B Beeson

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.

Nancy Reading wrote:I believe it is a tender perennial - so won't take a frost. I don't know how cool it will tolerate.... My house is pretty cold in winter; especially on the windowsills as we don't yet have full double glazing.

At your latitude, with your cool wet winter climate, basil will struggle, and suffer from fungal disease. It greatly prefers warm+dry+sunny. Best case, you keep it alive through the winter, and get a head start on a vigorous plant in late spring when it will finally gets the longer daylight it needs.

Grow lights will help, warm and dry helps with the fungus, maybe near the woodstove? And pick off any suspect leaves to keep the fungus at bay.

Looks like chert, common in sedimentary rocks. Chert is primarily  composed of a type of quartz.

Does it scratch glass?

If yes, could be quartz (and therefore chert)

If no, something softer, like dolomite or limestone is possible.

Either way, the purple color could be a result of iron or some other metal oxide, as mentioned by Burra. Doesn't look like fluorite, spodumene or the other exotic minerals. These are not found in Missouri.

But.....

Google says the state gemstone of Missouri is mozarkite! A colorful variety of chert/flint/jasper. Can be polished real pretty, makes good arrowheads, found west of Lake of the Ozarks.

I think that is the answer.

I'm endorsing Phil's suggestion of paper/cardboard plus deep mulch.

But that is just the opening salvo in a long war. Your enemy wins a battle when you allow photosynthesis to replenish the energy reserves in the rhizomes. That energy is spent growing new rhizomes to spread out, and new leafy parts to harvest more light. You win a battle when you dig up rhizomes, and when you cut off the leafy parts as soon as they appear.

Deep mulch helps immensely because it forces the deep rhizomes to grow farther up before reaching the light, and it will colonize the deeper parts of the mulch instead of the hard ground. Rhizomes are very easy to pull out of the mulch, so you don't have to work so hard as you do in the video. You don't have to get the deepest roots out, but it shortens the war. With deep mulch the hard soil will be softer and easier to dig to get the last, deepest parts out.

A complementary tactic is to establish a barrier around cleared areas to block rhizomes from penetrating into the cleared area. Cardboard installed vertically in a slit trench can work, but will need replacing frequently. Sheet metal is a good choice for longer term, and very useful once you've cleared to the edge of your planned bed. Tilt the vertical barrier slightly inwards. The rhizomes will try to grow over the vertical barrier making it easy to pull them out before they make it over. Whereas the horizontal barrier alone allows the roots to encroach underneath.

Obviously, constant vigilance is the key factor. I have 2 year old beds that are completely clear, only requiring policing of the perimeter, and one year old beds that I'm still working on. With a garden fork, the roots are easy to pry out mostly whole, instead of chopping them into smaller pieces with a hoe or shovel. Smaller pieces just grow twice as fast as the original!

I have a 3 year old bed that I neglected, and the rhizomes are everywhere, but now clearing is pretty easy. The broken down deep mulch of leaves and wood chips has turned into fabulous soil that is full of earthworms and worm castings, and the rhizomes are easy to pull. I just pull back the top layer of chips, save the best soil underneath for the growing beds, fork out the rhizomes, lay down new cardboard, put the old wood chips back  to cover the cardboard and replenish with more chips and leaves to make it deep enough. With the summer heat, deeper is better, especially in the walkways. I can mound up the beds a bit, cover with 10-20 cm of good compost - its ready for transplanting. The walkways get 20-30 cm. This makes them safer to walk on as wet cardboard or paper with a thin layer of mulch on top can get very slippery, and hard rainfalls have a deep reservoir to soak into.