r/Homesteading • u/leticiazimm • 6d ago
How to build soil?
My soil is reddish and looks/textura like clay. I cant buy manure or worm humus right now (its very expensive here I live) and I would love to have that Black gold soil (everybody's goal, I guess) and dont know how to properly start.
I have 5 chickens in another area (maybe use her poop?) and i've been composting food scraps in a random way. Like, I dig, put the compost and put the dirt again on top.
Would really appreciate any tips
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6d ago
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u/Beneficial-King-5844 3d ago
I used to clean out livestock stalls and collect sawdust from a local cabinet shop. Grit and gravel are great also. Someone once told me if you have clay you can make anything. Finally got my garden up to par and moved😢. I've aged out of stall cleaning but I a chicken farmer nearby brings manure. I let it season for a year before I put it in my raised beds but I can get as muck produce from my raised beds as I did from my whole garden. I have 3 raised beds that are about 3 x 12. Also a raised bed by my greenhouse that is about 30 x 3. If I start to get more green than veggies I take a year or so off from manure. Anything organic you can work into your beds will help. Lots of places get rid of their stall clean outs. In NC we get an Agreculteral Review. There are some places that advertise their cleanouts for free. All you have to do is pick up. Some even offer free loading which is a bonus. Good luck! Keep shoveling!
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u/OldSchoolPrepper 6d ago
I'm into year 8 or 9 of building my own soil. I have clay soil and tried to amend it for years then I watched that movie called Back To Eden (Gardening, the guy is religious but thought process is sound) movie is free on Youtube. Basically it's deep mulch...getting in a lot of organic debris and letting it rot. It takes a couple three years for it to really start working,now my garden is wonderful. I started by putting 8 inches of woodchip's, leaves, grass clippings, small branches etc on top of where I wanted my garden (do it in the fall) then every year after bring in 3 inches and spread it. You can get wood chips from an arborist or join GetChipDrop.com and sign up for a free delivery. I have given the drivers tips a few times esp if I wanted more from the same company but it's free. then get out the wheel barrows!
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u/toniaa1 5d ago
I wished people in Germany would use this site too!
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u/OldSchoolPrepper 2d ago
you can just call local arborists and ask them to deliver to your house or ask them what they suggest. Also if you see an arborist doing their job, stop and talk to them. I get about half my chips this way and the other half from GetChipDrop. It costs the arborist money to find a place to drop the chips using the app so they are happy to have a place to go that doesn't cost them $.
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u/toniaa1 2d ago edited 2d ago
I never see them🙈 i look though, google says not nearby and the gardenpeople in town never call me back😅. And my place the rent goes to march 2028. And i have only one summer here before i need to take it out. And hopefully with me. So now im thinking is it worth to do for one summer 😅 also for the next it will be not helpful because underneath its al stone, rocks and cement...
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u/Misfitranchgoats 6d ago
While you can use chicken poop, you need to compost it with a lot of carbon materials to make usable for the garden soil.
My suggestion would be to use raised beds. Hugel beds work well. You can make raised beds from pallets, old shelving all kinds of stuff.
My next suggestion is rabbits. Rabbits make huge amount of poo that you can put right on your garden fresh or you can compost it. Rabbit poo brings in worms like you would not believe. You can substitute rabbit of chicken in any dish. Heck some people raise the rabbits just for the poo.
If you don't want to raise rabbits look for horse manure from a stable. Make sure they are feeding an alfalfa mix. this keeps you from having to worry about a broadleaf weed killer being in the manure that can kill your garden. Just ask the stable/barn what type of hay they feed their horses. If they feed alfalfa or an alfalfa mix it will be fine because alfalfa is a broadleaf so you can't spray it with Grazon or similar herbicides. Composted horse manure is the next best thing to rabbit manure in my opinion. Or you can top your raised beds with horse manure in the fall and it will be fine for spring planting. I will often put a 6 to 8 inch layer of horse manure on the top of my raised beds in the fall. I toss rabbit manure on it fall winter and spring.
I will top dress some chicken manure from my deep litter bedding on the raised beds in the fall. I just put a light layer on about an inch or so. Chicken manure is very hot and rich you gotta go easy with it.
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u/Kaurifish 6d ago
We got a heavy dury shredder and mixed so much shredded cardboard with the chicken poop from the henhouse.
Thought it was going to be a hot pile. Turned into worm paradise.
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u/RipsterBolton 6d ago
Best resource for learning to build soil is Matt Powers regenerative soils book to tell you exactly what to do for your soil type and take the guesswork out of everything.
Another great book for the general principles of soil management is John stikas a soil owners manual. Then you just look up your extensions recomendations for cover crop in your area.
I personally make a ton of vermicompost, truck in woodchips which I inoculate with king Stropharia spawn, make biochar, make aerated compost tea. Initially I bought compost by the yard to start my garden and then have had cover crops going in my orchard and small field.
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u/leticiazimm 6d ago
Thank you a lot for the books you recommend, Im new on the subject and it will help me a lot
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u/Willowgirl2 6d ago
Get to know your neighbors and offer to take their leaves and grass clippings provided their lawn hasn't been sprayed with herbicides.
Get a heavy-duty shredder and shred all of the cardboard you can get your hands on. (It will break down faster if you shred it.)
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u/Bluetractors 6d ago
Leaves are great for soil. And it's about that time of year for them to fall. Drive through town and grab several bags people have bagged for trash pickup.
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u/ImaginaryAnimator416 6d ago
Where do you live? Careful with generalizing soil colours because you saw someone from a different part of the world talk about it. Red soils in Souht America, for example, are extremely rich.
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u/leticiazimm 6d ago
Thats a good point. Im from Santa Catarina in south Brazil, near Argentina.
My problem with my red soil (terra rossa) is because you barely cant dig in. Its compact and when rains it turns on clay and with too much sun turns on dust. When I dig to plant I find a lot of worms so I guess its rich, but the texture its pretty bad.
I plant corn, coffee, beans, beets ... even strawberries, but I would like to plant pumpkins and watermelon (for example) and its impossible, the plants just dont grow and eventualy die
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u/paratethys 5d ago
Personally, I put food scraps directly in with the chickens. Then they eat what they want of the scraps, and they eat the bugs that come out to eat the scraps they didn't want.
I'm on clay too (PNW) and what turns it into beautiful soil is plants, nutrients, and time.
Look up deep litter bedding systems and consider that for your chicken coop. I use deep litter all year then shovel the coop out each fall into a pile. I let the pile get rained on through the winter and by the next autumn it's beautiful soil. Worms and stuff come up though the ground (since the pile is directly on the ground) and help with the process. Just make sure any runoff water from the pile is going where you want fertilizer (garden etc) rather than where you don't (rivers/ponds/etc).
Never leave the soil bare unless you have a good reason to, like catching native plants by letting the seed bank germinate. Most of your gardening soil should be piled with mulch at all times.
You can get mulch for free by using weeds and volunteer plants as biomass. Just make sure you've identified the plants -- harvest weeds for mulch before they set seed, and if a plant will grow readily from cuttings, make sure it's fully dried out before you use it as mulch. Cutting your mulch material into smaller pieces makes it rot into soil faster. Some people like to go over fallen leaves with a lawnmower to make nice mulch.
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u/Jessawoodland55 5d ago
If I had a large amount of soil I wanted to make healthier and very little money to spend on the project, I'd sign up for chip drop, get as many wood chips as I possibly could, and spread them everywhere. Then I'd get free old moldy hay, and spread that around everywhere too. The wood chips will add material to the clay and the hay will seed! If you were to do that and then wait a year or two, your soil would be much improved!
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u/Sweet-Trees-Hawaii 6d ago
One scoop at a time.
In reality there are a lot of methods that result in healthy soil and the best of them take time and patience.
When I started learning about permaculture around 2010, I read "The One Straw Revolution" and I learned a lot (lots of free PDFs available).
You want biomass, diversity of microbes, and time (and/or some boosts to cut down the timeline).
I like huglekulture for areas where you have access to a lot of trees. You can even spread it out over a longer period by planning for mushroom log farming, then use those logs later as part of a mounding strategy so you get the benefits of mycellium breakdown and a food source.
For warmer climates I would start with growing biomass from trees, comfrey, sweet potato, and other fast growing plants. Add a baseline of soil and mulch (that isn't treated with fungicide), leaves if you have them, and add worms, castings, manure, compost etc... even biochar if you are looking for faster inoculate. Compost over time in piles and in place if able to "chop and drop".
There are some shortcuts, but good soil takes time, layers, and microbes when it comes down to it.
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u/West_Commission_9875 6d ago
If you're after some garden beds, you can just start piling everything organic up in situ. Any manure/straw from your chickens, grass clippings if you mow, kitchen scraps, bury carcasses if you hunt etc. tree mulch if available, dead leaves, baleage, it will all eventually break down towards black gold!
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u/ChamberlainFaculty 5d ago
Your chickens are your best free source. Just compost their manure with some fallen leaves or straw before it goes in the soil, since fresh is strong enough to burn plants. Clay won't turn into black gold in one season, but adding that every year gets you closer.
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u/KrishnaChick 4d ago
Ask people for good soil for Christmas and birthdays.
Also, if you have trees, collect the fallen branches and bury them along with food scraps, manure, grass clippings, etc. Look up hugelkultur.
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u/Dracoatrox1 6d ago
I would get in touch with that do yard work and/or tree trimming. Usually, you can volunteer to have the organic waste (leaves, grass clippings, wood chips, etc) dumped on your property. Spread it out where you want to improve your soil, and use a roto-tiller to incorporate it into your clay soil. Repeat every year, and you'll soon have a nice, loamy soil!
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u/c0mp0stable 6d ago
Composting enough material yourself is going to take years. You have to buy some compost and other organic materials.
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u/stratispho 6d ago
Find a local tree trimming business and ask them to dump shredded trees on your property. They’re usually happy to do it as they have to pay to dump it at the local dump.
Are there any dairy farms near you?
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u/Berkamin 6d ago
Building soil requires increasing soil carbon, and strengthening the soil fauna (worms, nematodes, and arthropods) and soil microbiome.
If you don't mind time doing the work, there is a very low labor intensity method that involves compacting down 1-2" of compost (which you can buy if you don't have enough to start this method) and covering it with 6-8" of wood chips as mulch. Compost and worms introduce participants to the soil microbiome. Wood chips provide the carbon that they need to make SOM (soil organic matter), which largely comes from microbial necromass (the material from dead bacteria and dead cells). That is where a lot of the fine structured carbon in the soil comes from. Soak the wood chips first and then layer them on; this doesn't work well if the wood chips are dry. You can give it a boost by diluting urine and using that to soak the wood chips. Mixing in a bit of chicken manure is another way of introducing nitrogen. Make sure the compost contains some worms. Then just leave it for 6 months to a year.
The worms carry out a process called bioturbation, where they mix decomposed material with the soil below, and they do this for free, they just don't do this very quickly.
The 6" of wood chips will decompose from the bottom up, but it is important not to mix the chips and the soil or with the compost. Just layer the chips on top of the compacted compost. This way, the wood chips can serve as mulch to keep the actively decomposing portion protected from the sun. The microbes from the compost will work their way up and decompose the wood chips in a progressing decomposition front that doesn't use up all the available nitrogen in the compost. The worms will mix all the decomposed material with the soil below.
Once you've done this, plant lots of cover crops to keep the process going. Plants release root exudates into the soil that feed the soil microbiome, and their own roots introduce carbon into the soil when the cover crop dies.
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u/whaticism 6d ago
Where are you located? If it’s not about to get really cold where you live, Black soldier fly larvae farming to feed your chickens is going to be the best way to get a product similar to the worm black gold that you want. Look up self harvesting larva boxes and find some cheap rotting starch material like yams or rice or squash or potatoes, some other food scraps like you would put in compost, and eventually you will have both good organic solids for the humus when mixed with your clay and sand, and also you will have a bunch of liquid that you can pour over charcoal to further amend your soil.
The fastest way to build soil from that point is to make a large circle (30-40 feet across) and within this circle, concentrate on making that bit of soil healthy enough to support things that produce a lot of biomass. Harvest that biomass and build more soil with it while continuing to get input from the chicken feed and litter system.
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u/Pure-State9715 6d ago
Can you start making compost? Thats how I did it. Working in sand and humus helps.
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u/MALEsquashBLOSSOM 6d ago
Leaves! Free since it’s fall! Especially ground up dried leaves. I will drive around when I don’t have any in my yard in neighborhoods where they’ve been driven over and ground up and just fill up some garbage bags to add to my soil. If it’s in my yard I’ll leaf blow into a huge pile and let it break down for a few years, making sure to turn it so no anaerobic bacteria develops.
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u/Lifesamitch957 6d ago
How much area are you looking to rehab? Alfalfa pellets are a great, they take a bit to break down but add alot of organicd back to the soil
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u/erie11973ohio 5d ago
I turned a 30 × 50 garden spot from Ohio brown clay to black with compost made from old rotten leaves from the city leaf dump & the weeds I had pulled from the garden.
The leaves had sat for 10 years?? I would shovel them from the truck to the shredder (with the screen removed) as fast as possible. If that sat for the winter, it looked like potting soil in the spring.
Probably 5 to 10 loads of leaves. I got them from the city where my dad lived, 35 miles away. I took as many as I could. The city would have a local landscape company bring in the "composter shredder" for the fresh leaves, those would disappear the following spring to all the residents
One day, that company hauled away the old ones too!!
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u/toniaa1 5d ago
Put the chicken, where you wanna have the good soil. Feed the scraps. Move them regularly, so it will not become nasty. If you dont wanna do that Make compost pile in the coop. The hollar homestead on yt. Ben has made mutiple videos where he tells why and how. And they are living there mutiple years now and they started with the same conditions 😊
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u/Bitterrootmoon 5d ago
Raise rabbits. Bunny berries composted lightly or just used raw mixed into the clay and then built up on top.
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u/Twig-Hahn 5d ago
We garden in the and type soil as you're describing. No issues since we grow what is native to my area, example'watermelon that's made for this soil. You're loved💔 𐤔𐤋𐤅𐤌
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u/Cute-Consequence-184 5d ago
Do a lasagna garden.
Talk to anyone with cattle and a barn. They usually have the scrape out the barns and it is usually a mixture of hay, straw and feces.
Get ass much as you can. Put down cardboard first.
Then fences
Cardboard then straw
Get wood chips, the older the better. Where I live the county next to me will give away wood chips. You can even request 3 year old ones.
The straw and wood chips break down into soil.
But you call add worms directly into the wood chips.
You can also make your own worm barrels
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u/PeterRuf 5d ago
You could plant lupine. Quite cheap and will give you base for some organic matter in soil.
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u/Flodius 5d ago
You are basically composting in place. You might want to split some of the scraps you bury and give some to the chickens. But keep doing what you're doing and in time your soil will improve. I had rough clay soil and I turned it into decent style by continually bearing scraps. Also you need to add water if you're in a very dry place. If you don't add water your stuff will just sit in that dirt. So I use the washing machine. Rather than have it run down the drain, I emptied the wash water into a big bucket and spilled out over my garden. Never had to run the hose, and turned the soil into wonderful black dirt
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u/Twinetied_haymaker 5d ago
There a app called “SoilWeb” after you install it. Use it to id your specific soil type. That’s a good place to start. Then use google to find out more about that soil type and how to build it up.
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u/personalviris 5d ago
Dude you already know. Chicken poop and compost is the best way to start! Mix in some of your red clay dirt some sand whatever you got man mix it up! You got to run what you brung hahaha
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u/Kgriffuggle 5d ago
Fallen leaves.
“Build it, grow it” is a blog and YouTube channel. He documented his five years of using leaf litter for mulch. He doesn’t ever apply fertilizer, not even manure. It has made like 18 inches of black soil in his garden. And it’s free.
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u/daitoshi 1d ago
I started with cracking, mostly-clay soil. My timeframe for both of these projects was:
Year 0: Do amendments in mid to late fall, let it sit all winter.
Year 1: Check the soil in Spring, Plant in Spring, keep area mulched and watered through summer, check soil again in Fall, apply extra thick layer of fallen leaves and grass clippings as mulch in fall to decompose overwinter
Year 2: Check the soil in spring, plant again
My goal for this project was to spend as little money as possible. Not including the cost of my own labor, or the cost of water, I spent $60 total to buy 30 moldy hay bales from a local farmer. Everything else was sourced from my yard or leaves/logs/branches from my neighbor's yards
At the start of Year 0, I had a 1-year-old compost pile, which was turned over to source 'finished compost' from.
--
First; I went on craigslist and contacted local farmers to see if anyone had really old musty, moldy hay bales from LAST season I could buy off them for cheap. I ended up buying 30 moldy hay bales.
I placed them, whole, over the areas that I wanted to improve. With a sharp shovel, I cut into the middle of the bale (keeping the twine uncut, so it wouldn't spread out everywhere). I dumped some dirt and finished compost on top of the bales and packed it into the slit I'd made, then applied whatever nitrogen-heavy fertilizer I had on-hand. (Fresh chicken poop would work fantastic, I wish I had chickens at the time of this project.)
I then soaked the bale and the fertilizer with a hose, pinned a black tarp over it for a few days to speed up the heat, and let that sucker hot compost. By spring, the bales were half rotted into the ground. I planted in spring, got a ridiculously huge tomato harvest, and by the end of summer the bales were nearly fully integrated with the soil.
What this did was shove a bunch of carbon into the soil and invite a shitload of worms to chew through greens and browns of the hay to create nutrients. While it wasn't instantly 'black gold' (that process requires years of feeding the soil) it did significantly enrich the soil and make it easier to work with, at about 2" depth. Deeper than that it was still mostly red clay.
--
In another area, I did a bunch of earth-moving. I dug down about 6 inches, removed the rocks and placed the clay aside. I layered food scraps, grass clippings, sawdust, half-decomposed logs, fallen leaves, and loose hay from the moldy bales I split on accident until the depth was filled, then capped the whole area with the clay I'd excavated. (With a shovel, by hand. It was exhausting.)
I had gotten a bunch of free mulch from ChipDrop, so put a bunch of mulch over the clay cap, then got lucky and a storm thoroughly watered it in for me.
The soil in that area seemed less remediated than the hay bale area in spring year 1, though I strongly believe it's because I used too many fallen leaves in the top of the lasagna stack - many of them fused into a moldy layer which didn't let water penetrate deeper down, and ice formed at that layer so the hay and compost below the leaves was weirdly dry and preserved. I stabbed the beds thoroughly with a pitchfork to loosen the soil and break the 'seal', churned some areas with a shovel, hosed it down thoroughly and by the end of fall the soil in that bed was much looser and nicer to work, with improvements going down the entire 6" depth I'd dug out originally. Some log cores remained, still in the process of rotting. The color of soil had darkened throughout the entire depth, and the plants growing in that area were more resistant to drought. (good sponge effect from the organics).
-- SUMMARY:
The first technique: Hay bale planting, was much less laborious. It created fantastic yields, but needed a lot of additional watering during the hot & dry season. Many plant roots were growing within the hay bale itself, which dried quickly. The tomatoes and strawberries LOVED it, I got the biggest jalapeno harvest I've ever seen, but root vegetables suffered. The depth of soil change was fairly shallow.
The second technique: Excavation and Lasagna layering, was extremely laborious, but created a significant depth of improved soil, and a better resistance to drought compared to the hay bales, and compared to soil I didn't amend. I had a decent carrot harvest (better than the 'zero' I got from other areas), a really good brassica/lettuce/spinach harvest, a sub-par potato harvest, and some mini-pumpkin volunteers which went wild and took over the back corner of my yard. I suspect other harvests would have been better in Year 2, when the earth wasn't still so full of 'raw' compost.
Alas, I had to move out of that house and wasn't able to continue my experiments. I was able to visit the area and peek into the garden from the street. The folks living there now turned the whole yard into plain grass, the beds all flattened out, but the areas where I had amended the soil showed significantly longer and lusher grass growth in suspicious rectangles hahaha~
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u/MobileElephant122 6d ago
Plant a variety of cool season grasses, brasicas, legumes, forbs, warm season grasses and keep it up every season for 18 months while mowing only the top 1/3 of the foliage which probably means mowing a lot more often and at the highest setting on your mower.
Most mowers cut at 5 inches being their highest they can mow which means you can’t let your grass get more than about 8 inches tall.
Cut off the top third with a mulching blade and let the clippings fall back into the duff layer.
Stop fertilizing and stop spraying for bugs
Let the roots interact with the soils natural microbes and your plants will sequester carbon into the soil for you.
You can test this with soil testing if you like to keep track of your improvements
Or you can just dig a hole and look
Acre a year you’ll start to see black fingers reaching down into the red clay as carbon is being brought into the soil and it begins to aggregate
After 2 years you’ll start seeing more worm activity and you’ll notice higher soil organic matter (SOM) and you’ll notice that a one or two inch rain doesn’t sit on top of the surface anymore or run off terribly as the SOM increases
Your ground will start holding water longer during drought and infiltrating it faster during deluge.
Your chickens will help add nitrogen into the system and so will the legumes you plant. The clovers and the peas and beans especially help by adding nitrogen nodules in the subsoil that successive plants can utilize and it’s already plant available
As the root exudates interact with the indigenous microbe population, your soil health will improve year upon year
At year 3 the difference is remarkable
It’s not a fast fix but it is long term minded and global health conscious
Not to mention your chickens will love the diversity of their salad bar
If you want to see the results on paper start with a soil test now so that 5 years from now you can look back and see how far you’ve come
Good luck