I agree you deserve 3 DHs so they could each work a shift. My soil is no picnic but yours sounds very arduous. Your plants will love you for all your efforts.

And after all that you are no doubt going to do some dry stone walling....lol. Seriously though,I can't imagine having to do all that to plant 1 rose...reckon I'd have a lot of potted roses and bare earth.

I found out that 'this other thingy' is called a 'cutter mattock' in some places. This and a narrow adze are my most used tools for working the soil.

Cutter mattock

The part that struck me was the sifting. You have soil that can be sifted? What on earth (besides the rocks and roots, I mean) is it made of that it can pass through a sieve?

I'm joking a bit, but our clay--ahem, I meant SOIL--has to be broken up by hand and mixed with the rotted hay that serves us as organic amendment. It can't be mixed with a shovel, and never in this world could it be sieved. I spend a great deal of time on my knees filling planting holes with layers of broken up clay and old hay.

All the same it sounds extremely laborious and slow, and I compliment you on your tenacity. We have plenty of work ourselves, but it goes more easily, especially with DH on hand (I have at times wished for another DH or two for the many tasks we need to have done here). About your growing stone mountain, you could do what we did and dump a load of garden soil over it, thus creating a zone with excellent drainage. However it sounds as though your garden probably has good drainage to begin with, and so you wouldn't value the area thus created as much as we do.

Yes, I mostly do not have clay soil, although in some parts of the garden there's a thin layer of clay loam brought over to act as filler by the person who used to own this place many many years ago. That gives me the most problems. Drainage is too good most of the time. Most of my soil is what I would describe as infertile limestone based stony sandy loam. The problem with digging is not due to clay but due to the stones.

You will need to give the rotting hay some time to completely decompose before it is good for planting IMO. Otherwise it can act as a nitrogen trap and, in a wet clay soil, as a source of anaerobic activity (releasing hydrogen sulphide).

The improvised sieve and the old rusty cart..

The stony mountain... I had made a few of those through the years which at some point I managed to get rid off paying dearly.. This is the latest one. About three years worth.. How many planting holes and beds do you think this is due to? Less than you would imagine.. Thinking of it, maybe I should name it Broke(n)back Mountain..

I can sympathise wholeheartedly with you Nik - and Melissa, too. It would seem that my 'soil' is a combination of both yours! My weapon of choice in the garden when I need to dig a hole for (yet another) rose is not the 'cutter mattock' but the 'pick mattock' which, I discover, I've been erroneously referring to as a pickaxe ever since I owned it - in Italian it's a 'piccone'. The pick part of it is very useful for exploring the dimensions of rocks I discover when I'm digging my holes - sometimes they're of very impressive dimensions and the holes have to be abandoned entirely and a new site chosen. I don't have to worry about roots, though, because when we built our house 5 years ago it was in the middle of what was an agricultural field - unfortunately, the only trees on the entire site were 5 quite ancient olives. The farmers here use ploughs that plough extremely deep and are constantly turning up rocks that they need to then remove with an excavator-like attachment on their tractors. These rocks are then dumped in piles all along the edge of the roadside (no fences) so anyone who feels they need a few rocks can stop and take them. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone in our area needing extra rocks. Need I say that all the old houses around here are built from stones picked up in the fields.

Here is a photo of just one of the smaller of the many piles of stones that we removed when we were planting our olives -

All our soil is very ugly clay - it's mostly yellow but in some parts the colour is a greyish-blue. So, yes, I amend every hole with all sorts of things - lots of peat, soil called 'terra pozzalana' that I get from my nursery - I replaced the soil in all my vegetable beds with terra pozzalana and I can grow wonderful heirloom tomatoes and any other veggies I need - it also goes into every rose hole, too; lots of horse manure, tons of used coffee grounds from my local bar - they very kindly give me kilos every week and, lastly, I use a product called 'cornunghia' which I'm pretty sure we call 'hoof and horn' in Australia. It looks revolting - like enormous chopped up toenails but the roses love it and it apparently encourages lots of microbial activity.

Good luck with your hole digging Nik - we started harvesting our olives yesterday but it's rained overnight and looks set to continue through until tomorrow afternoon - only light rain but it makes olive picking impossible. When the olive harvest is finished I will be making a start on my four 'rose holes' - after this 'rain event' the ground will certainly be soft enough - can't say I'm looking forward to the hole digging, though.

A mattock can be very versatile..
Another use of the mattock

I have mostly clay soil (the red sticky type). I usually try to wait for the soil to be moistened up by rain, if not, it will be as hard as concrete. I don't sift, but I remove stones or hard clumps of clay that I can't break up with my hands. Unfortunately the new beds I have as the result of construction are filled with gravel. I can remove the big pieces, but there is plenty of crushed gravel (from the machines driving over it) which is hard to get rid of. So I'm amending a lot and really mounding up over the gunk.

..some impressive digging going on here...and I thought I had problems... I can hardly believe what people have to deal with although I've had my issues in the past but nothing like these above here...

..Nik, in place of an unlikely DH, you could get yourself a DW - is there such a term?... you know, one built like the back end of a bus, she will do all that for you and a whole lot more besides...

...I really must get myself a mattock...

Good Grief! That sounds utterly insane. I have been digging holes in the wood and true, tree roots and stones are a continual pain - the wood is situated in a river valley so is filled with sedimentary stones, silt and other tidal debris, plus the far-reaching roots of 300 or so poplars and elder and oaks. However, whatever may be said about the structure of the soil, its fertility is not in question, which is probably the biggest difference between my woodland and your hill, Nik. Consequently, I simply ignore or chop out the roots, spread the plant roots out as wide as possible and fling all the spoil back on top, then stomp down hard - job done.

As a major benefit, the soil biota (mycchorhizae, beneficial bacteria and insects) are truly on my side since the plants start off slowly (no irrigation ever apart from one intial puddling in) but stay short, stock and sturdy for a couple of years while roots fight through the stiff, rooty soil...then take off like rockets.

Have you tried planting 2 shrubs, side by side, running an experiment over a few years? Like planting very small plants as opposed to mature ones, the big plants end up taking forever to get established while tiny whips are bigger than 3 year old feathered saplings after the first few seasons...and the losses are far, far less with smaller plants.

Years ago, I used the allotment as an experimental nursery, planting rows of this and that, trying out different mediums, fertilisers and maintenance regimes - don't have the time or space now but it was an illuminating (and often quite shocking) few years...and I kind of miss those experiments.

I am somewhat awed by your fortitude (along with Ingrids, who also has difficult conditions) and am glad I am not in the grip of a particular obsession (I can switch plant allegiances at the drop pf a hat) as I know I simply do not have the stomach for fighting against impossible odds to grow such and such a plant - afraid I would be finding a huge love for maquis type pines, lavenders and other oily aromatics (and, in fact have been forced to review much of my planting as sunlight is now a rare treat and not the overall reality.

Camps, of course lots of natives and such plants grow in my patch of land, planted by nature, the previous owner more than 30 years ago and yours truly. Where do you think those roots I have to remove come from? This makes the life for roses and the like even more difficult. Have you ever seen a 30 sq.m area Pistachia lentiscus? Can you imagine its root system? Fig trees? You can find their roots 30m away from the trunk, and they will sucker at that point given half a chance (e.g. if you plant and water something at that spot..). Have you tried underplanting Pinus halepensis in a med climate?

Camp, I don't think we can even mention me in the same sentence as Nik. Believe me, after reading what he has to go through, with Melissa, tuderte and buford being not far behind, I don't have one single thing to complain about. No, I'm quite happy and fortunate, and at this point feel incredibly lucky. For the most part, our boulders are above ground, and I'm not so sure that my husband would have dug holes quite so willingly if each one took 6 to 8 hours. Actually I'm pretty sure he wouldn't, and I don't think I'd even have the nerve to ask him. I think it's going to be quite a while before I complain about anything again. Nik, I've seen your beautiful garden, but never dreamed how much effort it cost you to achieve that. My hat is off to you.

Not everybody has halfway decent soil. The area around our house, the former farm courtyard, was packed gravel and clay, except where it was weeds and rock: I dug that out with a pick to make propagating beds and grow a few tomatoes. Fourteen years of terracing, digging, and planting, hauling in hay, bagged compost, sand, and soil, and feeding back in all the organic matter generated by the plants on the site, has turned it into a pleasant, if often messy, garden. The shade garden and the woods below it are an old slide zone, easier to work with, especially after a winter of flooding several years ago that deposited on it much of the topsoil of our neighbors' field above. Still, the wood is mostly organic matter over rock and crammed with roots. When we cut down the brush along the drainage a couple of years ago we found the ground beneath was almost pure clay.

The big garden started out as a poverty-stricken grass field, steeply exposed to the south, with no woody plants at all, only a meager cover of grass and weeds with the gray soil showing through. It's hard to start a garden where there's no protection from sun and wind. Nine years after starting working here we finally have shrubs large enough to provide protection to smaller plants, and supply a litter of organic matter to feed the soil. And a few years ago DH had the obvious and brilliant idea of sowing clover and alfalfa in all the grass: hurray! So we're finally building soil there too. Oaks are now seeding all over, mostly at the bases of shrubs which have obviously transformed their immediate environment, because we never had oaks sprout before. The grass cover has improved. We get a lot of annual grass in the beds: much of it I leave since the roots, which remain when the grass dies, are in-the-ground organic matter which I don't need to dig in. But the digging continues as we still have large areas that have remained infertile, unable to support anything but the very coarsest weeds and grasses.

There has been a change this year. Parts of the garden look like a garden, a hard-bitten one, to be sure, where only tough plants can survive. BUT some of the shrubs are now taller than I am, and they grew this year. Some of the trees we've planted have begun to dig themselves in, while the Italian cypresses have always been happy. I've redug some old beds, replanting them, and I've planted a few herbaceous perennials, having an idea that they can finally survive in the more sheltered environment that is the current garden. Planting plants is, you could say, one way to improve the ground. It's an incentive. Also this is an area vulnerable to slides and slumps. There have been quite a few on our land and on our neighbors' contiguous property. The big garden wants to travel downhill. So, since the ground is very steep, and our house sits right up above it, it's good that we're working hard anchoring the ground with deep-rooted trees and shrubs.

I Don't envy you. Our soills are literally sand, so planting time is like a day at the beach.

I don't mean to be cheeky, but as you have the stones, maybe you could try your hand at Cattleya orchids?

http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/1566361/using-large-rocks-for-growth-media

My own conditions are similar to those described by Melissa and Tuderte. I'm perversely comforted to know that these two, plus Nik, are as loony as I am,lol. I do everything myself ("pick mattocks are a girl's best friend") , since my DH has so much on his own plate,plus no interest in gardening. I may have to start powering down a bit, though, since my back and right hip seem to be rebelling.Tuderte,thanks for the mention of this "terra pozzolana";I will have to look for that! because amongst my land's need for organic matter, I also need just plain old soil! since in many, many spots, it's been so eroded away,or is just all rocks,plus I have to replace the spots where I had roses failing-to-thrive -for several-years (I can't say actually "growing" in many cases) because I didn't know enough about soil to do the spots right. Thanks, Nik, for your mention many moons ago that the inert "mud" is necessary as well as organic matter: I have managed to cheer up many areas of my garden by lugging in heavy red clay that I dug up from a landslide on a road . But this is extremely hard on a middle-aged back : digging and bagging up the heavy clay (only diggable when it's been wetted by rain, of course),hoisting bags into car, hoisting bags out of car, dragging bags down to the garden. So I'm hunting for alternatives. Kitty litter seems pretty good-either plain cheap clay or betonite.In theory, I think Paul Zimmerman's thing about digging and preparing an entire rose bed is the best,because that way you avoid the risk of the "bath-tub effect",but in actual practice this isn't always an option. My latest conundrum is my bark chip mulch project. I found, over the summer, that plants rejoiced remarkably just by having their roots shaded and the weeds discouraged by my addition of the carboard plus the bark chips. I didn't even water these guys,but they still perked up as if I had done so. But now, it's begun to rain, and I see that,in several areas, the rain can't penetrate the cardboard-and chip mulch, and the soil below is dry. My garden is far too big for it to be possible to remove all the mulch I put down in the summer(I still have vast areas that need to recieve their first mulching). So one thing I'm trying is to plant stuff in these areas,digging a hole where I plan to put the new rose,pushing some of the mulch aside and incorporating some as organic matter into the hole,adding kitty litter, alfalfa hay ,cracked corn, manure grass clippings, etc, planting and watering,in the hope that the moisture and nutrients will start percolating into the surrounding areas. My goal eventually would be to get the entire area re-worked this way. Ideally, I'd only apply mulch to soil that was already thoroughly soaked by rain, but again, the project is just too big for that. Fact is, the mulch seems to help the soil along so much that it might be worth risking the dryness problem...

Bluegirl, where are you located?

Nik, Bluegirl, et al. Have you considered explosives?

Bluegirl's soil looks like the caliche in Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb, that I once gardened in. We called those huge limestone rocks "dragon teeth" that we pried up with similar looking tools.. Painful memories. Gean

Truly, after seeing the horrendous pictures, Bluegirl, I would consider explosives very seriously or not gardening at all. After reading this thread I'm so humbled on the one hand and filled with incredible respect for all of you who go through this for the love of gardens on the other. I've bookmarked this thread so that when I feel like whining about my tiny problems I can refer to your nightmare conditions and keep my mouth shut.

I second Ingrid's comment!

I third Ingrid's comment!

I'd have a Japanese garden with sand and rocks if I have a land filled with rocks and not too good soil. It's way too much work for me. :-)

Bluegirl, even I don't know if I would get into that trouble... Looks much worse than my situation. Hats off to you.

...if I bought a property and found that was my garden.....knitting would suddenly become an interesting proposition.... much respect to you...

Just looking at those photos made me very tired, lol!

There might be an easy way out........

Would it be easier to have a raised bed to grow roses?

Bluegirl ... I think I'm now the fourth to say 'respect' ... I'm not going to complain about my soil any more .... at least, not for the moment ... I've seen that 'pry bar' before but I don't believe it was in a gardening environment - just can't think where ...

LOL! I do love me some nice garden sympathy--many thanks!

Carriehelene, I'm on the hill country part of the Edwards Plateau.

Harborose--yup, DFW area has the same junk but more soil on top (usually)

Yes, yes, I OFTEN consider explosives :-p I've read some folks will dump a gallon of muratic acid down the hole when doing serious digging, like for trees.

Yes, raised beds ARE the way to go, fer sure. But it's a slow process. Actually the caliche & limestone rocks make fine walls for raised planting. Dig 1/2 way down, start piling the caliche around the hole, then fill with good soil. But I have lots of things in pots, too.

And, really, over a relatively short period of time it looks nice--at least I think so. I like the paths of white stone & caliche bordering the improved holes/beds.

This is an apricot bordered by Souvenir de la Malmaison, Ducher & a 4 o'clock bush (I know, I know, but the things grow here with no care at all & the hawk moths et. al. love them. Smell nice, too)

I miss the brugs & gingers we could grow on the coastal prairie. Miss the 39" of rain, too.

But don't miss the constant drenching miserable humidity nor the hurricane worries. Here we can grow tons of lavenders, sages, thymes--lots of other lovely plants we couldn't there.

I know it was a lot of work for you, but the end results are gorgeous!

The hill country is really beautiful, Bluegirl. We took our kids down to the Fredericksburg area a lot of summers. I was a lot younger when I used a pick and a iron bar to pry out those dragon teeth; I don't think I could do it now and I do admire your perseverance. After living in Allen with no real topsoil, just that caliche ... it looked like your pictures, we moved to McKinney which had black clay on top of the caliche. It was sticky when wet but if you start adding organics and keep adding and keep adding, it is really pretty good stuff. Hats off to you. What most amazed me are the wildflowers that would grow in that caliche - orange paintbrush grew wild. I tried so often to transplant it. Thanks for the memories, Bluegirl. Gean

Blue girl, your pictures are amazing and I was already thinking when I saw your first picture that I like the caliche paths, although knowing me I'd stumble and fall down umpteen times. The planted areas look beautiful, and I think it was very wise of you to grow mostly things that don't need to have the area dynamited first. A few roses can go a long way in your situation.....

Many thanks for the kind words & thoughts!

Yes, Harborose--I'm close to F'berg--you recognized the landscape well. We gardened on black "gumbo" clay for many years & recognized--like you--that it makes a fine rich fluffy soil when heavily amended with organics--I miss it!

In some ways our area is difficult but we aren't as extremely dry as those of you in southern CA or other areas that receive just a fraction of our rain or get much harsher winters. Yet I've seen some gorgeous photos from you all.

One of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen is that of another person dealing with caliche--Roselee's in San Antonio. She doesn't post here much anymore because she has reduced the number of roses she grows.

She has creatively & artistically worked with the soil/zone she's in to create the loveliest yard, most welcoming to people & wildlife. Here are some photos from this fall's tour.

Sunny area with blackfoot daisy, verbena, agaves & barrels.

a cascade of queen's crown & silver ponyfoot pouring off of a huge stump into a bird bath. The tree had died & had to be removed.

I remember seeing pix of her garden in years past with some pretty creative plantings and garden art then too. Glad she is still gardening and doing well. Thanks for the pictures. It is great to see people deal creatively to make wherever they are and whatever they deal with into something beautiful. Name of the game! Gean

This thread turned into a surprise tour of some wonderful beautiful gardens. Thanks, bluegirl! and congratulations on your work! Also this reminds me of what I usually remember: here we actually garden in quite favorable conditions. We have to dig lots and lots of big holes, yes, and fight off the neighbors' invading brush and deal with sundry other irritations. But the soil is diggable, and once amended, it's good forever after, not requiring the regular enrichment that sand calls for. Our winters are chilly but mild, and even an unusually hot summer like this year's has little of the muggy oppressiveness of my native Florida. We get adequate rain. While I certainly wouldn't object to better soil--we garden in some of the worst to be found in our area; there are some beautiful reddish-brown clays around, and I've even seen sandy loam--at least we can claim to have improved on what we started out with. My hat is off to all determined gardeners.

The new rose bed I want to make has soil similar to bluegirl. It's grey sticky clay and some strands of hard dry grey stuff. So, I'm putting in a concrete border and importing a bunch of good soil and basically just planting on top of that. Even the big machines that dug through this area last year had issues digging in it. It previously had Junipers cover in, but I had them removed. I knew the soil was not good, but I hoped with it being dug up and put back, it would be a bit more pliable. The first 6 inches are, but underneath is the same as it was before.