I have a nice garden on reasonable soil, but it’s former pasture and the grass is *very* well established. Last year I put in two raised beds, filled with purchased peat moss and planting mix and grew a decent crop of stuff.

This year I want to expand, and was thinking with dread of having to go out there and dig up the soil, turn over the sod, and find the dirt underneath. You’ve saved me! I can lay down newspaper (time to start asking people to save me some), and I have a two (three?) year old bale of hay sitting in there that is just waiting to be rolled out on top of everything. In fact, last year I rolled some of it out on areas I planned to plant in future, to kill the grass and compost in place … so apparently I was on the right track.

We do have animal manure (sheep and a couple of cows) and a nice big compost pile going from last year’s barnyard waste, so with luck, we’ll be able to get those new beds in place without me needing daily visits to the chiropractor!

Thanks!

TJ

Adding in compost, organic fertilizers, and some mulch are all on my game plan. I just don’t want to disrupt the mini ecosystem too much all at once, and I would be really disappointed if my efforts at garden fertility eliminated all the random flower volunteers that popped up last year. (At one time there had been a garden there, but it was grassed in, so I had to dig out the sod last spring in order to plant. I had Johnny Jump-ups pop up all over the place. Simply lovely.)

I used to have a source for horse manure (alas, I had no garden then), but they have since given up their horses. So I’m keeping an eye out for animal inputs.

Lance - we have lovely chipmunks here, aerating away (and entertaining our indoor cats). They are great fun.

Sharon - I’ve got the ‘mulch and some soil’ on top of hard hard hard clay going in one of my beds. Didn’t produce much last year, but it has VERY happy dandelions overwintering.

Fern

“We don’t have gophers, but we do have moles. And what a blessing they are! One resident at the farm said he wanted to get more cats so that they could get rid of the moles. I explained what a loss that would be, given that the moles aerate and turn-over the soil masterfully. Also, the soil of the mole hills the make are excellent soil to put on top of our raised beds! Its already mixed, and fluffed too.
I filled several 10 gallon buckets with soil from only about 1/2 the molehills on the farm. I did not want to hog it all. Also, I make sure that there is enough soil left that their burrow entrance is covered so that I don’t expose them to predators.

You can do the same thing with gopher hills.

Moles are awesome!”

http://tribes.tribe.net/bioregionalanimism/thread/119f7075-4722-4b41-84f7-4236ebadb9fa

“The idea took a while to grow on me but I found through discussions about many aspects of permaculture, and from an animist perspective, we need to encourage life, and encourage interaction between life forms.

So, instead of digging, plant some plants that will do it for you, and mulch like the forest does, and encourage digging worms and insects. Save yourself work by delegation.

Grow a bunch of clover to help fix nitrogen and feed the deer and rabbits. They will prefer some lovely clover to anything you could be growing in your garden! Plant some alder specifically to thin every year, transport the logs to places on the rest of the land that could use swaling and butressing, and grow some fungi or something as well. Maybe a native willow or two? If you decide to grow anything, double it!!”

We’re gardening on top of a heavy, unforgiving clay, filled with round river rocks, that has us doing practically everything right in the mulch layer. We bought two tons of hay last year, and are walking back and forth with wheelbarrow loads of poultry bedding, buckets of ashes, liquid manure. When I plant spring crops, I bore a hole in the mulch down to ground level, cloche the spot for a week or two for warm-up, come back, pour in a canful of potting soil, lay out the seeds on that, pour in another canful, tamp it down flat, water lightly, and stick the cloche back in the hole. Things are that bad. On the other hand I haven’t had to wrap tons of clay around tiller tines in a long time because I don’t till this muck any more (it goes from muck to “bricks without straw” in like, two days) and we DO get crops.

So, if we want the land to give us something, we have to put something in first, like our blog author says here … one thing the soil is not, is a credit default swap.