B Beeson

Reusing/recycling mitigates the climate burden. That cost has already been incurred by the first user. Only purchasing new material adds to the Greenhouse Gas burden.

How thick are these sheet? If its normal 2 inch sheets that is, indeed, a very good price.

R. Scott's advice is sound. Isolate XPS from any exposure to UV light, and especially bugs. Can be hard to achieve 100% protection that lasts a long time underground.

XPS is eXtruded PolyStyrene. It's the same polymer as EPS - Expanded PolyStyrene, but blown up into a foamy consistency with a different process. XPS uses lots of very-bad-for-the-climate gasses as blowing agents, while EPS uses relatively inert gasses. These gasses will leak out over time, so the harm in using XPS is collective harm to the atmosphere, not a local contamination. It's bad for the climate in the same way as releasing old CFC refrigerants were.

Otherwise the polymer itself is essentially a solid form of petroleum, and, like most plastics, very toxic when burned, so it is treated with flame retardants. Now you've added two different toxic gicks to your soil. If you believe the industry propaganda, it will not break down in contact with the soil (stable for hundreds to thousands of years), but UV will degrade pretty quickly (years to decades), so keep it covered. Reading between the lines, I expect that conventional wisdom to slowly change. Firstly, XPS can be abraded by physical action into micro and nano plastic particles which will become very mobile in soil, water and bugs. Secondly, the long-term stability is mostly because nothing eats it. That will change. This will be a highly calorie rich food for the first bacteria that evolves an enzyme to break those never-before-seen-in-nature chemical bonds that currently make it a stable polymer of a natural food source (petroleum is, of course, a completely natural product that bacterial love to eat!)

Natural alternatives include expanded clay products, perlite, vermiculite, foamed glass pebbles, aerated concrete, biochar, and foamed cement to name the ones at top of mind for me.

William Bronson wrote:...
I.planted some old dried up garlic in here, but nothing came up, so I'm hedge my bets
...

As the days get longer and soil gets warmer, garlic is going dormant now. Any bulbs planted now will wait for fall: shorter days, cooler soil, more moisture. If not damaged over summer, they will pop up after a cool rain any time between late August to early October.

Waterlogged garlic can rot over the summer, damage from digging can cut the bulbs, allowing fungus to penetrate the protective skin, then rot.

Quick question:

Do they make good fishing bait?

If yes, then "...do not chop their bodies. This does not kill them and each piece becomes a new worm"  sounds like a way to make unlimited bait.

Welcome to Permies, Stacy!

Great start, keep it up. Learning what works and doesn't work is the core skill, but it takes time to make all the mistakes you need to learn from.

Have you considered making biochar from the dry deadwood, and brush? That would help with the clay soil, moderate soil acidity and improve drainage in your future garden beds. With just hand tools, a burn trench is a good choice. Have water on hand in case of escaping embers, choose a wet day during or after a rain, and especially not a windy day.

With all the trees around, you have a bounty of easily gathered leaves, and leaf mold on the forest floor. Use the leaf mold to mix into your garden soil and hugel surface. Use the leaves to keep soil covered and plants mulched. Bare exposed soil is dying soil, especially clay.

Have you had any deer showing interest in your growies?

Nynke Muller wrote:...

I am not so sure about the garlic. I have some unions (same family) planted around in my garden. The ones on a small new made bed, made from wood and compost don't do very well, while they trive in more established situations. It could be my specific situation. Somebody else maybe has experience with garlic in new beds from leaves and compost?
...

Same here in SW Virginia. I've grown garlic and elephant garlic for several years under several conditions:

A.  with plentiful compost made partly from fresh woodchips, almost no soil.
B. aged compost with wood chips, no soil.
C. in sandy loam soil heavily amended with buried kitchen waste, mulched with composted wood chips, or plain wood chips.
D. almost un-amended sandy loam soil, mulched with fresh and with aged wood chips.

In every case, older aged wood chips made better, bigger, healthier looking garlic. Fresh chips made weaker, smaller garlic, even with plentiful diluted urine to address nitrogen deficiency.

The best results are from the soil amended with kitchen waste. This area is full of worms enjoying the rich worm food. The aged compost also has good results, also full of worms. Fresher wood chips in the soil, no worms. Wood chips as surface mulch doesn't deter the worms.

So I think my experience is that worm castings are the ideal garlic substrate, and that fresh wood chips are inhospitable to worms, reducing garlic yields. I suggest trying legumes in fresher wood chip compost, but that's more of a guess, not experience.

Wood chips, as Anne suggests.

Also, is it a deep layer of gravel with perennial weeds established in and below the gravel?  I have a gravel path I made with my huge surplus of rocks and gravel from my stream floodplain alluvial soil. I find this is pretty easy to dig into with the right tool, but only when it is still moist from a rain or melting snow. I use a sturdy 4-tooth garden fork, working it in with a rocking motion to get through the gravel. Then I'm able to leverage out the tap roots of the deep rooted weeds, and sift out the roots of grasses and shallow weeds as I pry it up. By summer, everything is dry and compacted, the weed roots are well established, and they wont come out easily.

Frost heave is your friend. Do the hard work in late winter, early spring when frost heave makes the ground easy to work, and before the weeds get going. Over winter, they are putting their energy into the root system. They benefit from the frost heave, too, spreading their root networks out. Short circuit their progress by extracting their root systems with your fork. Even if some of the roots survive deep down, they will be greatly set back by your efforts.

If its just a thin layer of gravel, well.... that's not doing much good anyway. Scrape that useless stuff out with a mattock, dig down and root out the offending weeds, put down some cardboard and paper, extra thick, and cover with 12 inches of woodchips. Repeat every year or two. Harvest the perfect topsoil at the bottom the worms will make for you. Worms love cardboard. I think its the glue, made from waste animal parts, its their second favorite food (after coffee grounds).

I have one rule for gardening and homestead owning. Its a simple rule and it is valid under one specific circumstance. It definitely applies here.

Here's the rule:

Whatever the problem is, applying wood chips is the solution.

Obviously the special circumstance is that one has access to unlimited free woodchips from ChipDrop or a local arborist.

So before the big storm hit, I renewed the mulch around the house foundation, really piling it up high, thick and wide, right up to and a bit over the bottom of the siding. As it settles over the next few months, the recommended gap between the masonry foundation and wood structure will re-emerge. The gap is to prevent termites from finding an easy entry.

This idea is explored pretty thoroughly in the series of Low-Tech Magazine articles as in here:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/11/winter-is-coming-build-a-solar-powered-foot-stove/

Incorporating the DIY heating element as shown in this article:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2025/10/how-to-build-an-electric-heating-element-from-scratch/

I had grand(iose?) plans to grow lots of sweet potatoes this year. I started early in a pot on a sunny windowsill...

planted slips out to the garden area protected by a fence...

The deer LOVED this idea, the early leaves are very nutritious and tasty - perfect to help out the local deer population explosion. The fence was no barrier at all to motivated deer.

In the end, the plant in the pot survived, produced about 470 grams of tubers in a pot of about 5 liters.