The underlying soil on most of the property was found to be clay, rock, shale & sundry debris from old buildings. Fortunately, Wayne enjoys a challenge! We obviously needed to bring home a lot of topsoil and soil amendments if we wanted to grow vegetables and flowers. Many truckloads of seaweed & rockweed were brought home from the nearby beaches for the compost bins.
Added to this were hundreds of bags of leaves.
A supply of horse manure was located and added to the growing compost
piles.
Our municipality has a state of the art recycling system. One of the
recycling byproducts is flower garden compost. This product has more 'grow
power' than any other soil amendment I have used. However, it does not add
much 'body' to the soil, so is best used mixed with the regular compost or
as a top dressing.
Gardens were added and enlarged as time and supplies
allowed. The lawns shrunk. A large piece of shrubby woods along our
driveway was tackled with chainsaws, excavators and determination. This
area is now filled with spring flowering plants, bulbs, shrubs & trees.
