pick-till gardening
- To: m*@ucdavis.edu
- Subject: pick-till gardening
- From: R* R*
- Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 11:40:05 +0800
"I ruined one shovel in the effort, and keep it as a
> conversation piece. It was literally as hard as cement. "
>
Kurts shovel ruining exercise reminded me of two incidents I'll not
forget ;-)
One involved a day spent on a research station in the middle of our
wheatbelt.
I had to take soil samples to 10 cm depth (about 4 inches) and the
site we requested
was supposed to be light sandy country so we could get cores out
easily.
Maybe they had it in for me but the site was almost pure clay and
had set as hard as a rock.
I started out using a pristine core sampler and by the end of the
day and 50 cores later had a loverly concertina effect on my tube
shortening it by about 5-10 cm.
I keep it as a souvenir in my office.
The other experience with tough soils was when as a student at uni I
spent 4 weeks on a mine site working in rehab. The site manager wanted a few
trees planted around the site office for shade and wind breaks. This was at
Eneabba where summer temps on site are constantly over 40° C each day in Jan
and Feb and it is very very windy there.
The soils are normally very sandy but the site office was built on
the tip site of mineral sand tailings and with all the very big heavy
machinery passing over it was like concrete. A pick just bounced off it!
Not to be fazed the foreman (they get that job cause they know a few
tricks) called up the fire truck, cranked up this huge pump, wound out the
firehose and proceeded to blast several dozen holes in the ground in a
matter of minutes. We had the job finished in less than an hour when we
first thought it was going to be an all day effort.
I still use the hose at home now to punch a hole through the clay
layer that sits about 2 feet below the surface. It certainly helps the
plants to put down a tap root quickly and aids in deep watering the planting
site. I've just got to remember to remove the fitting off the end of the
hose, another lesson well learnt.
Rod
