Moving from our urban homestead to a country acreage was a dream come true. The transition from healthy soil we built over 5 years to packed clay was depressing.
This post will focus on our efforts to establish a garden in a short 2 year time frame without replacing the clay with premix garden soil. Year two results were great and hopefully the new family living there will continue to benefit from the progress we made.
Wood chips
Chip drop was amazing for this project. I had wood chips dropped off at our house by the truck load! Around 10 trucks of shredded wood chips and leaves over the course of our two years in Chesapeake VA.
The starting point is a lasagna garden method, applying bucket loads to the garden area. I did lay some sections of cardboard and brown paper bags. Initially I though this step was necessary for weed control, however we layered the chips so deep the weeds seldom came through.
Gorilla cart helped a ton, as the movement by 5 gal bucket would take forever. I eventually broke down and rented a tractor from home depot to save hours of movement. A very similar model Kubota now sits in our garage and continues to get use weekly on our homestead.
If you are working a small area perhaps work with neighbors on a chip drop, or use the extra as mulch!
Leaves
After we had a thick layer of mulch on the garden area we moved to leaves. We did not have much since our property lacked mature trees. I managed to partner with a landscaper from church who delivered trailers full of bagged leaves! The final price was just fuel to deliver them!
This was critical to adding more quick decaying organic material to the garden area. Some of these bags contained shredded leaves, the majority were not. To shred and scratch all the leaves into the ground we employed our eager feathered friends! The thickness of leaves added was about double the thickness of wood chips. On average I placed 3 inches of wood chips and 6 inches of leaves.
Poultry
The secret ingredient for our clay transition. We did not till or mix the wood chips and leaves together yet. We just put the whole flock into the garden over winter. These hard workers happily shredded all the leaves and worked their wonderful poop into the mix. By spring the leaves, wood chips, and poop were all a packed mix into the clay.
*DISCLAIMER* This step does not allow for sufficient composting of any poultry poop before being in the garden. Our family was not worried about this as we mostly planted plants the grew the vegetables off the ground that season. The carrots, turnips, and greens were all placed in a raised bed with garden soil due to this.
Spring Till
Tilling is one of those controversial topics that I have not fully found a side on. In this case the soil was already heavy with very very few earth worms. We tilled multiple times over to start getting the wood chip, leaf, poop mixture good and turned. The featured picture is our end result after a few passes with our little garden tiller.
Final result was a nutrient rich mixture that we easily planted and did amazing well our final season in Virginia.
Moving Forward with Healthy Soil
I will not have future updates to this post as we moved to a larger homestead in NC following that growing season. Now our adventure with a sandy soil begins.
The progress made over those two years was great. I planned to keep rotating the birds into the garden during winter. Our meat flock, turkeys, and goats all were in pasture rotation in the front 2 acres for slow soil and pasture improvements. We now live on a homestead with sand and are eagerly learning lessons to share as different challenges arise.
I hope this post helps anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation. Sometimes you just need a starting point to jump in!