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Garden journal entry |
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A clay mine below the sandy layer |
December 01, 2024. Our cul-de-sac lot has a generous back yard, but a tiny front yard (which has the advantage it takes only 5 minutes to mow). Per neighborhood requirements, it still contains two shade trees, both live oaks – and in the eight years since the home was built, those have grown respectable canopies, enough to cast a good bit of shade on our lawn, which, again per neighborhood requirements, consists of bermudagrass. Bermudagrass hates shade. That's probably why, over the past few years, the patches of lawn between the oaks and the west side of the house have become sparser in lawn grass, and even the weeds that attempt to take its place struggle. So I recently decided to give up on the idea of grass growing there, and instead enlarged the foundation borders along the front facade of the house, on both sides of the front walk. This is when I found out that the shade was only one reason for the grass' poor showing: another contributing factor is that the lawn was appararently planted on nearly pure sand, brought in by the builder to cover over the masonry debris (I unearthed half a wall in my recent digging) and bring the lawn level up near the top of the poured foundation (I must say I'm happy that the builder elevated the foundation above the surrounding terrain – that came very much in handy during hurricane Harvey's flooding rains). Normally, digging new borders in the sticky Texas clay around my home requires bringing in plenty of composty material along with some sand to improve its texture; but in this case, I had too much sand, and needed clay to improve the water retention of the soil for my new border. The only way to do that was to go mine for clay, by digging deep, below the layer of construction debris, to where the hardpan clay layer started. Which was hard work, so I perhaps didn't extract as much clay as I might have wanted. But I augmented liberally with the not-quite-compost contents of my compost bin, so I hope the soil will be water-retentive enough to support the new plants I've installed there. There's still more grass-free lawn to be concerned about – but I'll worry about that some other time. |
Last modified:
September 09, 2009
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