I need soil!!

[Crunchie]

I. Need. Dirt. Ok, soil. This shouldn't be so difficult, but seeing as I over-analyze everything, it's, well, driving me bonkers.

I have a small garden (6' X 8'? -ish), several itty-bitty rasied beds (2' x 2'), and several containers that I am working on planting. I need to build up the garden and smaller beds, and I need to fill in the containers.

As far as places on my property where I could dig soil....We have a compost pile that is horse manure/bedding, goat manure, and chicken manure/bedding. Most of it is pretty "fresh"--someone came in w/a backhoe and took all of it about two years ago, and it hasn't recovered very well. We live on about 60 acres, about 2/3 of it wooded. Most of my open land is pasture for the animals. I have a hard time finding someplace out in the open to dig any topsoil. Of course, I could potentially dig an unlimited amount of soil from the woods.

Any suggestions? I've been tempted to buy the 40# bags of topsoil from Lowes for $1.20 and ammend with compost or fertilizer. But how lazy is that, when I've got 60 acres that I can do what I want with right here?? Problem is I just don't have a good place to dig, it seems!! Ugh. What would y'all do?

ETA: I'm planting the usual veggie suspects. Tomatoes, squash, cukes, beans...

 

[panner123]

If you live in an area that has oaks and maple trees, you have the makings of some great soil. Take a rake and remove the leaves, from there down to the clay is some fine growing soil. Years of decomposed leaves.

 

[patandchickens]

Well, if it were me, I would buy packaged stuff for the containers, used either straight or cut no more than 50-50 with soil from the ground - I haven't had all that good luck with soil from the ground in containers. I'm sure some people have had different experiences, but that's me.

OTOH, for your garden beds, iI would just put up with not the greatest soil for a year or two as you work on gradually amending and building them up. Even not-the-greatest soil will still produce a pretty reasonable crop of all but the finickiest veggies (and flowers mostly care even less). Dig in whatever you have before you plant -- even if you have some not-really-all-that-composted-down material, you can dig that in and add some ammonium nitrate (or if you want to be organic and expensive, lots of blood meal).

This will result in your raised beds being not really all that raised, but so what. You will have to bend over a few inches more to thin your carrots. The only other virtue of the "raisedness" of raised beds is that they warm up faster in spring -- no longer an issue this year -- and that they drain well. The latter is a virtue if you are gardening in a serious year-round swamp, but actually is a DRAWBACK in most other situations b/c it means you have to water the heck out of them compared to if you were planting in ground-level beds.

In the fall, once you've taken off your last crop, dig the soil over very roughly (leave clods) -- double-dig it, if you have energy and your mineral subsoil is not too near the surface -- and then dump all the organic cr*p you can find on top of it Then mix it all together when things become workable in the spring.

This approach avoids the labor of digging and wheelbarrowing soil all around your property -- and it is amazing how far a wheelbarrow of soil does *not* go, when added to a garden bed -- and it prevents you from creating little pits that will breed mosquitoes and surprise you when you're taking a walk, and it lets you leave the native soil, and all the weed seeds it contains, out there in the fields and woods where it belongs

(Exception to above paragraph: if there's anywhere on your property you need a drainage ditch, you could dig it now and use the topsoil from it. However it will have a gajillion weed seeds and grass roots in it, so personally I would not, since I kind of like weeding but do not need to create more of it for me to do )

JMHO,

Pat