What the heck is Tagro?

So after the mess of a garden we had last year (we grew a fantastic crop of grass!), we decided to build raised garden beds filled with Tagro, instead of doing all that pesky digging again.  We first laid down landscape fabric to keep the grass from growing between the beds and covered the walkways with wood chips.  When you are using reclaimed pallets for building material, none of the boxes are going to be the same size, so it makes it hard to mow between them.  Kass then went to pick up a couple yards of Tagro, or TAcoma GROw.  Tagro is the Class A biosolids produced from Tacoma's wastewater treatment plant, otherwise known as human manure.  It came highly recommended by Scott, who used it in raised beds in a previous gardening project.

"Old Blue" full of Tagro.

The use of biosolids in vegetable gardening is super controversial.  There are tons of people who swear by it and tons of people who speak against it's use.  We did the research and decided that the treatment process used is safe and tested regularly.  Most of the public outcry is against Class B biosolids being used for farming, which are not as, for lack of a better word, clean.  So getting around the "ick" factor and deciding on an environmentally friendly planting medium seemed like the way to go.

Transplanting strawberries to their new home.

So here's where we made our major mistake.  After getting about 2/3 of our boxes filled and about half of those planted, I took a look at the city's website and realized the sell two different products: Tagro Mix (what we bought) is for use as a fertilizer and Tagro Potting Soil is ready to use.  Oops!  Tagro Mix is a blend of biosolids, sand, and sawdust so it is pretty dense stuff!  So to partially remedy our mistake, in the boxes we hadn't planted yet, we took out some of the Tagro and replaced it with topsoil and added the rest to the remaining unfilled boxes.  For the ones that were already planted we are taking a "wait and see what happens" position.  From what we have read, the major problems could be water retention and too high levels of nutrients, which will mostly fix itself after a few crops pass through.  Hopefully nature will have it's way and it will all be fine, fingers crossed.  Everything is growing so far so good, except the kale, which had a hard time setting up its root structure and only a few seedlings made it past the seed leaves.  I did put in some more kale seeds on Monday so hopefully a few more will take.

So for better or worse, the garden is growing!

Looking better already!