Cody Crumrine

Update!

Well.. I don't have a wood chipper (will need to line up borrowing one sometime. In fact I know someone who's got one, but not a trailer that can haul it) but I was determined to find a better source of planting medium.

Not sure why this wasn't more obvious to me, but when we cleared to build we cut up a lot of firewood. Yesterday, as I walked by the remains of that wood pile, the lightbulb came on. I was walking past year old piles of bark and sawdust! I'm sure it's not as close to "soil" as it will be in another year or two, but it's something! Here's a photo of a load of that added to a row:



I can plant in that. That will work. The big pieces of bark sit on top and dominate the picture, but it's mostly comprised of much smaller particles.

Thanks all for the tips and encouraging me to find a better source.

Bryant RedHawk wrote:why not just garden where you found that "good soil" instead of removing it to another space?

Light mostly. That area is heavily wooded. Basically, everywhere we left the sod we also left the trees. : ) And we've already cleared a lot... I'd like to avoid clearing further for the sake of my garden plot. If I can.

Aaron M Armstrong wrote:Your gut is right about it feeling "unsustainable", but I applaud your efforts!

Yeah... I guess my problem is patience. I've been hung up on "how do I plant a garden this year not next year." Which I guess leads me to be a bit short sighted.
^ As I right that I realize it's probably the world's oldest excuse for bad growing practices. Prioritizing "right now" is pretty much the definition of unsustainable isn't it... : )

O. Donnelly wrote:What did the contractor do with the topsoil?  Probably sold it. Really sad that they did that...

Actually my father in law did most of the clearing (he owns some heavy equipment, and we were thankful not to rent it.) Most of it sat in piles for ~ year and then were used for fill or leveling around the house. We did actually try to save the best piles and spread them on the garden. I think the problem is that you hit clay very shallow here, so what I got from those piles was some good topsoil mixed with a lot of clay.

jars lyfe wrote:It will curd up on top, drop sediment to the bottom and the middle yellowish layer is our serum! Extracting is tricky, you can scoop out the curds (eat them, feed them to chickens, make cheese, YouTube it) and sieve out the middle layer.

So I haven't intentionally cultivated EMs (yet) but we do make yogurt, and the serum you describe sounds a lot like whey (yellowish liquid, left over after we strain it). Since you're talking specifically about LAB, what you're making is probably a little closer to Sour Cream than yogurt, and has the advantage of starting with the IMOs that live in your air, but I'm curious now if there might be garden uses for whey. We usually just cook with it.

TLDR: Had bad soil. Digging some up from the woods. Good idea? Bad idea? Share your thoughts.

Let me start by saying I did not know much about permaculture when we built our home (~2 years ago now). We built in the middle of the woods, which I love, and I took advice from friends / family / contractors who have owned or worked on land in this area on how to to do it. Part of that was clearing and removing absolutely all the topsoil around the house in a pretty large area. I wish I'd known to leave at least an area for my garden untouched, but I hadn't even planned where I'd put the garden at the time (we hadn't planned much : /). So last year when I put our garden in, this is the terrain I had to work with.



Not bad if you're just going to harrow it and plant grass (which we did for quite a bit of it) but rough start for a garden. By that time I was pretty convinced on the "no till" idea, and wanted to embrace it. "But I can't start with this" I thought. So I tilled it, and mounded up some raised rows thinking "I'll add compost every year, and this will be the only time I till". Our garden grew okay, with the exception of root vegetables (carrots, beets, onions... none fared well). But here I am this year, wanting to plant, and this is the state of those rows now.



Not the best picture, but you can see the dry cracked (rocky) ground. It's pretty much clay, and quite solid (I'm sure by my previous year's tilling helped it get this compacted). "I can't plant in this!" I said. And I I didn't want to til it again and compound the problem, so I began to spread everything organic I could find on top. Old hay, compost, grass clippings... But we don't actually produce enough "kitchen scrap" compost in a year to cover all the rows, and mulching is something I should have been doing all last year... it doesn't give me much I can plant in now.

So my next "great idea" was to try harvesting muck from one of the little streams that runs nearby. It's a fairly healthy stream, fed by a little spring on our neighbors farm, and the mud doesn't have any funky smell. I thought "surely this is full of good organic matter." Well.. it may be, but it's so wet that I still have the same structure issue. I added a bucket's worth of it to the end of one row, and here's how it looked the next day.



: / Something tells me that won't be great for planting either.

So there I was, wishing that we hadn't cleared away all the topsoil... when I realized that it was still there. Not where I was trying to build a garden... but right over there in the woods.



I headed into the forest with a rake, shovel, hoe and pitchfork and set to work seeing what I could find. I pulled away the turf with the hoe, and what I found...



Looked a heck of a lot more like garden soil than what was in my garden. So I started a repeating process of:
- strip away turf
- break up what I find with the hoe
- dig it out until I hit too much rock or clay (which happens pretty quickly... making this a slow process)
- take wheelbarrow loads over to my garden



So... this looks better anyway. At least it's something I can put seeds in, and seems like it will both have better drainage & better moisture retention than my clay... And hopefully comes with far more organic matter already incorporated.  I'm hoping this gets me on track with a decent base, and that if I continue to mulch around veggies throughout the year, plant cover crops in the fall, and amend with compost in the spring, I can build up some nice soil over time.

Here's a picture of two rows worth of added "forest soil". (The darker one from just before the picture was taken. The lighter (dryer) from a day earlier.)



My concerns are:
- Am I wrong about the richness of the organic matter in this late-stage succession soil? Is it actually more "used up" than I've assumed?
- Am I going to get unwanted volunteers from this in the garden? (not that I don't anyway)
- This feels unsustainable... Not only is it a ton of work (this is so much later than I like to get most of my garden in...) but it gives the illusion of being "no input" (I just used what was here!) when actually the "input" is just from "over there in the woods", so I'm hoping this can be a "one time kick-start".

I may know more about permaculture than I did 2 years ago, but I still know very little. I'm reading/experimenting all I can, so I post to say "here's what I'm trying!" for your entertainment and would love any advice folks have to share.

To throw my little voice in:

A lot of the reason we like to buy organic is so that we can have confidence in our food and how it was grown/raised. Certified Organic is a way to have the confidence about a business far to away for you to know anything about. Someone's made it their job to check in on that.

Sometimes buying local can satisfy the same need for us. The milk we buy is not Certified Organic, and I bet it couldn't be without changes to their methods. Still, the store is on the farm. We can see the cows, we can see the scale of the operation, we can see how they work, and there are a lot of things we don't like about the dairy business that we don't see going on there. So we can have some confidence.

Price comes in to play to. If we could do all Organic all the time we'd love to, but sometimes it does demand a higher price (which can be a big difference or a tiny one depending on the product. A lot of our canned goods, for example, are priced nearly the same as their non-organic counterparts.) When our kids first start moving from breast milk to cows milk, we buy the Certified Organic whole milk from the grocery (not local, much pricier.) For the rest of us, it's the local milk. It's not 100% organic, but it's a long shot better than the store brand.

Our bodies can handle a certain amount of things that don't belong... but only so much. It's like the drain on a sink: it can only drain so fast, so if you're putting more in than it can handle you're going to run into trouble. So our food choices are often centered around "doing the best we reasonably can". Sometime local food, even if it's not organic, fits that goal nicely.

You can pay attention to this property on a weekly, not a daily, basis. I.e., you are NOT going to run a CSA box scheme.

I'm no expert on profiting from land (have lived on our land 3 months, so we're pretty new to it) but when I read that line I couldn't help thinking: "Do you know anyone who does have the time/desire to run a CSA?" Seems like you've got land that you don't have time to use, maybe some one around you has time and no land. You could rent it out or work out some kind of profit share.

Also, to get into growing yourself with minimal time investment, look for advice one low-maintenance "plant it and forget it" crops. Summer squash come to mind...

Travis,

Thanks for the wealth of info! The pictures really help show the difference. The circle cut seems to really help with diversity. When you cut, do you leave the tops there to help shield new seedlings? Or do you clear all of the wood out?

I'll try to get some pictures of mine up today or tomorrow, but your before pictures do seem very similar, so I think you have the right impression of our land.

Re: the Hemlock, they actually aren't too populous. We find them in dense matches, most of which are near a stream. They're noticeable because we don't have many evergreens (we have a couple other pines... much less common, and I'm not sure exactly which species), but our trees are mostly:
- Red Maple
- White Oak
- Black Cherry
with the cherry being less common than the other two. There is Ironwood around as well. Maybe a little more common than the evergreens, much less common than the cherry.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:
Around here, we take care of the deer problem with 8 feet tall fences. And then keep the gates closed!

Are you talking about the whole property or just near your home? Once we have a garden in (I'm very late this year, lots of landscaping to do) I plan to fence that in, but I don't know what kind of an investment it is to fence the whole 60 acres. My father in law has about that much land, and all of it fenced, but... he's also a good bit more well-off then we are.

Backstory:

It's been about 3 years since my wife and I bought ~60 acres of woodland in central PA. We've been living on it (finally) since January. The other day, I took a nice walk around the property with a family friend who's in the business of "land management." A timber company had made us an offer and we had asked for his advice on selling or not. We decided not too. He thought the price was fair, but it wasn't a good time to harvest. That it would be better for our forest - and the price - if we waited at least 5 years. Better 10.

But as we walked he commented on the state of the land. "You have a deer problem" he said, quite a few times (who in PA doesn't?). He described our forest as"sterile." By this he meant that there was little-to-no brush or cover for animals to bed down in, and that there were very few saplings that survived the deer. He's right. As I look out my window I can see quite a long way through the woods. We have lots of "pole" timber, lots of trees around 12'' - 14'', and a few bigger here or there, but almost nothing smaller than that. There are some hemlock saplings scattered around, and I've found at least one patch where there were a bunch of maple seedlings not yet eaten, but these are very few. In fact.. with the exception of some ferns near a stream which will get quite big, there is almost nothing that gets even knee high.

What we do have is a lot of long grainy grassy stuff. The kind that comes about halfway up your shin and has seeds with little hooks that are great at sticking in your socks. That's the majority of the ground cover throughout the whole 60 acres. It is broken up here and there by large patches of wild blueberries (or huckleberries, not sure which, very low and sprawling) and less often by patches of club moss. Of course that isn't "all", but those three comprise most of what you see walking around. And again - nothing with much height.

So.. what can I do to help this "sterile" forest out? We'd like to take care of our patch of land. For own sake - to enjoy it - and because we believe in being good stewards of the earth.

Questions:

The obvious question in my mind is "can I just plant a bunch of beneficial plants and try to cultivate a more diverse environment?" I feel like a mono-culture (that reedy grass everywhere) has got to be a part of the problem. I love the idea of bringing in new species, and would love it if I could introduce some wild edibles. I don't want to go overboard and bring in something invasive or damaging though...

Would it help to clear-cut a section? The same friend who advised us not to sell our timber right now, also recommenced that when/if we do sell some down the road, we should pick some far corner of the property to clear cut. In his words "it probably won't come back in anything decent, but it will come back in brush at least, and that will give critters somewhere to bed down. We call them 'regeneration cuts' these days." Makes enough sense to me I guess... But I also know this whole property was clear cut something like 60 years ago, and I can't help but wonder if that's a bit to blame for it's current state.

What (if anything) should I do about the deer? If the deer are really a big part of the problem, is there anything I can do about it? I could take up hunting (my dad/brother always have and would love to get me into it) but it's not like I'm going to really affect the population that way... Having a lot of deer just seems like a fact of life here.

What else do users here recommend doing to be good stewards of our land?

Thanks so much!

Alex,

Thanks for the tip about the Soil survey. I did indeed find information for our property. The area around the home site is listed as "Hazleton-Clymer channery loams, 3 to 8 percent slopes". The depth to water tabe rating is listed as ">200cm". On some areas it's listed at 51cm, but those are not near the home. I'm not sure if that's the relevant information? It will take me bit of learning to parse this all.

We did have a perc test done when we were trying to get a septic system approved. I don't know the details of the results, but I know we were given "credit" for 2 feet of good drainage - meaning we still had to build a sand mound, but that it could be 2 ft shorter than would have otherwise been required.

When we were looking for a good spot to do that perc test we dug several 6 ft holes. They filled up on their own (without rain) in a day or two. Some drained after a span of dryer weather, some were still very wet when we filled them back in.

I'm familiar with raised beds, but not hill rows. Is that literally a row on the side of a hill? Or are those "mounded up" rows? Searches on the term mostly lead to me article on raised beds.

I am interested in building raised beds, as you suggest, to keep roots up to improve drainage. I was wondering if gravel (between the soil in the raised bed, and the clay in the ground) similar to a wicking bed design would help create a favorable situation, or if this is not the appropriate place for that.