OK. Who's MAKING Their Own Dirt?

I'm having great fun making my own organic "DIRT" from decomposed leaf mold and grass clippings. I think it's healthy for the plants. Just a logical thing that someone on another thread noticed and posted. NO one sweeps up the forest or fertilizes it. And whatever falls to the ground, STAYS on the ground and returns to the earth. So, I'm using the same concept in my garden. If a bloom falls, it goes back into the pot. Leaves break down, they become soil/dirt/whatever, and go back into the pot. I hope to start saving some money not having to buy potting mix for everything I plant. And, the potting mix has no real nutrients in it does it?

Please let me know what ya'll are doing for dirt without spending money on it. Thanks!

Linda

Does compost count? I got beaucoup and DH has to go build me more bins.......the neighbors are getting into the swing the yard looks like trash bag heaven......LOL Got the neighbor hood mom and pop contributing tater and other veggie peelings ever 2 days and 2 5 gal buckets of coffee grounds from Starbuckets every couple days......We are growing black gold here!! LOL

Now THAT'S what I'm talkin' 'bout! Way to go, Doccat5!

It's messy, but way cool!! And I've got 6 buckets of Bokashi cookin! I should have enough "juice" to do the whole yard and my fruit and nut trees too. I'm so excited!! This is fun!! And the best part is I no longer have hypertension, my dr took me off the blood pressure meds last month!! He was amazed, but gardening makes me relax, less stress and the pressure dropped dramatically. LOL I thinking about doing him a little dish garden for his office, he could putter with that, ya think? LOL

What is dirt? My understanding is that dirt is basically rock that has been ground down and although it contains minerals needed for plant life, it needs orcganic matter to create a healthy planting medium (soil/loam). So, I have been attempting to create my own soil for a large raised bed.

I currently have it filled with composting materials and will later add a fine sand to the mix to "create" soil/loam... I sure hope I'm right!

Linda, I just posted this hot pepper potting mix in a vermiculture thread: Three scoops of spent worm media (or worm casings as you prefer); four scoops of peat moss (soaked and excess moisture removed with aquarium net); one scoop of eighteen month old composted horse manure (grated fine through 1/4-inch screen); and a half scoup of coffee grounds. Using a hand trowel for a scoop, this gives me enough mixture for a flat of 18, 3-inch square peat pots.

I never purchase potting soil because i don't know where the ingredients came from. I see postings on using Milorganite or any of the hundreds of other brands of potting soil that utilize sewage sludge. I have made this material in bulk, and I can tell you there is no place in the vegetable garden suitable for potting soil made with sewage sludge. There are also brands of compost which contain additions of sewage sludge as well. EPA regulates the land application of sewage sludge under 40 CFR Part 503, and it is intended for crops other than those directly consumed by humans. If you cultivate your rose bushes, etc., just be carefull. Kids, cats and dogs should be kept away.

I'm a new gardened to composting and want to know if you dig it into the garden or just spread it on the surface around plants and let it do its own thing
Jo Ann

Jo Ann, I always wondered that myself, and I guess the answer is...yes! For new gardens it's a good idea to mix it in with the soil. For gardens where plants are already established, just kind of carefully mix it into the top couple of inches (I use my hands). You don't want to injure any roots. I've found that plants are very appreciative of whatever organic matter you can add to the soil. I just purchased a small shredder/chipper (McCulloch 14 HP electric) and my plan is to chop up all the little sticks and leaves in my yard into mulch and use it as both mulch in my garden and add it to the compost pile. Mix compost into the soil, then mulch on top (which will turn to compost in a year or so anyway!). Just relax and experiment!

I asked three different people and got three different replies. My other daughter ,spreads compost on the ground and mulches over it.
My organic farm girlfriend spreads it on beds but plows it into the vedgtable field where there are no roots. I'm going to do the carefull spreading. The garden was abandond two years ago before we bought the house last July so I want to compost everywhere I can and plant when the nurseries send them.
thanks Jo Ann

That's a good way to go Jo Ann. Are you doing wide row, raise beds? The reason I ask, is you can spread your compost now, but you want to get something in there to keep down weed seeds, so I would suggest over planting it with annual rye grass. This grass dies in off in the winter. But it germinates fast, holds the soil in place, and smothers out the weed seeds. When your plants arrive you can just move the grass super short and plant. Leave the clippings as a mulch and a extra little nitrogen boost. Makes weeding a lot less of a chore. :) Good luck, you are going to have so much fun with this!!!

no wide row planting for me, just established beds. My friend Carol has an organic vedg garden and plows compost in spring. Fabulous tomatoes.

That's quite a slope, to plant in ge1836. Or is the picture a bit crooked? If you spread you compost in there and add the rye, you should have great crops. Since you've got trees and other shrubbery in there, you may have to side dress with fertilizer a bit more often. As the tree roots will compete for the nutrients. Just figure out on paper what you're going to put where and do factor in the shade from the trees. Actually, you could divide that area into quarters and leave room in the middle for a couple of walkways so you could more easily tend all your crops. Just build those quarters up a bit and you got a raised bed! LOL Nobody said they have to be square, ya know. You work with what you have!

I get it now and will do.

sort of related to soil. The new gardens are in a clay vaine that goes from Lake Ontario to Pensylvainia and this property is part of it. I have never had plants heave out of the ground. Former garden was "blowsand" one extreem to the other.
My perennials planted last fall had raised themselves an inch out of the ground and daylilies were completely out,dead of course.

Hmm, sound like you need raised beds to help prevent that. Plus adding lots of organic material to all your beds always makes a big difference. If you understand the dynamics of your area, it helps tremendously to be able to spot fix your problem areas. That takes time, but it can be done with great results!

thanks for the info.I have been compost spreading this AM .Friend Carol the organic gardener has extra compost I'll pick up this week,it'will take some time to get the garden going again. I am not patient so this is a good dicipline for me.

Agreed, but it teaches you patience without raising your blood pressure :)

gotta luv it

Huh, I didn't realize that raised beds helped with heaving. I'm facing the same problem, old beds that have been neglected for a long time. I'm not patient, either! I just figure that doing a little at a time over time will ultimately pay back in big rewards...but it's so hard not to have those magazine-perfect beds.

Yeah, but they cheat and air brush..........LOL Nature is NOT that perfect......

Ha, thanks, that's good to remember!

drumlin...after reading your comment on the recently purchased McCulloch 14 HP electric shreader I went back to my shed to finish a multi-month project of grinding up the rest of my tomato vines. I purchased one of the machines last fall for grinding up corn stalks, bean and tomato vines. Not Pleased! Would like to hear what your take is.

Welll...I've only used mine for about 15 minutes so far, and I've only used it on stiff leaves and twigs. So far so good, but in reading reviews on Amazon.com I see that grinding anything that's moist is problematic. Does yours stall when you try to feed in the vegy waste?

"It's not dirt, it's soil!" the professional Island guy gardener once said to me. Funny how we remember little comments, hey?

And, yes, the magazines come in with truckloads of pots of flowers from the nursery for the shoot. Or the rich design and build a house just to get the house featured by a magazine. I knew a nurseryman once who was doing the yard for a house. And yes, I saw the house was in a magazine a bit later. The yard must've cost many, many thousands of dollars!

There's one way of gardening that's only mulching. Ruth Stout wrote a book long ago about "Just pull back the mulch a little to plant...

I see stuff everywhere that I want to bring home for mulch and composting. Especially on the sides of the roads when they mow, must be the richest soil anywhere!

One thing, your mulch will disappear as it rots. You always need more!

drumlin...literally gave up on corn stalks. Green bean and tomato vines were about alike. Grind ten minutes and stall. Took ten minutes to clean the throat out and wait until rest clicked before I could start again. After about three cycles (grind/clean/grind/clean/grind/clean), I had to remove the three spring nobs and clean out the debris that clogged under the cutter blade spindel. Huge pain getting those spring loaded screws back on and screwed down tight. Tried both green and dried vines...same results. I even took the hood off with the three-one way screws...that was some trick...and never put it back on. I don't have any large trees so I couldn't say how it works on leaves, but in my openion this machine was not intended for the garden waste. Considering writing a review for Amazon, but wanted to see if anyone else was experiencing the same kind of problems, or knew of neat little tricks to get this thing to work on garden waste.

Yikes! Sounds awful! I have to say that I've had much better luck feeding things into the "branch" opening at the side than the top opening. Mine came with a paddle-looking thing that you're supposed to use to push stuff into the top! I really haven't tried anything that might get wrapped around the blade, which is what sounds like happened to you. I'm kind of surprised it didn't like nice, straight forward corn stalks. As you probably saw on Amazon, the reviews ran the whole range. I suppose it just depends on your situation. I only have 1/3 of an acre, and it's all mostly leaves and small twigs and branches. I wouldn't even attempt to force wet leaves into it after reading the reviews. I'm still hopeful that I can at least clean my yard and use the waste for mulch/compost. I'll let you know after this weekend!!

Here veggie scraps either go to the bunnies or worms; if the worm bins are full it goes straight to the compost pile.

"It's not rot, it's decomp!" :-)

Yay! I visited my aunt, who is not a gardener at all, and watching her throw out veggie scraps made me want to hurl myself at the garbage can! I used to just throw everything into a big compost pile, but now that I have such a small yard, and close neighbors, I want to attempt to reduce the pile somewhat. I'll still throw un-mulchable scraps in there.

Very funny drumlin. I suffer from the same phobia...I see a banana peeling and I want to grab it before it gets tossed into some garbage pail. Sometimes I just flat creep myself out!

Most small neighborhood mom and pop restrurants will gladly provide you with a five gallon bucket full of left over food daily. Hey they have to pay to haul it to the landfill. Meat is hardly ever sent back so the mix will be acceptable. It must be placed into the pile and not left on the edges to discourage critter actions. This only works if you swing by and pick it up promptly as promised.

On the coffee grounds hunt.........Those paper filters decompose. I put them in the pile with no concerns. Once in awhile one shows or gets away. That is however not a problem with just a little care on your part.

My rule of thumb............if it rots its just short of being compost. Rule two....if it's to much to bury in an hour or so it's to much.

Ha, good words to live by! I might try to get up the nerve to ask a couple of restaurants if they would mind giving me their scraps. People around here are a little, oh, how shall I put it, indifferent to the rest of the world??!!! I think my best bet would be to hit them with one-time requests...."Hey, great pizza, I'll tell all the neighbors....if you give me all your pepper and mushroom scraps, no questions asked!"

Thought I'd add a bit on chipper/shredders. I don't have the McCulloch shredder..the one I got is the Harbor Freight 2.5hp unit..the yellow one. It was on sale for $100 at the time and couldn't pass it up. We have two huge oaks and my mom has another 5. After a very windy winter here..we had a ton of limbs and I also did some trimming of some low limbs that were whacking me in the head when I was mowing. I shredded three full 55 gallon trash cans worth of chips from both the old debris and the new cut limbs without a hitch. I've also run quite a few leaves and brush through mine and it works well, although it takes some time to feed it all through.

It has one main knob that opens the blade chamber so clean out is easy. It also has a main nut that holds the blade plate on that needs to be tightened occasionally with the supplied wrench or a rachet. I also liked the push stick that it came with as it allows you to kind of move stuff around that is stuck without stopping and starting constantly. It's also not nearly as loud as a gas-powered unit and you can still carry on a conversation while it's running. It also weighs around 50-60lbs so it was easy to load in my truck and take to mom's for her stuff.

It's made a huge difference in maintaining the yard and the chips are quite small and suitable for any use or to just go into the compost bin and compost twice as fast. I'm using some of them to border an area that I don't want weeds in and I figure they will suck the nitrogen from the weeds fairly well.

Anyway..that's my thoughts on my chipper/shredder.

Wolflrv, good to know, and very encouraging. I think I'll like mine once I have the time to actually use it. You made a very interesting comment....I'm only now finding out that wood mulch pulls nitrogen from the ground, and therefore the plants. Do you add anything to balance that?

Wood mulch or anything else that lays on the ground does not draw nitrogen from the soil in any amount that hurts any growth. Mulch remains mulch until it rots and becomes compost. This mini maybe quarter inch thick rotting area between the surface of the soil and the other unchanged mulch materials is 24/7 making a small amount of excellent compost. That rotting moves onto and into humus and humus to humic acids. All these things are the value of any mulch in addition to maintaining a ground cover to give you better moisture retention and weed prevention.

Wood mulch just remains mulch longer than for instance leaves that rot much faster.

This of course is not true if you till in lots of wood chips which will tie up your natural soil biology including the stoppage of or inability of your natural biology to do so much work all at the time of the additions. This is what most refer to as tying up the nitrogen. More than just nitrogen gets tied up. That is just what we recognize the easiest.

In nature a tree on the ground is just a big chip of wood. Given time it will rot in place without harming a thing under it. The rotting provides the long term food and other trace minerals to the spot it is covering while still recognized as a fallen tree.

This message was edited Apr 15, 2008 10:14 AM

Docgipe, thanks for that explanation, makes sense. There was an article on Dave's recently about mulch that mentioned that wood mulch reduces nitrogen, but you make a very valid point...Nature knows what she's doing, and much of the lovely natural soil is just wood! So, I guess I won't worry too much about using the small bits of sticks as mulch. Thanks!

Ok..Docgipe..now you have me worried...LOL! The way I've heard it is that, you need to compost your wood chips for a few seasons before applying them to beds and such or it will suck the nitrogen, which would in effect kill the weeds, but also probably other good things growing in the beds. The reason I'm questioning is because I'm banking on that being the case, so that it will kill anything that tries to grow in this small channel I have to fill between a fence and my concrete driveway border. It's about 3 inches wide and about 3 inches deep. The chips will make a nice looking fill instead of just some Quickcrete and I've been trying to use Roundup in the area but it's been way too much work and still requires a lot of weed pulling. Plus I have good beds just on the other side of the fence and the Roundup makes me nervous.

Also while I'm at it...if that is the case, I have some ornamental pear trees that shoot sprouts faster than I can mow them down, and I'm thinking about applying some of those fresh chips around the tree bases to keep that from happening too...or will that kill out my trees? I do know not to get them right up to the trunk.

Thanks in advance, for any thoughts.

Application of wood products including paper to or on beds is one act that is OK at any time and within reason to any debth. Mulch does not cause any problem unless it is tilled into the soil before it is completely rotted.

Mixing wood or paper that has not been completely composted into the volume of the growing medim is not acceptable. Very small amounts that may accidently get into the soil is of no major concern.

I have developed 1 1/2 acres of raised beds with poor top soil about 10" thick to raised beds of rich soil over 24" thick. All of this with the materials in our valley free. I have over 10 years acomplished this bed by bed. I use lots of mushroom compost (sawdust and horse manure) mixed with the thin loam on the soil over our glacial till. This will sit for a year and have compost, manure, sandy loam, or even clay added to it over the year to accomplish the mix I want. I use lots of wood chips, pine needles, and bark to provide structure to the soil. Every time I use sawdust or wood chips I add an equal parts of cow manure. After cooking this mix for a yr I plant trees, shrubs, and other woody plants. Usually planting some annual into the mix to see results. If nitrogen deprived (yellow tinge) to leaf I delay any plantings of pereinals.
This photo is of the soil in a 6000 sq ft bed I am building in a woodland area. Year one is native top soil mixed (rototiller) with mushroom compost with added manure. This sat one year with only a few plants added (elderberry, and witchazel). This was heavily irrigated throughout the summer to allow composting. Now this year sandy loam and Manure will be top dressed and mixed in. Now it is ready to plant.

Wow! You have the bed science down to a good program that works. I have never done one in that much shade.