You ever see that film Dune? :P
The soil in the garden is almost pure clay, having been under tarmac and paving for at least 30 years and a few inches of concrete for 20 years or more - it was originally put there by glacias, the clay. Beneath it is sand and sandstone. To cheaply restore organic mass to the soil and allow it to drain, I scored these gigantic bags of sawdust from Hews Gray for all of 3 english pounds - this much premulched bark would be around 90.
It was applied when raining to damp it down and will be rotovated in when I recover from the last week.
Goggles and dust mask to keep all the fine stuff out my mouth and eyes - itchy.
The dust may drive the pH acidic, but lime has also been added to flocculate the clay and that will drive the pH the other way, so the two will even out.
The ground has already been rotovated with composting accelerator and chicken manure. The manure will supply nitrogen to the bacteria and fungi that will attack the wood dust - both these two need the nitrogen to synthesize amino acids, which then make the proteins and enzymes they use for digesting carbon sources, in this case the wood dust. Over the next few months, the soil should warm up as the wood is composted in situ, until I'm ready to seed a lawn - like a gigantic steaming compost heap. I went for chicken manure as it'd supply more of the essential trace elements - moly, copper and such - than pure ammonia based feeds. It comes as hard, dry, mechanically compacted pellets. The smell in the bucket is bad, but disappears as it's rotovated. Chicken manure is also cheap for the quantity of nitrogen and trace elements it contains, real cheap.
Need to be very careful and patient making pH changes given the scale of the neutralizations and buffering taking place - it will easily take weeks for the changes to start, maybe months to a year for the full effects to be seen
20kg of lime (only 1 or 2kg used so far) ~7.99
Compost accelerator ~2.99 (Carr garden centre)
Sawdust 3 pounds (for all of it, Carr garden centre)
Chicken manure 5.99 a pack, one used so far (Carr garden centre)
Total, not a lot at all
ooh, most intriguing. What's the plan?
ReplyDeleteunfortunately, i haven't been running the blog from when I started doing the garden over. in the last week, I took down the trelis, put all that render up, built the curved wall around the tree and levelled the soil with the rotovator. the garden will soon have a decked area, a lawn planted (later in the year when the soil has been tilled a few more times), the walls will be reskimmed with render to a finish coat and then airless sprayed white. i'll then be moving through the house redoing each room in there. if enough people were interested, I could upload the rest of the images from before now, featuring some heavy duty gardening, a cement mixer and rotovator. stay tuned for daily updates
ReplyDeleteYou should set a camera up and take a photo every day to create a stop motion animation thingy... :-)
ReplyDeleteill add some videos of the more excting stuff. stop motion would be good. before starting a bought a laser tape measure, measured the entire place to the mm and put it through google sketchup. i was also taking photos of the sun's position throughout the day every month so I could see exactly where the shadows would lie in the garden. if you'd seen the garden two weeks ago (which I do have pictures of), it looked like jurassic park. i found some frogs, no raptors, yet - if there's anything jurassic park taught is, it's that raptors are well smart and can open doors. i've added the googlesketchup screen shot for your perusal, i noticed you like design and illustration so thought it might appeal. the garden will of coarse have more in it than just grass and decking, but the plan is more for working out measurements at the moment
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