Afraid Of Big Bad Clay?

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They said when I came to Hillcrest Acres (it was mudcrest then) that I would never have a flower garden on the heavy, sticky, joint clay. I was almost ready to believe it myself for the first year. It was too dry or too wet to work all the time. I had few vegetables and flowers that first year and was beginning to think that maybe I had bought a white elephant.

An old sawdust pile was near and free for me to use. A neighbor had been piling his coal ashes in a heap for years and I could get them by hauling in a wheelbarrow. I was a minister and a small town postmaster with two or three other jobs, but I laid down my Bible and pen and reached for the shovel and spade. All spare time that I could spare I put it to spading, hauling ashes and sawdust. As we went forward in bringing Hillcrest Acres to beauty and bounteous harvest, we had two objects that had to be kept in view. We wanted something to eat now and some beauty of bloom to remove the drabness from our, as yet, unlandscaped acres. This was long before zoysia grass was started.

It was not my intention to put fertility into the clay soil by the use of ashes and sawdust. In fact let none think that coal ashes have much value in feeding crops. Wood ashes have more plantfood in them but are not as good for breaking up heavy clay soils. Unless sawdust has reached a stage of advanced decay it will take up some nitrogenous matter from the soil. But when you are trying to penetrate and work into clay like mine, you cannot have your cake and eat it, too. Besides the regular amount of fertilizer used under the crops and flowers, I made a good guess towards the amount of sawdust in bushels and added about a pound to the bushel for two years. I put in about an inch of sawdust in the Spring and plowed it under. In the Summer as crops grew I added some more as a mulch.

I knew too much of these materials could have disastrous effects so I have given this one treatment of the dust and ashes. I am expecting to repeat the dose next year. In the meantime, I am giving my flower beds, garden and truck patches, everything that I can lay my hands on in the way of humus. I am not afraid of getting too much of that. All the garden stalks and vines and weeds, the canning refuse from the kitchen, all the droppings from the chicken house and all the leaves and straw that I have time to carry from the woods, go into the clay on Hillcrest Acres.

The long neglected and forsaken hill has started to come into a thing of beauty and joy. But it is not doing it of itself. It is taking work and then some more work.

Sawdust and coal ashes mixed into stiff, joint clay with plenty of vegetation of one kind and another will make a red, muddy hill into a garden spot of the town.

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