Buy a house?

Some crappy pics of us digging up all the soil and dumping it on the inside of the fence to make flower beds. I got some miracle grow soil to replace it. But I'll need a hell of a lot more to finish the garden up.

Soo many weeds.

 

Thats because all the soil I dug up is miracle grow haha. My soil is pretty clay filled. So its not that nice. I'll take pics later of it.

I have about 8.2 cubic yards of compost coming tomorrow morning. Which is going to be very fun to move all over my garden by hand...

 

Breaks down? As in compress down?

 

Note: Dog poop is not compost!

 

Not as-is, but I add it to the compost heap and have for many, many years.

It can be surprising how much one can alter heavy clay soils in just a few years. I started my beds 5 years ago and initially it was all clay, but I add compost, old potting soil, and cardboard. 5 years later the garden plots are all very nice soil with good tilth about 14" deep and it produces well. About 20% of my plots sit idle each year, I ammend them like the other plots, plus I lay cardboard boxes on top of them and all the weeds and debris I pull from the beds gets heaped on top of them and next year the plots move to another spot. I did half the area with a tiller on the little tractor and the other half with a grub hoe. The tractor is obviously faster when opening lots of new area, but I tend to just grab the hoe and work an hour of so each day.

Over time much of the compost fully breaks down

As for compost, my pile is probably a tad larger than most at somewhere around 10-15 cubic yards, but the garden sees only a wheelbarrow or two of that a year. I add kitchen scraps, dog poop, donkey poop, cow poop (when we have them), large tree branches, whole carcasses, pretty much anything I can manage to get covered. If I had my way, when I'm done here they'd just lay me down and push the pile over me so I can keep working the land longer.

 

Do you think I need to till the ground under the compost i add or just dump it on top and start planting? I don't think the ground is too compacted in most areas since the area near the fences don't get a lot of traffic and aren't stepped on that much.

I got 6.65 tons of compost delivered and 2 to 3 tons of black topsoil from near the river delivered. I'll mix them together to make a more substantial soil.

 

I always mix it up but my beds aren't raised; eventually the stuff you add will get mixed in, but I like to speed the process and get a nice uniform soil for the roots and make it easier for them to grow in the soil. Among all the other issues of clay, it compacts easy and becomes harder for the plants to put down roots. If you're putting down less than 12" of new, I would dig up what you have and mix it all so it's at least 12" deep, preferably more.

Nice looking dog BTW.

 

Thanks we have 2 doggos.

I lay down about 6 inches of compost so far. I probably need to go back and add a little more. Without proper raised boxes for the flower patches I'm not sure that I can get 12 inches to stay piled up for long without slumping out. Ill see how it goes though.

I'm surprised how much compost was delivered. We moved about 72 cubic feet today in about an hour. It looks like we moved about 1/8th of the compost but who knows. His flat bed was only 16x7x2 (225 cu ft) so I'm not sure how we could have 8x more left to go. Time and dump carts will tell though. We made about 20 feet of new flower beds so far.

 

Pics of progress. Only got one wagon load done today since its been pouring. But we did dig the wood into the ground to prevent soil escaping out the back.

 

My father in law grew the best tomatoes ever on the sewerage beds at the refinery effluant plant (I'm told, I never knowingly ate one)

 

Spent a good 5 or 6 hrs digging out the soil. Only moved about 56 cubic feet of the compost but managed to dig out almost all of the old soil in the vegetable garden and I dug up the old flower bed (and irises? In the wagon) next to the gazebo which was pretty rough work. Hopefully tomorrow I'll finish up the back yard.

Check out the native clay soil. You can see my finger prints in it.

 

Just for giggles, fire some of that clay. A number of years ago we fired a little bit of our local blue clay and something totally expected happened, when fired it turned a beautiful dark green colour with small yellow flecks, not useful for pottery but it might have made a really nice glaze.

 

I've been thinking about firing it as well. But the guy I bought soil from down by the river has a cave on his property right next to the river and apparently it has a lot of pure clay in the bottom of it. So he was going to dig some up for me to fire and see what happens. Then if it turns out well I will buy a truck load or so from him and make lots of pots for the garden and maybe tiles.

I'm interested in making glazes but I don't know the details of that very well. Something to look into.

 

Got only minimal work done on hauling soil maybe 2 buckets of vegetable patch soil moved. But I ended up charing one 16x4 ft vegetable patch raised box frame. Supposedly charring the wood will make it last 50 to 100 years in ground (if I get 5 years ill be happy).

I finally found a use for my original furnace burner (the one with the flare that works in air). It's been sitting in my scrap metal bucket for 9 years waiting for its time to shine this day.

 

Made one box. Burned enough wood for another one. Unfortunately I'm on nights shift so progress will now be slow.

Also bought 6x 275 gallon totes all food grade for water storage. Will be getting some bulk heads to connect them together soon. Then I can start collecting water.