Forest Garden: Poking Around in the Dirt

While Dan has been working on the outdoor kitchen cookstove, I've been working on the forest garden (you can see photos and read my planning post, here). As with all gardening projects, the first step was to grab a shovel and take a good look at the soil.

The area of the forest garden is located at a high point on our property (see link above). It is roughly triangle shaped. Contour-wise, I'm looking at this:

High and low spots in the future forest garden.

In the above photo, the yellow line represents a small, shallow ridge. This is the highest spot. The blue oval is the lowest spot, which is dish shaped. In walking the area and looking closely at the ground, I observed several things.

The ground along the ridge - no topsoil.

Trees and brush have grown here for many years. After we fenced in the pasture, the goats ate the brush, which opened up the area. Dan took out a few trees, but most of them have remained and will form our forest garden canopy layer. That means a lot of leaves are dumped on the ground every fall, yet, the top soil is pretty much washed away. 

A little farther down on the ridge the soil seemed softer, with a few bricks lying around. I started poking around with a shovel.

Sand and buried bricks.

Under the thin veneer of decayed leaves, I discovered pure sand and buried bricks. The sand looked like builders sand, and it seems this spot was a dumping ground long ago for leftover materials from a building project.

Also found, homestead relics?

Neither absence of topsoil nor sand hold water, so I'm going to have to do a lot of work on the soil here if my forest garden is going to thrive.

In the low spot, the surface soil looked much, much better:

The ground in the blue oval in the first photo - lovely black topsoil.

When I dug here, I discovered the soil looks like this:

Thick black topsoil and clay subsoil.

The topsoil is black (indicating a lot of decayed organic matter), sandy (which is typical of our cecil sandy loam topsoil), and about five to six inches deep. That was a pleasant surprise because in most places around the homestead, black topsoil (if there is any) is less than an inch deep.

What to make of this? My theory is that most of the fallen autumn leaves are washed off the little ridge in heavy rains and deposited in the low spot. That would explain the absence of topsoil on the ridge and the thick layer of black topsoil in the low area.

I found another relic while digging in the soil here.

It was buried about 6 or 7 inches down.

The other observation that is noteworthy, is that even after several inches of rain in previous days, the soil was only moist in the top three inches or so. Beneath that, it was bone dry. That surprised me too and indicates that the ground isn't getting a deep soaking, even with a lot of rain. This information tells me that our conditioning the pasture soil with a subsoiler was a good decision. For the forest garden, the subsoiler isn't feasible, so I'll need to work on other ways to deep soak the soil.

So, this is my starting point. Hopefully, over time, I can document positive changes in the soil in my forest garden. For now, I'm pulling out all the soil building strategies I can muster, and getting ready to put them to work. 

Forest Garden: Poking Around in the Dirt © Oct 2021

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com