Soil Remediation

Saturday, May 22, 2021

I live alone on a small town lot in Bonavista, Newfoundland. I live simply.

Bonavista folks brag about three things: “How much wind we got”, “How much rain we got”, and “How little soil we got”. This project addresses the third of these claims. See Rain-water harvesting and 12vDC projects for material on the other topics.

This small bed, about twenty feet long and fifteen inches wide, took me almost three weeks to dig out, off and on. Large rocks and small stones to be pried out and hand-sieved through.

After a rainfall, the soil is washed down, off any pebbles or gravel, revealing a fresh overnight harvest of rock. Every time the rain falls.

Some of the foot-sized rocks pried from the bed, each time my shovel Clangs! As I push it through the sod.

And when I dig out a chunk of lawn to make a vegetable bed, there is always a neighbour who covets the sods.

We ripped the asphalt of the second driveway. I haven’t owned a car since 2003, so a second driveway is surely redundant. Under the bitumen was pebbly gravel.

I raked pebbles off the surface and used them on a neighbor’s swampy driveway. Now I am trying to split a large embedded rock with alternate bouts of fire and water.

A truck load of grass clippings dropped between the end of the driveway and the front of the shed. These will be barrowed to the receiving area at the rear of the shed.

Some loads of grass clippings bring a bonus. The house bricks make a small camp-fire barbecue pit for me. Another day there was enough rhubarb to make six large bottles of stewed pulp. The mower had been told to “tidy up the yard”.

My second summer here, my first batch of crop. The Zucchini effectively estranged me from visiting neighbours for a while. In the nearer bed, cabbage, beets, cherry tomatoes.

I use a 44-gallon drum for vegetable scraps. When snow blankets the yard I do not need to wade to the compost heap at the rear. Indeed, that large heap never receives kitchen scraps.

The drum is tipped over because I am going to barrow the digested scraps to the big pit. There will be no visible material there, just brown and black material.

The driveway with its first load. We were too late in the year for much grass, so the area over-wintered with nothing much to do.

I harbour huge worms come spring. April 19th.

A pile of rubble which was dug out with a back hoe to make a trench for a power cable. This material needs to be sieved and used to body-up a compost heap.

A friend dropped off an old two-seater stroller. I removed all the fittings and bolted a bread-tray where the seat used to be. This experimental version used a wooden leg to prop up the device, now discarded.

A collection of sieve-like gratings.

I tried using just the bread crate. Shovel rubble into the crate, most of the dry fine stuff falls into the barrow which can be wheeled away.

Shake the handle and we are left with a tray of pebbles which can be wheeled away …

… to a staging area where I plan to have four distinct piles of material in progress.

I make seed trays from scraps of Masonite and skirting board. Last year I made them from planking, but loaded with damp soil they were too heavy to cart indoors and out again when frost threatened.

Now I build three sieves from 1/8 “ plywood. I have one-inch, half-inch, and quarter-inch mesh. The sieves drop into and out of that bread crate.

Higher sides mean that the rocks do not bounce out and into the barrow or back on the ground.

That said I might trim the rear edge, the one closest to the handle to about half its current height so that I can see how well the sieve is emptying.

As well, I am using too much energy to bounce the sieve. I must disable the shock-absorbers on the frame. The things you learn …

Moments like these make my heart leap with joy. This worm was temporarily flooded out of its burrow. I took the photo and covered the worm with dried mats of grass and soil so that the worm could return underground after catching its breath. Check out the HUGE egg-saddle, soon to release new soil-makers into my gardens.

Sunday, August 21, 2022

A dozen or more bags of grass clippings, two trucks of hay, and a side-by-side of grass clippings overwhelmed my compost bins. The logistics of obtaining wood to make panels, to assemble bins, to match grass with old soil and sawdust is a problem at times.

Here I am in the process of widening a raised bed for next year. I dump a half-dozen barrows of clippings and ha alongside an existing bed.

The material is dumped in heaps, although the heaps do not show up well as heaps in these images.

Then I rake the heaps, dragging the peaks into the hollows. I reckon that I need a full foot of clippings to mat down and kill off the grass so that the roots will die over winter, making the grass-covered area easier to dig over next spring.

That, or I can just place the new raised bed planks in place and drop compost on the matted material and plant seeds or seedlings.

A row of grass clipping bags, turned inside out and hung out to dry. I spread the rumor that I don't want the guys to deal with rotting grass in the bags, so they air out for a day before being packed for re-use. But the truth is that I am a miserly old fart, and want the wind to shake out every clipping of grass that is available to me.

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