Backyard Soil Clean-up
My husband and I have zero experience with gardening and would love some advice from those of you who know more… This is our first spring with a backyard. The previous owners took the backyard from a neglected pile of rubbish to something kind of decent. They put a nice brick walkway around the outside…
My husband and I have zero experience with gardening and would love some advice from those of you who know more… This is our first spring with a backyard. The previous owners took the backyard from a neglected pile of rubbish to something kind of decent. They put a nice brick walkway around the outside of the garden and put in a fence. But, in the middle of this walkway, there is a rectangle of dirt filled with rocks and glass shards and cigarette butts and other assorted goodies. We’d ideally like to see grass in this area – something very kid friendly.
We’ve spent 3 weekends trying top pick through the soil and clean it up, but it there just always seems to be more junk in it. At this point we feel like we need some way to just get rid of all the dirt and bring in fresh soil. Does this sound like the solution? If so, how do we actually go about doing it logistically? What do we use to dig it out, how do dispose of the junky soil, where do we get fresh soil, and how do we get that to the backyard?
We starting digging a small section this morning to see how deep we’d have to go to get some clean soil. We discovered a plastic liner/tarp covering the ground after going only about a foot down. Any idea why there might be a liner under our junky soil? It also might explain our poor drainage in the yard.
If you have a lot of soil to sift, I highly recommend building one of these.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Trommel-Compost-Sifter/
We build one to sift compost in our community garden, and it’s incredibly efficient. Works great on removing rocks and debris from soil too.
I am in the third year of attempting to de-rock and de-junk our back yard (which had been gravelled over, so it is just full of rocks). I bag everything and put it out with the garbage, but it is a slow and laborious process. Have found lovely chunks of bluestone, a cellar hatch door, bones, china, melted glass, rusty paint cans, many many bricks, layers of old cement paving, etc. For our vegetable patch we built an elevated area and filled it with all new soil, just to be sure we had good stuff. We also compost so that has helped renew the soil. Plants and trees are all doing well. It’s the Japanese knot weed that is really a pain… though not as bad as I thought it would be. If you don’t want to pay someone to do it, it will take you a while but it will be interesting and you’ll feek that much better about it!
If you go the route of screening and sifting out the debris, you can dig a deeper hole and bury all of it as long as its glass, rocks, metal bits, etc and nothing harmful.
I had lots of new soil brought in and one of the other posters is right, you still keep finding bits of junk. Unless you have very young kids crawling around in it I wouldn’t give it a second thought.
As we discussed a week ago in another thread, kids need to cut themselves and eat some dirt once in awhile in order to grow up normally and not become some PS brat. 🙂
When I moved into my house on Carroll St. the entire backyard was covered with cement. I had it broken up and removed thinking that I could go in the next day with a rototiller and begin planting. What I found instead was a nearly solid mass of glass going down at least five feet. I built sifters, got four day-laborers and between the five of us we sifted the soil and put everything into a dumpster. The soil was dead; I didn’t see a single living thing in any of the piles. I brought in dozens of bags of topsoil, compost, leaves and anything else I thought could enrich the soil. Now, nine years later it is a lush garden with worms, birds, the various wildlife and beautiful plants and trees. It was a lot of work but once the first sifting had been done it became easier and more satisfying. You may want to consider sifting the soil since there is probably a lot of glass and other junk in that dirt.
I worked on the soil for ten years at my previous house, and now I’m starting over again at a new place. I think your experience is typical: every yard in Brooklyn has a hundred years of discarded stuff permeating the soil. I found keys, old hardware, doll heads, pottery, and piece after piece after piece of broken glass. (Contrary to what another poster said, I found that it actually does seem to work its way out of the ground–maybe it’s the worms? don’t know.) In one part of the yard, about a foot down, I found cobblestones. I found pieces of slate. I never replaced the soil; I just dug and sifted, composted and planted, and I had a terrific, lush garden.
you could also take a soil sample and bring it to a garden center to have it tested for chemicals AND to determine what balance your soil has and what you would need to make it healthy. – not sure if you have a car – but I LOVE Martin Viette nursery in Long Island – it’s a gorgeous (a bit expensive) huge nursery that will do a soil sample right there as you wait for free and give you all sorts of tips.
We did our own garden from scratch that when we purchased the house had loads of crap,cement,wood,tools,glass. We just hauled in bags of topsoil and started to till and till and till away each season and it’s really become a lovely garden. – we have grass that grows, plus healthy rose bushes,hydrangea,clematis,peaonies
last spring I finally noticed earth worms in the soil – which is a good indicator the soil is healthy
good luck!
You might want to consider that there might be more than just trash and glass in that soil. People used to think nothing off disposing of household chemicals in their yards and that’s without even taking into account lead particles.
If you are planning on gardening anything edible or having your children playing in the soil, I’d recommend having new soil brought in.
Thanks for all the ideas so far. To answer the question about size, the middle area of the yard that we’re mostly concerned with is about 30’x60′ – a pretty big area. Then the planter area around the outside perimeter also has the problem with junky soil, but I’m less concerned about that right now.