Clay, Straw & Manure - The Beginning

There are only 2 ways to garden -

Expensive (have someone else do it for you) or

Cheap (do things yourself). 

I definitely preferred cheap.

Our Garden Tale Begins

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We had finally built our dream house. That was about 15 years ago. 

It never occurred to me that the builder would strip away every bit of top soil he could get his hands on and leave us - well actually leave me since I do the gardening - with a front yard full of nothing but the hardest, most solid clay ever to be found.  Not even rye grass, that most easy to grow builder's grade lawn, would grow.

Thinking this would be too massive a project for me to correct, I had several area landscapers give me estimates for making the front yard look respectable.  I wasn't asking for Winterthur or Duke Gardens - just a nice looking yard.

At the end of 1 year.
Straw covered the manure. 
The manure settled
and worked it's way into the
 clay soil below.
Eventually, I tilled it all together. 

The estimates were out of sight - everywhere from $20,000 to $40,000.  We're not talking acres here, only a modest, not even subdivision size, front yard.  (See the pictures.) Maybe 1000 square feet - max.  I was shocked.  Who had that kind of money?

Most of the landscapers' cost estimates were for truck loads of top soil that had to be brought in - probably the very same top soil my builder had removed and sold to them - and tons of fertilizer.

None of the companies would use the massive amounts of manure we had from our horses.  They would only use their own organic kind.  (Mine wasn't organic enough?)

Year 2
Getting ready to plant
bushes
 and trees.

After all was said and done (and $20,00 to $40,000 later), my front yard would look like every subdivision yard - 2 small trees, a few bushes and a lawn that would have to be watered and mowed.  What a waste of all that hard earned money!

There are only 2 ways to garden - expensive (have someone else do it for you) or cheap (do things yourself).
I definitely prefer cheap so I decided to do the landscaping myself.

It would take time (the landscapers would have everything done and planted in 2 to 3 days) but in the end I would have the satisfaction of doing it myself and saving tons of money.

Pots of pansies brightened 
up the front door.

First things first.....
I started by covering every square inch of my solid clay with the raw manure collected from mucking the horse stalls.  Night after night I mucked and dumped.  Nothing fancy.  Just mucked and dumped, piling the manure to a depth of 18 inches. That's a lot of manure but I had plenty so I used plenty.

I covered the piles with straw to make it look presentable while it decomposed.  It took a couple of months to cover the whole garden area with the straw covered manure and it took a year for the manure to decompose but it eventually did.

While I waited, I planted some containers and put them around the front door for a pop of color as they say in the garden magazines.
.
The only money I actually spent  to create my front garden (aside from the pops of color) was on plants - and that came to around $400 total.

Trees were the biggest expense with rose bushes coming in a close second.
Most of other plants I used were free or cheap because I had grown them from seed or cuttings.

 

Year 3
My cottage garden entry

 After a year, I began tilling the manure and clay together.  It was   slow going.  

 Then I top dressed everything with a couple of inches of compost.  The soil wasn't perfect but it was incredibly better.

 I added some trees and bushes as the foundation for my garden.  The other plants filled in and created the flow my garden wanted for itself.

My perfect, graph paper drawn plans had, by then, only become a suggestion as my garden took on a life of it's own but I had my garden!!

Fifteen years later, it's still a work in progress......