I look at the field – the ‘works’ end of it anyway, and I just see a long list of jobs to be done, and problems to be solved:
There is a lot of wood that needs shifting and cutting into firewood for the stove, obviously, and the remaining shed needs to be demolished and processed in a similar way.
But beyond that, there’s been an order-of-work issue that’s been puzzling me for the past few weeks:
Ali’s house foundations need digging out, roughly in the centre of that picture. There will be a lot of surplus soil, as a result of that, and my problem has been to work out how to make best use of this.
My initial idea was to use it to level out some of the land around the new house, but this means thoroughly clearing the land in question, first. In this field, that means digging about 18″ down and pulling out all the bramble and nettle roots, as well as the assorted bits of random scrap metal that are buried beneath the surface.
Well, you can imagine how that would be, at this time of year. We’d have a vast area of sloping mud, across which to access the build-site. It’s just not going to be practical, doing it that way. Really, the only way to sort the land out is to put it straight under grass when it’s cleared, and to clear small sections at a time, as we did with the first strip, last summer. But of course, it’s a pointless waste of time and money to apply levelling soil to land that you’ve only just grass-seeded, isn’t it?
So, what do we do with the soil?
I’ve been thinking this through as I’ve been hacking back brambles..
.. and carting them to the heap at the bottom of the field:
(…whilst enjoying the view..)
and finally, yesterday, the solution to the problem of what to do with the soil occurred to me.
There’s another problem, you see. Well, two to be precise.
The second problem is lack of good growing soil. We’re wanting to do a lot of vegetable growing in the future, but soil nutrition is vital up on this windy moorland, and of course we won’t take the chemical option because there’s no surer way of depleting what little soil condition we have than by doing that. So we have to constantly dig in anything suitable that might help.
The available rotted compost sufficed for the upper bed here, which will take this year’s crop of legumes, and we bought in manure for the lower bed, which is for the potatoes,
(The lower bed looks tiny from that angle looking down the slope, though it’s actually nearly 100ft²!)
but there are two more raised beds which are currently full of nothing but moorgrass, and I have nothing with which to condition them in time for this year’s crops, though I’ll have to buy something in, I think, and try my best. (It’d be good to try and get hold of some seaweed, or something..)
But for next year, I’ll have that heap of brambles etc to go at. And the quickest way of rotting those down in good time for that? Piling soil on the top.
Tada! That’s the solution to all three problems. We’ll put the soil on the brambles, and use that next year to bulk out what’s in the other two raised beds.
This means we can minimise the mud issue, by seeding the rest of the land as we clear it.
Phew! Glad that’s sorted out!
1 Comment
February 3, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I’ve got a proper planting plan now, too.