population in N. Am didn't recover after being wiped out by the ice age and that most of the worms here are invasive species brought over from Europe. I've discovered a lot of worms in my yard but they seem to be European night crawlers. I may buy half and half to get started.) Since I've got 4 in-ground worm bins (made by Vego) that I'm going to bury in the beds (they have to be buried 11" to cover the holes the worms crawl in/out of) and rotate them among all the beds, I'm going to hold off on supplementing castings with the compost since it's going to be fallow for a year and instead depend on my own bins. I have a friend who cooks a lot for a big household and she's been looking for someone to take her kitchen waste, so I'll have a plentiful source for the worm bins. 

I've already gotten permission for a greenhouse from the landlord, but he'll only approve a nicely built one (no plastic sheeting, cattle panels, hoop houses or cheap fly-apart ones from Harbor Freight). I can get one from the same Amish family that built my shed, but that's going to be about $5K for one that is 8'x10', the largest size he will allow. I have other projects that will have to happen before I can get a greenhouse, which I hope will be in about 5yrs if the stars align. 

WRT deer fence, no the landlord will not allow anything that looks like a fence, but I can have something that looks like a trellis. I do have some 1" PVC connectors salvaged from a previous project (the furniture grade ones that have various connector configurations and angles). I was thinking about putting a PVC pipe frame over each of the individual beds and draping noseeum cloth over the frames to keep out the hoppers, and it would serve double duty to keep out the deer. (The Online Fabric Store has a good price on it, $3.65/yd and lower for larger quantities. It comes in black and white so I suspect the black could also serve as shade cloth.) I also noticed a lot of white flies last year so this may help with that too. I wasn't planning on squash/melons/cuccs in these beds, but maybe in another bed that I can protect with motion detecting sprinklers in the future, if the hoppers will leave them alone. I wish the landlord would allow chickens as that would decimate the hopper population, but no such luck.

Thanks again for your input!

- To use compost made from bio-solids is a personal decision. If it is properly composted, you won't have to make any adjustments.

- Looking at the bio-solids compost strictly from the Mel's Mix aspect, it is 75% manure-based, which is way more than the 20-25% recommended. For every bucket of this compost, you would need to use 3+ buckets of non-manure compost. I will check further on this and get back if I am wrong.

- The Libby mine closed down years ago. The rock to make coarse and super coarse is mined in other countries and tested by each plant (PVP Ind, Thermo-O-Rock, Palmetto. The rock for medium and fine is mined in the U.S. PS: PVP Ind is a member of this Forum so we get the skinny from him.

- In the U.S., we are so used to buying Canadian peat moss that it is easy to forget that there are peat bogs in the U.S. Sphagnum Peat moss and Sphagnum moss are 2 different products from the same aquatic plants. SM is from the living top and is expensive and often used as "mulch" on indoor plants. The SPM is anaerobically dead plants deeper in the bog. Just make sure you are getting the deep peat moss as it is acidic. When mixed with composts and perlite, it produces a near neutral pH Mel's Mix. Go figure.

- Earthworms. Build the beds and they will come. No need to do anything special. Earthworms travel through the soil, unlike little red wigglers that stay closer to the surface. The earthworms can travel vertically as needed to survive.