As I mentioned before, we exposed (and moved) a lot of dirt when we cleared the land for the house. The required septic field is quite large, and we needed room for the children to play, for my chickens, for my garden, and for the pool (my husband said we had to get a pool if we moved, and we went ahead and did it at construction time).
To keep the pool level the nice man with the bulldozer, who thinks I am slightly insane with all the land-clearing we have done, had to move around some soil. When they installed the pool, the other men dug a 10 foot by 10 foot by 4 foot deep hole to get more soil. We needed to fill in the lovely muddy mosquito breeding ground that had filled with water after the rain with dirt, and we also needed to move more dirt up under the pool decking.
We had to buy some dirt to help with this project, and instead of buying clay soil, we had him steal some more clay from the area to put beside the pool decking, and purchased some topsoil to put on my garden spot.
The topsoil was of pretty low quality, as I expected it would be, but it’s better than the clay. It also has bits of broken glass and plenty of weed seeds, I have discovered. I saw an ominous sheen of green from the house and went down to investigate.
It’s interesting that the native clay soil doesn’t seem to have many weed seeds sprouting. I guess the soil has been covered with trees for many years and the weed seed bank has diminished. The original hardwood forest was clear-cut about 20 years before we purchased the land, judging by the size of the pine trees that had come to repopulate the forest. My estimation is that the surrounding forest has been in hardwoods for 100 years or more, according to the size of the trees.
This is good for my gardening plans. The weeds are terrible in my previous garden due to years of hay mulch application and weed seeds that I allowed to blow in from the surrounding area. I have learned my lessons the hard way, and I will be managing the weeds intensively when they are tiny and not allowing them to go to seed.
I purchased some 6 mil black plastic from the home store and covered the young weeds, which are mostly crabgrass, with the plastic.
A construction site is a great source of debris with which I can hold down the edges of the plastic. I covered about 500 square feet with the plastic, and I’ll move it in a few days to cover another area.