If you’ve ever found yourself facing a challenging site for your gardening, this will make you feel better, and hopefully show you what is possible with determination, grit, and LOTS of manure. I’m not an expert when it comes to explaining why this or that works, or why something else doesn’t work as well, or what is going on scientifically in the ground. What I am an expert in, is my ability to make a grow site based on only one thing…sunlight…and to make it work.
This year my wife and I are prepping a new location for growing garlic. If I were to prep this location for growing weed, I’d do things exactly the same. Well…almost. I was not home when a neighbor built the raised beds for us with machinery. All the topsoil was stripped, and the mounds were made of clay, hardpan and subsoil. Unghh. The horror! No topsoil. Zero. Garlic needs to be planted by LAST week, and I have 4 days, including yesterday, to finish the beds. My wife has already been picking rocks for 2 weeks at this point, and there is no machinery available to reclaim any topsoil. My wife and I both have herniated disc’s in our spines, so busting up the piled sod ain’t gonna happen. I have to use what’s at hand in the mounds…and it’s an ugly mess.
The location is on a slight grade, so the mounds run downhill to avoid standing water in between. Again…I’d like to stress that I was at work when the mounds were built…this is what I have to work with.
Tools available include shovels, rakes, hoes and a tiny rototiller. First the clods of clay and hardpan/ subsoil must be broken up by hand. The rototiller won’t do the job. Rocks are tossed at this time as well.
Next, composted horse manure is added by hand. This is the good shit, lol. We inherited a large pile when we bought our house. Horse manure is the best option for fixing dense soils. It has a much higher ratio of air than other manure such as from cow, sheep or pig.
It’s extremely important to completely break up all the clay, all the hard pan and all the subsoil. This stuff will not mix itself… it would take years for worms to do the mixing… and I don’t have that.
So i’ve got this mound of nasty sticky clay and sub soil. Each individual particle is rolled in manure after it is broken up. Think of what happens when you put flour on dough. The flour prevents the dough from sticking to itself. It is the same with manure. It prevents the individual small clumps from sticking back together. Gypsum can also be used for this purpose, but it’s high PH precludes it’s use everywhere in the country. Here in limestone country it’s OK to add…but I’m using what’s at hand and free.
Updates will be sporadic over the next few days. I’ll be mixing manure and pulling rocks today. The plan is to add chopped leaves to the mix in lieu of perlite, in order to add more air to the soil, and to rototill it in at the end. Other than that I am pretty much playing it by ear. I suppose more than anything, I created this topic just to show people what can be done with determination. Ninety nine percent of the people out there would take one look at the location and give up before they started. Those are the smart ones🤣
@JustANobody I should have added digging fork to my tool list. I love Fiskars tools and I have one. Tough as nails. A broad fork has been on my list of must have tools for years, but I always seem to find something else to spend my money on. Sure looks a lot easier on the back than what i’m doing. Someday I’ll get one, but for now I just have a fork
in this photo, You can see a section that has had manure added next to a section that has had no manure. I usually go in phases. I’ll fix three or four or five inches of the soil with some manure, And then go back through and add a second round, This time digging a little deeper. My goal for this year is around six inches in depth. To do any more than that probably isn’t possible.
In the photo, one round of manure was added. About 2 inches on top of the whole surface
I have a property that is straight red clay. Down closer to the creek you get sand, but yeah, the only things I’ve found that love the straight clay are spruce trees.
That red clay is tough to work with but very fertile once amended. I have the infertile gray version here unfortunately. Better suited for making pottery than growing food. The sub soil has a yellow color. It really doesn’t get any worse. I hope after our piled sod has sat for a year, I’ll be able to start adding it back to the beds, but there wasn’t much more than four or six inches of topsoil to begin with.
They’re amazing tools! The farm I worked on last year (which is also my CSA farm every year regardless) is organic and uses tractors (obviously) to work the hundred acres of fields but they don’t plow except to do the first deep prep of a field. Since plowing flips the soil, and they do a lot of long-term soil tilth, after that they have one of those German disc cutters and use that to break up our local clay clumps, it goes over after the plow and chews up the clods in the first foot or two without turning the dirt, but it levels the furrows. So when we knock down and turn in the dead crops or the green manure cover crops like rye and alfalfa they stay in the aerated top layer and break down faster. And when we spread dry amendments, manures, or our own compost made from the veg processing waste they give it a shallow (6” or so?) disking that turns it into the top layer where it’ll get to work. We make compost on the farm with about 2-3 pallet-sized bins a day once we wind up for the summer, maybe a thousand pounds or more of biomass that gets dumped in the back and mixed/turned over with the tractor, if it’s not put into a fallow field and then we run the chicken wagon over it for a month. Getting that field disked by someone in the future might really speed up your building of soil tilth especially if you cover crop it beforehand with some nitrogen fixing beans or something.
The field crew uses broad forks for mid season replanting of smaller crop plots at the home farm where we have five acres of U-Pick fields that rotate through the season, we get ours (like pretty much everything else) from Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine, they have a good comparison chart for the types regardless of which manufacturer you go with:
I have a similar outdoor soil,It Is all compacted and very hard,It looks like hardened clay,It Is grey and not like a good soil.I have some lemon trees and olive trees going there,but what can I do if Say I want to plant 2-3 small-medium plants outdoor?
I thought I have to add some Coco coir and some worm castings,but how and how much?
Thank you in advance
If you are just trying to plant a few plants, then you can excavate a hole larger than you need and refill it after amending the dirt to be more hospitable to cannabis. For example, this year I dug out a hole for one plant at my partners house, the transplant was from a 2G fabric pot, so I dug a 10-15 gallon hole at least twice as deep as the pot, put the dirt on a tarp and mixed it with lots of worm castings and dry amendments mix, along with five gallons of compost from the deepest, oldest part of the house pile, and then refilled the hole, making a big foot-thick donut around the trunk with a depression in the middle about a foot wide. That’ll help trap some water where it will run down through all that better soil and help improve the soil around and under it as the nutrients leach out. Another tip from @Upstate I used that seems to have worked well was to take a steel rod (in this case a foot long screwdriver) and when the hole is still empty, poke holes in every direction especially sideways and down, that gives the roots an easy way to snake out through that hard pan soil so it doesn’t hit the edge of your amended hole and decide to stop rooting, which would hurt its water-gathering ability.
For aeration I wouldn’t use coco or peat, something that breaks down, I would use either the coarsest sand that you can find or ideally pumice rock from a landscaping supply, that will do all the same things as perlite but even better, and it doesn’t float out of the soil the same way. Our local soil is a clay/silt mix in bands, and the sandy silt horizons are what let the soil move moisture sideways very effectively, the narrow bands make it suck water up from very deep down. Clay soils aren’t necessary hopeless, but soil composition and structure is, in my opinion, more important than in a nice fluffy loam soil.
That’s legitimate! Here in the Northeast all the rocks that big mostly are in a pile already on the edge of the field from the last few hundred years of other guys doing it already , so we don’t seem to run into anything bigger than a softball most of the time
