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Maybe this will lift some people's spirits because its not a garden-in-a-minute scheme and it involved more sweat and time than money. I realize clearly that its on a larger scale than most folks are able to enjoy themselves but the basics of soil building, raised beds, and doing with what you have available to you might be worthwhile to someone.
Our garden spot has been used for that purpose off and on for at least 70 years, it is on a hillside (south facing) and built on stoney ground with an almost impermeable clay layer just below the surface. The garden has been in the same place since this house was built sometime in the early 1930's. The garden was plowed annually I am told, the old fellow who built it all also dumped the manure from his work horses on it. I have neighbors who still recall all this and have told me about it.
The land the garden is on is steep; any steeper and no man in his right mind would have run a tractor on it. Back when I still had a tractor (Ford Golden Jubilee NAA) I plowed it a couple of years myself. However it was clear that with every plowing all I was doing was rolling what little top soil that remained 2 feet down the hill. At the very bottom of the garden, just before the woods begin, the soil was deep and fertile, at the top it was more like the Gobi. Around the mid-90's I gave up on it.
When we quit gardening it and let it go back to grass it occurred to me that I could terrace that hillside and build raised beds on the terraces. With a way to contain the material, I thought, I could then begin the process of building some soil with compost or whatever. So that was the plan.
Sometime around 2000 I started digging. With a mattock and shovel I terraced off three rows and three walkways. In a stair step fashion the hill was cut so that I had 3 rows each about 7 feet wide on which a 4-wide raised-bed row would be built as well as a walkway, then it dropped down as far as the hillside's slop dictated to the next row, and then to the 3rd. Each row would be 45 feet long.
Next I had to find materials to build raised beds. Rail-road ties are easy to find, cheap, and scare the hell out of me. I do not know what they use to preserve them but I do not want the roots of anything I'm going to eat touching them. Block or untreated wood wouldn't last, treated wood was out. I had not intention of building natural stone walls - stones and clay were the problem, I had no intention of bringing in more of either. As luck would have it elsewhere on this property there used to be two other houses. One, probably built in the mid 1850's and abandoned around the time of the Great Depression, had a cut stone foundation and a cut stone fireplace/chimney which had fallen years ago. These would be my stones.
Over the years I removed enough of the cut sandstone blocks to build my walls. The stones ranged in size from 12"x6"x18" to much larger (5'x12"x12"); their weights varied between 100 and probably 500 pounds each. I moved the stones by hand with a come-along and chains, ramping them into my truck and then back to the come-along and buried dead falls to move them into place. That took me 2 years.
Now with my walls in place I could go to work. I dug out the beds to a depth of 18" and removed all of the rocks. I then tilled the remaining soil in the trenches. This got me through the clay layer and broke up what clay was still in the trench. Then, a truckload at a time, I started buying manure from the local University (WVU)'s dairy farm. They clean their barns daily and mix the manure about 50/50 with bedding and then put it out in long rows (about 8' tall and 200 feet long) for a year before making them available to the public. You can pull up and take all you want, for $10 they will load your truck with a front end loader. I always pay.
It took at least 20 truck loads and another year of application, tilling, an additional application, tilling, and again before we had a soil we could plant in. That was last year. Because we had been putting the ashes from our wood burning stove on the rows for 3 years the soil was quite alkaline in the first year so we used pine bark mulch applied very heavy for the first year. The garden was magnificent.
This spring I dug all the rows by hand again. The soil I have created goes to a depth of about 3 feet. You can littler ly stick you arm into it to the elbow if you want to. There are more earthworms per cubic foot than you could count. Oh, and the stone walls turned out looking real nice too.
Below the 3 row garden the hillside was too steep for me to work. I didn't have any more stones either. So I put in 2 rows of fence poles set in concrete and planted 6 grape vines per row. That does us for grapes and we hope to get some from the vines next year. Below that, and in the original garden soil at the bottom of the garden, we planted 4 blueberry bushes. They too should bear next year for the first time.
And that's it folks. Have heart. It doesn't take a lot of money, just a lot of time and work.
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