This is only my 3rd grow here in the 6 years I’ve been living here so it’s changed each year. In 2014 we plowed up a second 30x60 plot that was wildflowers and tilled in several bales of peat and big bags of vermiculite and a truck load of sand and 20-30 lbs of 10-10-10 pellet fertilizer.
This bed had pretty fresh cow manure tilled in the spring of 2015. It was a little hot and caused some excess Nitrogen symptoms during the early veg stages but mellowed out through the season. We let it go back to wildflowers in 2016 since we ended up with a harvest beyond my wildest expectation.
I plowed that up again in fall and planted annual winter rye cover crop to prevent wildflowers from returning.
In the spring this year, I tilled that all under. You really only want to do a single pass with a rototiller to maintain healthy micro-biotics in the soil.
We didn’t really have enough compost to do both the veggie garden and the weed so we spread the compost in the veggie garden and tilled it in this year. This weeks project is to construct a faster compost system like Will Bonsall does.
Check out @Ragnar’s topic on organic amendments here Soil amendments for organic outdoor grow and general gardening
Will Bonsall is Maine’s authority on radical, self-reliant gardening.
https://www.amazon.com/Bonsalls-Essential-Radical-Self-Reliant-Gardening/dp/1603584420/ref=sr_1_1?tag=greenrel-20