Our belongings are at the new house and we are still unpacking. I knew moving with three children was going to be difficult, but I didn’t realize how long the unpacking would take. We have too much stuff, even with all my decluttering efforts.
For the past couple of weeks, my chickens lived at my old house protected by electric netting. My new home is close enough to the old one for me to check on the chickens. Last week, a local towing company moved my chicken house.
You can get a nice view of some of the clay soil. This soil is actually not as bad here as the soil up closer to the house. I will need plenty of help from the chickens to fertilize and aerate this soil. I have had the landscaper working on my yard till in granite dust leftover from the well drilling, lime, cottonseed meal, and several loads of horse manure. I also saved chicken manure, in empty feed sacks, when I cleaned out the chicken house at my old home for months before our move and had it tilled in as well. The garden soil will be okay without anymore extreme effort from me aside from planting cover crops.
I chose the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, to move the chickens. I was late picking up my daughter from youth group because it was still just a bit too light outside that evening for the chickens to be in their nightly chicken-coma. I caught these last two in a flurry of feathers and stuffed them into this metal bucket. They were content in there and, most importantly, could not fly out. I transported them inside my SUV and let them sleep in my garage for the night.
At the front of the house, the soil is terrible. Loads of bricks, lumber, and machinery sat in front of the house for months. When rain falls, it puddles in front of the house in a mud slick on top of the hardpan. I purchased a pickaxe to tackle this soil. The man doing the landscaping found that his tractor’s tiller bounced off the clay, and they even had trouble getting an auger to go into the soil, but a pickaxe will go through. I have given up my morning efforts on the elliptical trainer to spend time using the pickaxe. It is definitely good for building muscles in my arms and back!
A pickaxe will go through the mud and the hardpan, and I have managed to break up the soil and to sprinkle in plenty of gypsum, a clay softener. I have also added lime, copious amounts of horse and chicken manure, and some topsoil. This area, on either side of the front walk, will be my flower garden. I have downsized my gardening efforts from those at my old home, and I hope to spend more concentrated effort on a few plants instead of having a mass of things that easily fall out of control. I am building a sort of raised bed over this area, and I purchased some red worms and some night crawlers from the hardware store to inoculate the soil with worms. The cover of soil and manure softens the clay and prevents it from turning into mud during the rain.
I’ll keep you updated on my gardening progress. I miss working in the garden and I hope to get a fall vegetable garden planted.
