i feel like a mountain goat

afternoon all, recently purchased our first house and have really only been concentrating on the house but the time has finally come when i'm allowed (my girlfriend is the boss!!) to get stuck into the garden.

the garden itself is not that big, but its quite steep (probably a gradual difference of 4ft from the top of the garden to the bottom). i have removed over 15 tonne of concrete that the previous owners had laid down. this has caused the ground to be quite "undulating"

im currently in the process of wheelbarrowing 19 tonne of soil that was kindly given to me by a neighbor (who was digging a swimming pool) so im trying to get the garden to sort of level. i understand that it will never be flat but i don't mind.

the soil that i was given seems to be sub soil. so far i haven't found one worm (that's a bad sign im guessing!!) whilst digging in it. i have been in touch with local horse riding stables who said that i can have as much manure as i want (which was nice of them) so im going to put loads of rotten manure in hoping that it will improve the quality of the soil

i have to build a retaining wall/ fence at the bottom of the garden to stop all the soil i brought in ending in the garden behind us too, looks like im going to be a busy boy this summer

is there anything else i can do to improve the soil quality?

pictures to follow

 

how it began....






getting there

 

Given that unless you're either superhuman, or have unlimited cash and access to heavy machinery, you're unlikely to get it right this year, how about getting it somewhere near, and then filling it with a vigorous green manure crop? Lucerne/Alphalpha might be a good candidate. It apparently does well in poor soil, and I've seen for myself that it grows quite bushy, enough to hide the imperfect ground, and it is actually quite pretty.

Something like this perhaps: The Organic Gardening Catalogue

 

Blimey,

Theres a project

As an experiment i've recently potted up 2 tomato plants in subsoil. They are only half the size of the others

Horse poo is good, you'll need to stack it heaps to rot down first. Green manures are also good, clueless's suggestion of Alfalfa/lucerne is good as it fixes nitrogen from the air too.

If you can build a rat proof compost bin then a collection of the neighbours kitchen waste will be a good way of building up some fertility.