It's No Toil to Make Garden Soil

I'm not a shopper.  Doing the whole Black Friday thing is not my cup of tea.  However, Russ went to Wal Mart and came back with an amazing Black Friday special for me:  Seed Starting Mix.  Four bags for $1.  They are usually $5.99 per bag and he got a bag for $0.25.  Wow.  I was going to be purchasing some of this anyway as we're about a month away from when I normally start all my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant for the spring crop.  I use this exact seed starting mix to germinate and grow them until they put their first true leaves on.

Then I transplant them into bigger cups that have garden soil in them.  I'll have to buy the garden soil.  Or will I?  I searched around on the Internet and found a few tutorials on how to make your own.  We can do this!!  All you need are three ingredients:

1. An old rotten tree.  I walked into the woods behind the house and found the remains of a huge willow tree that has been rotting for years.

I could reach into the rotten tree and easily tear it apart.  Down on the lower portions, it was already essentially soil.  An old rotten tree is a perfect ingredient to build a medium in which to grow plants.

2. Composted manure.  Just over the fence from the rotten tree is our hen house.  Approximately half of our flock roosts in there at night, leaving their "calling cards" underneath the roosting bars.  Now I don't want to use any of the fresh "hot" chicken litter, so I used a shovel to dig about six inches below in order to get to some of the older, composted manure.

Here's a nice shovel full of it along with a photo of the producers of the stuff.  There is also an abundance of feathers in the mix.

3. Light Soil.  I found the third and final ingredient about 20 feet from the hen house.  When I roll round bales of hay out, the cows mash down a lot of the hay in the surrounding dirt while also pooping there.  Over the years, the hay/poop mix becomes a rich mix that I think would be perfect.  It is not compacted and easy to shovel.

So we have our 3 ingredients together.  Before we mix it, the rotten log needs a little bit of processing.  Using my hands, I rub the larger pieces of rotten wood over a screen, breaking up the wood into a coarse "soil" that is captured by a bucket placed beneath it.  Although I'm not concerned about leaving a few large chunks of wood in the mix.  It'll continue to rot in the garden and will sequester moisture during dry months.

This bucket of crumbled up stuff was a willow tree not too terribly long ago.  Now we've captured all the nutrients that the tree pulled out of the ground and we'll re-deposit it in the garden.

Looks like pretty good stuff, huh?

We're almost done.  Let's just mix it all up.  The blue bucket on the left is the rotten tree.  The blue bucket in the middle is the composted manure.  The brown bucket on the right is the dirt I rescued from beneath where an old hay bale was.  I simply take a shovel scoop of equal parts of each medium and mix it in the yellow bucket in the center.

I filled a Hen Scratch bag three quarters of the way full and a Dairy Ration bag three quarters of the way full and I'll store these bags in the garage until it is time to re-pot my spring starts.

This is just an experiment, but if the vegetables like this stuff, there is plenty more raw materials to make bag after bag of "free" garden soil.