It's bad enough when you're dealing with heavy clay soil, but to add rocks to it would be a nightmare. You've done a lot of hard work. I hope those tomatoes taste extra special.

Wow, you have worked harder than most 30 year olds would! I'm glad you got good tomatoes. I don't have the rocks you do and all I've found at my place that helps the clay is lots of hard work picking, digging and adding compost. Wish I had some "easier" tips...

WindsurfGirl

Well I was afraid that there were no magic tricks. Thanks for the encouragement. I really am happy with the way it turned out.

Here is the cowpea and buckwheat patch, with tomatoes in the background. This will all be planted with a cool weather cover crop mixture in September. When I get this area in good shape I'll move on to another one.

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When you finish that orginal area it should generously reward not only you but also generations to come who in the future purchase your property.

It may take some time for you to feel the need for even more gardening space. If and when that time comes, and you just simply cannot bring yourself to do that kind of hard work again; why don't you consider installing Lasagna garden beds. There are sites which can be googled that give very good detailed instruction on how to create them.

The following is an overview of how to do that, and once you investigate it a little further, you will see that it is a much easier way to get good garden beds.

In autumn or early winter:
first: cover the area you have determined for the bed with non-corigated cardboard or about 10 layers of spread out newspapers which you have sprayed down with water during the layering.

second: cover all the newspaper with about 4 to 6 inches of dried peat moss which you have saturated with water.

Third: cover the peat with layers of oak leaves, grass clipping, compost, vegetable and fruit scraps, garden soil, pecan shells and other vegetative by products, which one might put into a compost bin.

install a boarder around the bed to prevent migration of the layers.

Then simply wait for the cold composting process to begin. I do not know of anyone who stirs or mixes the layers of their lasagna beds. If over time the bed seems to settle too low, put more layers of leaves, grass clipping or vegetative scraps on to raise the bed's height. The end result should be a bed which is 10 - 12 inches high.

After all four seasons have passed and during the following early spring planting time, is when you can begin to transplant small potted vegetables or bulbs into the bed. Only thing is that, instead of digging holes to do the planting, you will simply cut into the bed enough to lift away the right amount of layers for planting your starter vegetable or other plants. At that point some people use a good quality garden soil mixed with compost to fill the hole enough to secure and firm-in each hardened off transplant.

Most people do not like to step up into their lasagna garden beds, so from the beginning they simply design the layout of them in widths that they can easily reach across and with paths between the beds where they can reach across at least half of each bed from either side.

Katrina, thanks for the info about lasagna gardening. I had heard of it but had not read the book. What I worried about was that with a raised bed, it would be dependent on supplemental watering. We have raised beds (not lasagna) which seem to dry out faster that the conventional in-ground beds. I suppose the additional organic matter and peat help retain moisture?

The deer hit me yesterday and browsed the tops off of all the buckwheat and cowpeas. I had planned to turn all of that under; I guess some will grow back.

The good news is that I found an earthworm! So the soil is coming alive.

I have an alternative to lasagna gardening I've been doing since my Seattle days. It's a very quick way to create soil, but only works on new beds as it requires a little digging.

I simply dig a hole, fill it up with clean kitchen and garden scraps, sprinkle in some nitrogen--manure if I have it, cheap purchased if I don't, then dig a new hole, using that dirt to fill up the first one and so forth.

The breakdown to compost is really quick using this method. No tilling, turning over, or even dealing with keeping layers even. How this would work in a city garden is another question--I did it in Seattle, as I said, but in the back yard. Everything I plant in this stuff, both in Seattle and here, is twice as large as the soil I simply amend.

After I"m done with a patch, I cover with grass clippings and if I really, really want to speed it up as I do the raised bed I intend to use for tulips and daffs and lilies, (they rot in my clay soil) I put black plastic over it with a couple of holes for watering the mess.

I miss my bulbs and want to plant some this October.

A lazy person's way to garden, if a bit on the trashy side (or so says my husband).