Garden bed adventures

I've had some fun and excitement digging up my garden beds. While digging up garden beds 1 and 5, for instance, I encountered a bag of trash, styrofoam cups (the environmentalists aren't kidding when they say they don't break down), shingles, and large chunks of concrete buried in the yard.

Garden bed 5 also produced a long metal chain, leading to a large dog collar. I found out years later the first homeowner bred pitbulls in the yard for 10 years. As a result, my soil had "unusually high" fertility, and I have a marked reluctance to grow root crops.

Garden bed 3 had the cursed pear tree. I kept cutting it off at the roots, it kept resprouting, and sending annoying invaders into beds 2 and 3. I finally dug a massive hole, crawled underneath the stump with my portable folding saw, and sawed at every root I could find. It was a horrible, messy, sloppy job. I made a blood offering to the garden when I sawed my hand by mistake. It took me years to get rid of that thing, and when I finally did I rejoiced.

However, the expansion on garden bed 1 is taking the cake. It has an impermeable layer of hardpan that was so dense, I thought I had another concrete chunk in my garden. The concrete was easier to handle! I have battled this for hours now, and currently I have a 1 foot deep by 4 foot wide hole, filled with water. I see a few bubbles now and then but that's it.

Here's a link to hardpan info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardpan

So, what to do? The rest of my expansion went very well. I dug out the bermuda grass (I layered black plastic "contractor" garbage bags on top of the soil to solar-kill as much as possible), and threw that away. Then I dug out one layer (about a foot deep) of soil, placing it into my large wheelbarrow. I mix it up, pull out obvious offender roots (bermuda-weed), and add amendments like gypsum, greensand, a small amount of balanced organic fertilizer, and organic matter. Today, it was landscaper mix (finely shredded wood with a little bit of perlite), composted cotton burrs (oh, the STENCH!), and composted manure. Oddly enough, the cotton burrs smell worse than the manure. I mix that all up, then loosen the soil in the bed, to a depth of another 12 inches or so. This is called "double digging". I like to do it just to make sure that I don't have any concrete/shingle/dog chain surprises in the bed, too.

I add all the above amendements to the existing soil, about 2 feet down, then I add in the top layer of soil. It's nice and fluffy, rising above the edgings (love that Emerald Edge, it's the only stuff I use now). When I finish, I water it, and add a nice thick layer of mulch. When I stir up the soil, I'm also stirring up plenty of weed seeds. Why let them sprout and ruin my day with weeding?

The first 12 square feet went very well. THIS, however, wins my "most troublesome soil" award. It's a freaking swamp out there, and if I stick my hands in the water and dig at the soil, it's dry. Dry and hard as a rock.

My solution? I'm going to let the swamp percolate for a while yet, and hopefully penetrate the hardpan today. I need to break that layer, if water can't get through what about the poor plant roots?

I'm DEFINITELY adding some sand to the mix!