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.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
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.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
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.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
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.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
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.
Ouch! My back hurts just looking at all that -- it sure was a lot of work -- may it prove fruitful!
That looks marvelous!
Keep up the good work.
and keep up with the resting between bouts
Looks nice. I think my cousin Ed would approve.
https://archive.org/details/the-vegetable-gardeners-container-bible-how-to-grow-a-bounty-of-food-in-pots-edward-smith/The%20Vegetable%20Gardener%27s%20Container%20Bible%3B%20How%20to%20Grow%20a%20Bounty%20of%20Food%20in%20Pots%20-%20Edward%20Smith/
All our beds are at least somewhat raised, as our soil is clay like yours. While the top two thirds or so have a reasonable depth of topsoil, I think because of the length of time it’s been garden the bottom third was added to the garden later and only has about four inches before you hit the clay pan. One way we deal with this is by letting dock and dandelion grow on the paths, their roots are excellent at breaking up the subsoil allowing the beds either side to actually drain; they aren’t allowed to seed, but that just makes the roots go deeper as the get bigger and bigger.
@jazzlet, 10 cm of topsoil sounds about right for the natural state of my garden. After that is at most about 20-30 cm of light brown/ochre clay, and below it is the crumbling phyllite bedrock in some places already. When digging the foundation for my workshop, the excavator had to dig below the freeze-depth, which here is about 90 cm. The last 10 cm or so, he was essentially scraping the rock. When digging the hole for my septic tank (about 2 m), it was a bit better, but still, it was mostly stones after about a meter.
I do not worry much about dandelions going to seed in my garden. I am surrounded by huge meadows that are full of dandelions whose seeds are blown everywhere. Even if none in my garden went to seed, wind would blow thousands of them in from outside anyway, so why bother? Trying to break up the clay naturally a bit is one of the reasons for trying out alfalfa this year, even though I do not have any use for it per se.