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Tue, May 15, 12 at 13:54
| When my husband put in a new sidewalk last year, he thought it would be fine to scrape up the dirt/rock/shale mix from under the old sidewalk and throw it on the garden. :(
Now my Central Illinois black soil is a rocky nasty mess. Do I painstakingly sift all the rock with a screen? Build raised beds with new soil? We already had to rebuild the sidewalk because water needed to drain past that area... *Sigh*
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Follow-Up Postings:
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- Posted by diggity_ma 5 MA (My Page) on Tue, May 15, 12 at 14:23
| How about getting hubby to remove the mess that he dumped there? If he truly just dumped it there, then it's all sitting on top of your garden soil and can be removed again with just a bit of elbow grease. If it has already been mixed in somehow then, well... that's a different story. |
Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Imperative
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| How big an area would need to be sifted? I used to sift my entire raised bed every year. It was work but not horrible. |
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- Posted by toxcrusadr (My Page) on Tue, May 15, 12 at 16:36
| I have a few rocks in my garden, and I just pull them out when I come across them, and toss them in a spare pot in the corner of the garden. If it's more than you want to live with then you'll have to get more active. Get him a 6-pack, a kneeling pad, and a radio with the game on and tell him to get comfortable down there. :-] |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Tue, May 15, 12 at 23:14
| I use two bucket when I garden. One is for things to go back into compost and one is for outgoing things like weeds with seeds or rocks. If you remove some every time you garden, it will take a while but you will get them out eventually. Screening is a lot of work, but it may be worth it. I think clement pieces can make your soil too alkaline. If you think that is happening it would be better to bit the bullet and get it all out as fast as possible. |
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| Thanks all! Good advice ...and consolation ;) We may do a combination of these things. I just wish it wasn't so late in the season. Our spring has been overly busy :( BTW, what are "clement pieces"? |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Sat, May 19, 12 at 13:21
| sorry I mean cement is high in lime and therefore ground up cement or powdered cement will retard plant growth. |
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- Posted by toxcrusadr (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 10:37
| The alkalinity of concrete depends on its age, because the excess will leach out over time. |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 10:49
| So does a street tree get flooded with leeched lime? |
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- Posted by mackel_in_dfw (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 11:08
| T.C.- in Chicago, the concrete pushes up the soil pH close to a whole point in urban areas. However, I once tried to jackhammer ninety-year old, buried concrete and the ninety-pound jackhammer danced around like a bug on a diamond. I gave up twenty minutes later and could not get a single fracture....decided to leave it there, a parking lot was going over what was once the foundation to an old building...Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, circa 1986...in theory, concrete has an indefinite life, millenia, but it does leach for at least the first hundred years, or so... Mackel |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 13:37
| No wonder I can't get flowers to grow under my street tree. I used tons of compost but it all washes away. |
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- Posted by toxcrusadr (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 17:04
| I expect the leaching is on a pretty steep curve, a lot at first, then tailing off. I don't know how steep that curve is, though. TT, I think your problem might be more complex, and also includes the floods that are washing your compost away... :-] |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 17:22
| Well it's not really floods, but the soil is very hard and I try to dig in the compost as much as possible, but it gets washed away mostly when I water the tree. I even added OM when it was planted 20 years ago, but 20 years of compost the soil is unchanged. I have no idea why I can't change the soil in a square of concrete but I can change my whole garden soil. The last thing I did was CA poppies from seed. I figured those can't fail, but they would not bloom and they got kind of sickly looking. |
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- Posted by mackel_in_dfw (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 17:48
| Maybe your hard water seals the fate in that concrete hole... Rainwater is always on hand here at the bamboo grove back in North Texas...for special situations....and for the love of God... Mackel |
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- Posted by tropical_thought San Francisco (My Page) on Mon, May 21, 12 at 22:05
| Good idea, I should collect rain water more, but it never rains here in the summer. I am going to try this atlas poppy next. I will harvest the seeds and see if this can make it. It is an aggressive weed. |
Here is a link that might be useful: atlas poppy
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