Sharing success in urban soil rehab

We bought our post-war home ten years ago, and the yard was your typical small urban lot from that era: a few good mature trees,  a sorry looking cedar hedge, and a pitiful lawn.

Underneath, the soil was hard packed clay with obvious construction debris (including bits of bricks) and a soil analysis showed typical contamination for that era: some lead from gas and paint, some arsenic from pesticides. Nothing dramatic, but less than ideal.

Over the past ten years we took little steps towards bettering the soil. We removed the lawn in places where it couldn't thrive and mulched heavily with fast decomposing mulch (different kinds, from cocoa shells to rameal wood chips depending on that we could find). We overseeded with clover and hardy grasses and let "volunteer" plants join in the lawn. We left clippings in place and raked in a thin layer of homemade compost most years. We obviously stopped using chemical pesticides or fertilizers.

This morning, my husband (who knows nothing about gardening) helped me dig a new garden bed on the front lawn, and even he noticed the transformation. Gorgeous black soil, humid but not water-logged, full of organic material and earthworms. It was easy to dig, whereas I couldn't even get a showel in when we started.

Not only can our soil now grow plenty of fruiting shrubs and trees but it can also retain water a lot better, which is critical in our neighbourhood to be resilient to sudden heavy rains (which are becoming a more frequent concern in the past few decades in our local area, overloading the sewage system). We never have to water our lawn, and it's pretty much self-fertilizing thanks to the clover.

Lead will always be a small concern, but it's less problematic in soil with lots of organic content. And looking at how dramatic the soil transfornation is, this represents lots of carbon that got captured in our lawn.

Nothing we did was extraordinary: it just took time and a little bit of faith that nature would do what it takes with just a few nudges in the right direction.

And an overview of our very civilized looking front yard. Stealth wannabe permaculture!

This is the soil we started with... (Snapped on the "lawn" of my corner convenience store)