You sound like you know a thing or two mate.
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lol…I’ve been growing and feeding garlic in boney soil long enough I got the scars to prove it 
I do the black eye pea/garlic ritual every year.
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@willie Thanks for the excellent advice. That sounds doable. 
@Rogue thankyou as well. That tight wire trick is clever. I’ll have to give that a go. Sounds like my best option is peas or beans. You two have persuaded me to try a cover crop. I’ve used dead leaves the last few years.
Bed number one is done. 
I dug down 8-10 inches along the whole thing, and widened it a bit too. It should grow good garlic now. ( I won’t be able to add chopped leaves this year. I realized we don’t have many at all. They were dropping half this summer from all the rain, and now I don’t have my yearly pile to deal with. So instead I added 2 more carts of manure to bed one, 60 feet x 4 feet. . )I didn’t get a picture but bed 2 is nearly done as well. Nearly. Funny word. I was NEARLY done with bed one yesterday, but spent 6 more hours on it today:flushed:and had to rush through bed two.
We have some sort of fungus growing deep in the poo pile. Here’s a picture. I see wierd high altitude weather ballon shaped puffballs all over on the surface. Maybe it’s them?
I don’t use lots of this type of poo in one place. It’s real heavy and wet, but breaks up nice. I mix this type with thoroughly decomposed stuff from near the surface which is really airy like decayed leaf matter.
@Dirt_Wizard nice tools in that link. I nearly bought that stainless steel hoe of theirs, just because it’s so nice. I wish they sold quality tools like that where I live. I hate buying junk.
Bed one complete.
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So the bed is running downhil?
When really heavy rain happens a lot of that beautiful soil will get washed downwards, but since they’re installed now, perhaps at the end, at the lowest part you can make a U turn and then lower than that another U, or as many as you can, to prevent the soil from washing down the slope.
That’s where it’ll be most fertile. I’d sow nettles there, you can sell it as tea, and use them as fertilizer mulch in the higher parts of the land, it contains a tremendous diversity of bio available minerals and stimulates mycorrhizal fungi.
Also at the bottom, plant bushes like blackberry, to catch mulch and other organic debris washing down.
Maybe even bamboo, that stuff grows anywhere, has shallow roots and can sell for decent money.
The heads of the shoots are edible. All you have to do to keep it in check is keep harvesting the extra shoots that you don’t want to grow and eat them or sell them.
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@Rogue I’ll have 4 inches of mulch on the beds after planting. A layer of chopped leaves and straw on top to keep it in place. The soil is so heavy, it won’t
move much before then. It’s like a giant piece of pottery, lol. I want to make terraces for easier watering, should that need to be done, (This year we didn’t water at all ) but that will have to be another day. Not enough time this year for any improvements. Thankfully, It’s not a very steep pitch. Any topsoil that gets washed away will get collected in the trenches where it’ll mix with the straw. When there is enough, I’ll shovel it up and throw it on top of the beds again.
There is a collection area at the bottom of the beds as well. Nothing can get past it.
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It sounds like you would maybe benefit from making some big water bars down across your slopes to encourage terraces to form, either as steps or in a zig-zag up the slope to slow down water runoff and erosion. I’ve done a decent amount of trail maintenance and building parties and it’s pretty amazing how you can bench out a steep slope with a few well placed and braced logs, emulating the way a mature forest drops large trees on a diagonal down steep slopes. The easier way to terrace with smaller logs is like this, making a weir or seine structure, what trail builders call a catch wall. It is a pretty doable weekend project if you’ve got a good saw and a sledgehammer and wanted to start doing one level at a time up from the bottom. They’ll slowly fill with the erosion from upslope plus as you level and cut each successive step, you can toss the spoil behind you and amend it with handfuls of stuff as you fill the step underneath you! I’ve seen a lot of small semi-offgrid organic farms here in New England that have cultivated steep and rocky hillsides that way with just hand tools and a few people expanding the area each year.
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That’s actually really interesting, we have the trees.
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I had the 14" tine broadfork in the cart before wifey caught me and stopped the transaction:rofl:
. Dang-it I want that!
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@Dirt_Wizard, those are excellent articles, IMO. Thank you very much for posting them! 
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@Upstate An interesting method for “loaming” clay, is regular (weekly) application of JADAM Microbial Solution.
Method:
Cut up and boil a potato until it’s totally soft, put it in a mesh bag with a handful of leaf mold or compost, then suspends the bag in 5 gallons of water. Mash up the potato in the bag with your hands until no solid starch remains.
No bubbler, this is anaerobic fermentation.
Leave it for about 48 hours.
You’re looking for a “clear ring” to develop on the surface, created by the bubbles from microbial activity. If the ring breaks, you waited too long.
Dilute 1:10 and soak the soil.
If you don’t need 50 gallons, just dilute less, it won’t hurt anything.
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@JustANobody its really cool stuff! If you have the trees then you’re in business, either cut them yourself to thin out the smaller stuff and open the undercanopy for shade plants, or hire/barter with someone! I bet there’s a sawyer of some sort near you who’d either work for a days pay or a zip to drop and limb trees that you’d pre tagged with paint or surveyors tape, then you could just do the assembly yourself!
Moving the smaller logs is easy enough by dragging or lifting onto a cart or truck, the larger ones you can move either by dragging with a Come-Along winch or by setting up a wire rope to zip-line (loggers call it “yarding” logs across or down a slope. You can use the same sort of zip line to hang a bucket from and haul your materials up and down the hill much more easily pulling rope instead of hiking buckets or wheelbarrows. We use those for trail building a lot to minimize the impact on the surrounding area with lots of stomping and wheels, so that when you repair a trail it doesn’t look trashed. They’ll even move large boulders that way with the experienced crews, mechanical advantage with pulleys is fucking incredible.
I grew up cutting cordwood on woodlots with my dad to heat our house through a New England winter, two stoves and maybe 6-8 cord a year, usually more just in case or to get ahead for next year. We’d go out and when we didn’t have the 1955 Ford backhoe for skidding, my job used to be doing the smaller limbing on fell trees with a Swedish bucksaw and a small single-bit axe after he dropped them and limbed anything over 2”, and sliced the trunk into 10’ pieces After I cleaned it up and got a smooth bottom with the pruning saw, I would hook one end up to a Come-Along anchored to a tree, slinging the log with one of those yellow truck tow straps and cranking it up or down the slope to the road where he’d cut it into 5’ lengths or unsplit stove-length rounds and we’d load up the F150. I was doing that by the age of 13 or so, you can do so much moving log and rock and soil with a good pulley system and not tear up your land even more with heavy machinery.
Introduction-to-Rigging-for-Trails.pdf (1.2 MB)
@mota you’re welcome! This is my jam, I don’t have the land to be doing it on myself but I did when I was a kid and I still love doing trail and land clearing or logging work as a volunteer or with my friends on their land
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Yes yes Hugelkultur swales as retaining walls for a terrace are awesome, the design I posted sort of naturally becomes one as organic matter accumulates on the top and breaks down through the logs, you could definitely backfill them right from the start on the bare log side and plant a stabilizing wildflower crop there to get it set up in place, that would be cool and really make it look well-settled within a year or two.
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Oh, ya plenty of friends in forestry. I make a trade for a truck load of logs every year. Ive been doing some work in the woods here and there and skidding them with our sxs. I plan to go pretty hard once ice fishing is done. I want to clear areas for food plots. A lot of those trees are perfect for this
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Oh yeah buddy you got this! I love this design for a lot of reasons besides the environmental preservation and land reclamation benefits. Like the Stowe Farm folks show, you can use gravity drip irrigation really easily and cheaply from a cistern at the top, and just control it with some electronic valves. You could even get really into it and make a manifold and link it to soil moisture sensors for different terraces and the crops that are in them!
The unspoken thing log dams for terracing that the Stowe folks reference obliquely is that they make each level a raised bed from the park below it, which is a fundamental part of designing for aging in place so that the elderly can still garden for food, medicine, or pleasure. I think you’ll start seeing the contours out there and get a vision pretty quick of what it could look like!
Oh hell yeah! That thing have a power take-off option?
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Beautiful terrace garden.
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Unfortunately not!
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Maybe you could slide by a less expensive one from this guy in Ohio who makes good quality looking ones and ships for free? Seems like an equivalent fork would be about $100 less:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/LAMWELDING
I don’t know why all my Etsy links say Czech Republic he’s in East Sparta OH
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Just ordered 
Wife was sleeping
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Worked on the beds 3 more days for a total of 6 days( last Sunday it rained)plus some short evening hours during the work week. We( my wife and I) did 3 beds instead of 4, and went 4 feet wide instead of 3 feet. The depth of the “soil” is around 8 inches. I was worried about drainage issues so I figured I had better go another couple inches deeper.
The beds look great when you look at them from a distance. I have a saying I made up a while back that seems appropriate here. It looks good from afar but it’s afar from good😁. I sprinkled 20 pounds of bonemeal over the 3 beds. One bed is 60 feet, one is 50, another is 40-45…so 20 lbs spread ovee roughly 600 sq feet. Lime is next. Then chopped leaves and straw, laid on around 4 inches thick. Likely some woodaahes/ biochar will be added over the winter.
I think I’ll keep this thread going so I can incorporate some ideas from you all next season, and so we can see how the beds perform. I already found a great new tool ( 4 tine broadfork)for $130. $130 well spent dollars. I should have snapped some photos. It just arrived. Right when I finished the beds lol.
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