Today begins our five weeks of soil cooking. There are a lot of various weeds in our lot, bermuda grass in particular. This lot has been vacant for at least 50 years, so many things have been growing, including random car parts and oil cans. (However, I don't think our soil cooking is intended to kill any car parts that may be buried.) So, we made a trench around the edge of our plot. Then we wet down the top 8 inches of our soil and made a whole bunch of mud. It was actually quite fun. At one point there was a suggestion of taking off our shoes and stirring the mud with our feet, but this was determined to be rather dangerous. So shovels it was. Once we were completely mudded up, we covered the whole plot with 4 mil drop cloth (it was suggested we should use at least 2 mil) and we filled in the trench with dirt, over the cloth, to seal it. Now our soil is just going to sit and cook for 5 weeks. Some folks suggest up to 3 months to really get the weeds cooked and gone. But, I think our whole garden is ready to get growing. So cook baby cook! (disco inferno?)
P.S. Oh and on the drop cloth issue. Another suggestion I was given was to make somethign akin to a double-paned window. You do one drop cloth and then a layer of something (in the scenario I heard it was plastic bottles) and then another drop cloth. Its supposed to cook even better.