Gardening on a Glacier - Part 14 of our Garden Makeover

Garden transformation Part 14 – Soil, rocks and pebbles

Before moving here I’d only had one other garden, it had beautiful black soil that your spade just sunk into, it was black gold.

On moving to our new garden however, we discovered that the soil is almost 50% stone. Not only does your spade not go in, but neither does your fork! The only way to dig our soil is with a mattock or a pick. Even when you’ve loosened it, trying to get your shovel in is still a challenge as it hits numerous rocks and pebbles.

After hubby breaking the wooden handles on our existing pick and my brothers (borrowed) mattock. He went on to break a fibreglass handle of a well known brand. Finally discovering that Wickes own brand of fibreglass handled tools are indestructible (so far).

Wickes tools standing up to our stony ground!

At the end of the last ice age, two large ice sheets came together, and when they melted they left huge deposits of rocks, sand and gravel, inconveniently under our new garden!

Strangely though, just at the other end of the village we have a road called ‘Clay Pit Lane’, we hadn’t really given much thought to the name until one of our friends sons bought a house there. As the builders started to dig the foundations for his extension, they found it was mostly clay.

He had a very large pile of soil that he wanted to get rid of, so we went to get some off him. It was extraordinary, after nearly eight years of our stony garden, digging and your shovel just went in!

It’s hard to believe the geology could be so vastly different in one village.

Riddling the soil

We’ve always believed that preparation is everything, and without doubt the hardest part of any task. With this in mind we decided that every border would have to have the soil taken out and sieved.

We had made a riddle whilst at our last garden, but that was only designed to sieve weeds out. We were going to need something a bit more substantial!

We constructed a new, much more robust one and built a frame to hold it at an angle. This allows the stone to fall into one side and the soil to fall into the other. When the soil is sieved, it is lovely loose sandy soil.

Riddle in action

The soil is then shovelled into our many Gorilla tubs, popped onto the hardworking trolley – up to six at a time. The soil is either tipped directly into a border or as we were intending to construct a number of raised beds, we filled the many builder’s ton dumpy bags we had lying around.

The stones were also shovelled into the tubs, popped onto the trolley, loaded onto the pick-up to be taken off to our re-cycling centre.

That is except for the sandstone rocks, extra-large pebbles and lovely smooth round pebbles, that I kept saving, knowing I wanted them for the pond.

Once we had placed all the huge rocks and pebbles into the pond, it was hard to believe that they were all dug up from the garden.

Saving the pebbles

I haven’t always been popular for saving my pebbles. Firstly, as my husband was digging I’d shout “stop, there’s a perfect one”, and he’d have to stop mid shovel full whilst I picked it out.

Then there’s the problem of storage. We ended up with piles of rocks, and buckets of pebbles everywhere. That was fine until we needed to work on that particular part of the garden and they’d need to be moved. As more of the garden was finished this became more and more of a problem.

Using the soil

The first soil we sieved went into the raised vegetable beds, these were our top priority as we wanted to produce food as soon as possible. Unfortunately a lot of the garden had ground elder, and we introduced it into one of the beds. After that we were much more careful and had to take some soil to the tip.

As we built the ‘great wall’– the long south facing wall down the left-hand side of the garden. We back-filled the foundations with the pre-prepared soil, ready to plant the fruit trees into.

The first flower border to be riddled was the white garden at the very end. The right-hand side of this border was challenging as there is a large old holly hedge, so the roots were everywhere. It was well worth it though as planting into this lovely soil was an absolute joy, as the trowel just slid in.

All the borders and raised beds with their perfect sieved soil, now reward us with lush growth, flowers and food. We now reap the rewards of our past hard work, but we’re not finished yet……

Present soil sieving

The soil sieving has continued until very recently, as we have finally started work on the house. We have kept back soil from the foundations for one last raised bed in the front garden (yet to be built). One of our neighbour’s cats thinks it makes a very cosy bed.

The riddle also appears to be a comfy place to sleep for one of our cats!

We still have piles of stones that I keep squirrelling away, and my husband keeps asking “what are we keeping these for?” I say “I’ll think of something”.

They’re just too good to throw away!

Retired riddle

We think the riddles work is now finally complete, but can’t bring ourselves to dismantle it. It is currently residing on a pile of bricks in the garden, as a piece of art.