Creating Healthy Soil

Yesterday I finally finished "Gaia's Garden", by Toby Hemenway. The book is so full of information and ideas that by the end  the reader feels both energized and overwhelmed. I can see clearly in my mind how my property will look once it has become a mature food forest, full of fruit trees and beautiful native shrubs and berry bushes, but then I look out the window I'm quickly reminded that my future yard couldn't be more dichotomous to what actually exists, a barren slope of hard packed hydrophobic dirt and decomposed granite, a place where only the most stubborn wild mustard plant can survive. Thankfully Hemenway provides, in the last chapter, some advice on where to start, he is sympathetic to those of us just starting the path to a permacultural paradise, as only someone who's been there can be. He confides to the reader that it won't happen overnight, and that there will be failures along the way, and shares that the best way to begin is to look for a place in your yard that is sheltered from nature's extremes, in our yard that would mean the blisteringly hot sun and high winds known as Santa Ana. He also advises to start small, and close to your back door. In the beginning there is a lot of work to put in, and if you have to traipse all the way across your yard then your first project is more likely to fail, start somewhere you're likely to pass most every day.

Now a note about me, I like to try things for myself. If I see a recipe that I think looks good, I make it, a craft that I think would be fun, I do it. I'm not usually satisfied by just knowing about something and assuming that it works the way someone else has said it will. Mostly because I want to prove that I can accomplish the task, and also a bit that I know some things are not quite as advertised. Either way, I set the book down and immediately set out to prove that I could turn a particularly terrible section of my yard into a garden. Behind our barn there is a flat section of hard packed dirt and decomposed granite. As a location it would be perfect for a kitchen garden, as a potential garden site, it literally couldn't be worse; the dirt is so hard that it could be confused for poorly poured concrete. Water pools on the surface of the dirt and rolls away without even thinking for a second of soaking in. It would be foolish for me to think I could take a shovel and dig more than an inch down without throwing down my broken shovel in a litany of curses. But this is where Hemenway suggest I start, in a sheltered area near the home, so I decide to deploy one of the tools he describes in the book, sheet mulching. Now I'll start by saying this, while I want to succeed and also to prove that I can create an oasis out of this horrible section of packed granite, I don't, however, want to go to the store on Sunday morning, so in true stubborn Michele fashion I used only those items I already had on hand. I realize that this means my experiment may not work as well, but I've bolstered myself with a quote directly from Gaia's Garden, "Overall, doing an imperfect something is better than doing a perfect nothing" and with this guiding me I set out with my shovel, gloves and wheelbarrow. As we only just recently moved I have an over abundance of empty cardboard boxes, this is one item that seems to make it's way into most blogs about sheet mulching and so I sat down peeled off the tape and labels and used that as the base of my garden. It was great to have a clear visual marker as to the size and shape that my garden would take,but also the cardboard will hold moisture and as it breaks down will help to add organic material to the dirt below it.

As you can see the area I'm working with is as dry and un-garden-like as possible. This addition of cardboard initially made it look more like an illegal dump site than a garden, but I wasn't deterred. As I've mentioned in a previous post Ramona, Permaulture, and Hugelculture, I have a surplus of horse manure lying around my property, another person would view this as a nuisance, but I see it as a valuable resource, one that I can shuttle from here to there, and one that I can use for free (I know not many people have this and I view my manure ownership as quite fortuitous). 

Two very full wheelbarrow loads of manure later and my little garden plot was well on it's way to looking, at least marginally more like a garden. The manure was about 2 inches deep across the surface of the cardboard, and as it had been lying around collecting weed seeds I decided to ad a layer on top of semi weed seed suppressing material. 

I'm the worst grocery shopper in the world, and I've always hated that stores send me ads in the mail that I don't even look at much less use, what a waste of paper. I hate wasting a resource, so imagine how happy I was to re -purpose those ridiculous store adds, and especially happy that they will forever be sandwiched between a layer of manure and dirt, I mean could there be more fitting an end for them? Now that I had this layer in place, and thoroughly wetted down; it was slightly breezy when I was working on this which was great for me, but horrible when needing to keep sheets of paper flat on my mound of horse poop. The next step was to put a layer of soil on top of this.

I did run into a slight snag at this point. In our back yard there are 2 raised bed planters. They are full of dirt but no plants. I figured that I would steal the dirt from one of these beds in order to compete my garden experiment. Unfortunately this "dirt" was less soil and more like an old wood ash pile. Half way though my first wheelbarrow full of the stuff and it turned powdery and white with little bits of charcoal. Not that it was entirely ash, there was a bit of dirt mixed in with it, but this dirt was also powdery and clearly unable to hold moisture. At this point I considered going to the store and bringing home some nice new garden mix, but then I reminded myself that imperfect is ok, and that I had this resource on my property all it needed was for me to make it into something useful. I added 2 full wheelbarrow loads of this onto the top of my mound and smoothed it out. No matter what the materials, it was definitely looking more like a garden than it did when I started, all that was left now was to plant it. Now this garden bed isn't ready to produce great fruits and vegetables, and that wasn't the purpose of this experiment, if you remember my goal is to turn this patch of hard unusable dirt into a gloriously loamy patch of garden soil. My final step was to sow seed onto the bed. I carefully chose what seed to add, and I decided to go with Sunn Hemp, a legume that adds nitrogen to the soil, has a root system that will tolerate dry conditions and also creates a bulk of green stalks - perfect for adding organic material to a garden bed in the making. 

Due to the horrible nature of the soil I was working with I did decide to use half a bag of organic garden compost purchased from the store, but only because I was concerned nothing would germinate in the ashes that I had used (and the bag was sitting right there). I mixed in a few handfulls of seed directly into the compost mix in my wheelbarrow, this way there was a good chance the seed would be evenly distributed and I spread it out across the top of my lovely sheet mulched square. 

Obviously I won't know if my morning's work was successful for a week or two, but I will say that the pile I created holds water much better that the surrounding area and that I'm very hopeful that when it's time to plant next year's tomatoes they will have a nice , healthy plot of soil that I can sink them into. If not, well, we'll just have to do a second round of sheet mulching, maybe with an addition of some red wigglers; only time will tell.