Soil, gravel and a new veg garden

15 years ago

Hi all,

I just joined this forum today as I have started a new vegetable garden project at our house...seems like a lot of good information and friendly people here!

I have a question for all of you soil heroes out there! I have just started digging our garden (29 feet by 10 feet) of a previously lawned area. Our house was built about 5 years ago. I wanted to dig the whole thing by hand, as I suspected that there would be large rocks dumped by the builders and didn't want to wreck a roto tiller! So I have been busy, and have removed some giant rocks, but have hit a snag. I have been digging down about 12 inches, but the soil seems to have a lot of gravel in it, presumably from the builders. In a few cases I hit what seems to be a bed of gravel about 14 inches down. Now I am only digging down about 12 inches to avoid that, but there is still quite a bit of gravel in the soil.

Is this going to adversly impact my vegetable garden? I have no idea how to get the gravel out of the soil, other than panning it, which someone else suggested, but at 29 feet by 10 feet at 12 inches deep that would take forever! I am digging it now, so that I can spend the time from now until next march adding stuff to the soil.

Should I be trying to get rid of the gravel?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

DavidM

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Comments (8)

grandad_2003
15 years ago
David, a layer of gravel under you garden soil would probably have a tendency to more quickly drain the water from your garden, which is not necessarily bad. Some folks will put a layer of gravel in the bottom of a large planter pot for this reason. Having a clay soil bottom, which is what I have, seems to have just the opposite effect. My garden takes a while to dry up. However, I have on occasion lost plants due to too much water caused by extended days of very heavy rainfalls.

I can't say what a gravel bottom underneath will do for your garden. It may work just fine. Perhaps someone who has a gravel floor bottom on their garden can provide us with their gardening experience.

In the end you have only the 2 options, leave it or remove it. Moving it might be somewhat of a chore. How large is the gravel and how deep is it?
User
15 years ago
My garden used to be a gravel driveway. I put in raised beds right on top of it with soil you make yourself. I had my boxes built from 2 x 10 pine. Run your beds north and south so that your veggies catch the full impact of sun all day long. I use Mel's Mix which is equal parts of peat moss, compost, and vermiculite. Many folks on here have their own recipes. Fill your boxes with the soil mix and plant away. The gravel has always been a boon to me because while my neighbor's garden is always under water after a heavy rain, mine drains right away. This is a good thing. Good luck.
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Hi rmawhorter, I'm not super experienced or a landscape designer but your post got my eye because we are in a similar situation. My new house (ok, 2 years new) has a perfect spot for planting, in terms of sun and southern exposure, but it is an area that is all pea gravel, to a depth of 6 inches at least. We built raised beds - 18 inches high (I want to grow potatoes and carrots or I would have just made them 12 inches) by 3'X3' and I just dropped them on the gravel, with a layer of newspaper underneath. But first I hoed out the weeds; and weeds were a good thing really. I know that the soil under the gravel has *some* fertility because weeds were growing there all on their own! You suggest getting a load of manure, but you don't want manure if you hope to plant your vegetable garden this year; manure will burn your plants and if you are lucky enough to manage lots of leafy green growth from the nitrogen, you'll end up with almost no flowering. Instead call (or google) around to your local compost dealers and find a blend of compost and topsoil that is recommended for raised beds. Locally here in northern CA I bought enough for my 4 beds for $120 and then bought 4 bags of really rich compost to blend in just for good measure. I hope this is helpful, good luck!
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I put down cardboard (or newspaper at least 6 sheets thick and overlapping) and then mulch over that anytime during the year before the ground freezes. Then in the spring it is good for digging into. I have been doing this for years. I till pretty much the whole garden once a year, usually in spring to incorporate whatever grew and whatever I want to add (not much, usually). I only till about 3" deep, max. I have not had a big problem with weeds because a) I plant rather closely, kind of pushing the envelope in terms of spacing because I want the plants to shade out weeds and lessen the need for mulching and b) I hoe. Hoeing is not at all bad if you have a good hoe. I use a stirrup hoe. I actually enjoy cutting their little heads off.:) I don't use raised beds, either. To me that is just extra work and money. I use regular 4' wide rows with 18" between, each row having a double length of soaker hose. Works good for me, especially because my beds can follow the curves of the sun in my yard instead of being straight, but lots of people love those raised beds. Some people would object to my practice because I don't use a lot of mulch once the stuff is planted. I hoe instead ('dust mulch'). It depends on how much water is in the soil and what is growing there. I have a bed that is pretty dry with no mulch that works well because the plants there like that--they're mostly Artemisias, although I also have a bunch of peppers there that are doing well. Those I have mulched with composted manure. Then I have most of the veggies in beds very thickly planted that get a lot of water and no mulch because they don't need mulch--they create their own shade. I keep the space in between rows very small, like 12"-18". I have also tried living mulches, like letting wild portulaca grow and weeding out everything else in between my tomatoes. This worked pretty well, but I think it was actually more labor intensive than having no mulch at all, because I had to hand pull the weeds instead of hoeing. For watering, I use soaker hoses and water only in the early morning, so it has time to soak in before it gets hot and is wasted in evaporation. Yes, people say you have to cover them. I have never covered them and in my highest watering months I think my water bill has increased maybe five bucks. Covering them for me just gets in the way of hoeing.:) I have clay and I think it is great for growing. Everyone complains about it, but I have gardened in sand and I would take clay any day. Clay has tons of nutrients in it. As long as it doesn't get sopping or get hard on top, it is good to grow in, in my experience. I guess what you can use the city compost for would depend on what it was made of. It must be grass and yard waste, no? It might have broadleaf herbicides in it, which wouldn't be good for your garden. I usually get composted manure instead, although the local prison has a program where they give away compost made out of food scraps. I haven't gotten around to trying that yet, but you might see if your local prison, if you have one, has such a program. I think that would be quite safe and you sure can't beat the price. I know what you mean about next year. I am already planning my next-year garden. Definitely going to be more peppers!
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Pudge, Actually, it's kind of a funny but it's unlikely that most of the rocks you're seeing are really "from" your area. Most of the rocks we see at surface on the prairies were actually transported from large distances away by the movements of the glaciers... (Same where I grew up in central Sask... strange that one would become a geologist in the relative absence of rocks! Or of outcrops, at least!) I believe the nearest outcrops of in-situ bedrock (i.e. older than glacial age; exposed at the surface) would be up along the Hanson Lake Road area, approaching The Pas, and in the Shield area to the east and southeast, and in the Cypress Hills to the west...(I'll have to check this, against a map of Saskatchewan geology, though, to be sure that there isn't some pre-glacial strata outcropping in the river valleys in the area.) So, anyway, the rocks you see in the fields, and in the young glacial deposits that are dug up as gravel pits (after being eroded/transported and weathered down into gravel), were generally transported by glacial action, generally from the Shield area. So, the rocks you see are likely to be a mix of sedimentary, volcanic and metamorphic, since they were picked up across the vast terrain along which the glaciers moved. Yes, it's very likely that some of your rocks are granite or other volcanics, others are metamorphic (schist, gneiss), some are sedimentary (limestone, sandstone); the quartz cobbles or boulders could have had a variety of origins (may have been weathered out of very-coarsely crystalline volcanic rock, or from fracture-filling; or sedimentary from fillings of cavities, or metamorphic from recrystallization of sandstone). The sparkly ones may be schist, a metamorphic rock containing abundant flat, shiny crystals (biotite and muscovite) that are all aligned by heat and pressure and folding. Anyway, that may be a little more than you wanted to know, LOL! Sorry, I can't think of a good website offhand for rock ID but I'll think about it and ask at work...
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nico_ky
15 years ago
I understand your frustration. I started working on a piece of ground at my new home and found out it was awful quality. The few plants I put out this year have been pitiful. I figured my problem was with the soil. I am now constructing raised beds to put my own mixture into.
schoolhouse_gw
15 years ago
I'm wondering if that's why the builders put a gravel layer down - to create drainage for your lawn? How far down does a leach bed have to be, probably deeper than 14"; but it just occurred to me maybe that's what it is, too.
jean001
15 years ago
Sorry, but a layer of gravel, whether in a pot or the ground, won't improve drainage. Instead, it makes it worse.

That's true, in spite of popular opinion to the contrary.

It's a matter of soil physics and something called an interface where one texture changes to another.
farmerboybill
15 years ago
Hi Martin,

I would leave the gravel alone. You could put down 6 inches of soil/compost on top of your plot if the gravel is bothering you. That would be the best thing you could do, anyway. It give you a good head start on nutrients.
jillzee
15 years ago
Hi!

My house is about 6 years old. We purchased it a couple years ago. Turns out the builders did the same thing to our yard. We didn't realize that until I had hired someone to rototill a nice big patch of lawn up for us though. He mentioned to us that we might consider building up, rather than digging down, for a garden, due to the sheer number of rocks he hit. That year we didn't listen and started to dig... we soon had enough giant rocks to line flower beds around two trees, the back of our house, and the front. We still have a pile of small stones left over. We got a decent garden that year, but nothing extraordinary. This year, for my birthday, my husband bought 5 cubic yards of compost for me to lay down in all of the flower beds and the garden. We probably put down about 5" or so over the garden, and things are growing like crazy this year!

I recommend bringing in dirt, rather than digging down, if your situation is anything like mine.

Hope that helps,
Jill
User
15 years ago
What a great husband you have, jillzee, to think so highly of you as to buy you such a great birthday present. Bless him.

I don't know anything about soil physics. My garden has been on top of that old driveway for 20 years now. At first it was an in-ground garden, now it is in raised beds. Drainage has always been excellent. My neighbor just comes over after heavy rains and scratches his head to see me working in my garden because he can't get into his for days.

Soil, gravel and a new veg garden

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grandad_2003

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