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Soil Building....

Good soil is comprised of three primary building blocks: Sand, silt, and clay. One of the challenges of post-construction soil building is getting rid of the rock and concrete chunks that inevitably end up scattered around the site.

Here is what the `soil' looks like in our front courtyard. This area was the primary site for stucco mixing and a large load of gravel was dumped here when they installed the foundation. In addition to that, the area had a LOT of compaction.

What to do?


I knew that in order to get anything other than weeds to grow here, I was going to have to get some of the gravel and concrete and stucco layers out of the soil.

One shovel at a time, I screened the soil in the planting bed on the freeway side of the sidewalk. I'm not sure what this steel grate was originally used for, but today it was a gravel screen.




After removing five 5-gallon buckets of gravel from the right side of the sidewalk, I added some compost and it is starting to look like garden soil once again.


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