I finally finished what I started last year – I filled my third rodent-proof raised bed with a mix of sieved soil, sand/coal ash, and biochar. The garlic in the first bed seems to be doing well so far, so I hope other plants will perform OK as well. In the meantime, I was left with a patch of bare land, where the sieved components were heaped over winter. I did not plan for that – I wanted to fill all three beds in the fall, before my injured back threw a stick into the spokes of that particular plan.

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So what’s best to do with a completely dead lawn? Convert it into a vegetable patch, of course. It was a matter of just a few hours with the garden fork to till it all. It is a relatively small patch, just about 11 m². And as you can see, I already harvested a full bucket of stones from it.

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This is heavy, compacted clay, so even when tilled, the lumps held together rather strongly, and despite rainy weather, they were still a bit hard. I have thrown on it all the rest of my last year’s compost pile that was not used for the potatoes. This will add a lot of organic material that should, hopefully, attract enough earthworms to break it all up over time.

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However, earthworms will need years of burrowing through it, and I would very much like to grow something in there this year already. This area was not planned for, and I already have enough legumes in my plans to not need another patch with them, so I decided to put butternut squash here. I have more than enough viable seedlings of those. However, all squash dislike compacted,  clumpy soil, so I threw four buckets of biochar on the lumps. That should lighten the soil a bit, hopefully.

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And the last step was to use the electric hoe to break up the clumps as much as possible and mix the compost, the biochar, and the clay together. Before I plant the squash plants, I will probably work some fertilizer into the soil as well.

This means that this spring, I converted 90 m² of useless lawn into arable land. Let us hope it will be productive and useful. It was a lot of work.