Can we share photos of our soil/land?

[chrysanthemum]

I’ve seen some pictures recently of different types of soil, and I thought it would be interesting if we shared what our native ground looks like.  I’m not so much talking about heavily amended garden beds here as just what is under foot in your area of the country or the world.

hmoosek has black gumbo.  woodeye says that there is red gumbo in Oklahoma.  I’m down in Texas Hill Country and had to learn the term “caliche” to describe my land.

I took a few pictures today and thought I’d post them here.  The first shot is an area right behind our fenced backyard.  It’s part of an area that we call “the way back, and it’s about the same level as the backyard, but the ground slopes down there and levels out for a bit before it drops off again to a lower level that we call “the way, way back.”  

The first picture is the top part of the “way back” just behind our backyard.  Once we clear out the weeds here, I’m planning to transplant some native Texas wildflowers that I’ve been growing.  I hope that they’ll be able to grow and reseed themselves and that some seeds might even wash down to lower levels in good rainstorms.




This next picture is an area where my husband and I cleared out a bunch of cedar a couple of years ago.  It shows the drop from the “way back” to the “way, way back.”  



The last picture is a photo of the “way, way back.”  We need to pull those weeds before they go to seed.   We do have more wildflowers down here than we used to.  It was almost bare when we moved in except for cedar and horehound.  It’s recovering slowly.

[woodeye]

chrysanthemum , I rode around this morning looking for bare ground to include in some photos to better show what the soil is like on this place. Unfortunately, I was not able to find any areas that are not covered in vegetation of one sort or another, other than the pictures I have included in this post. I don't have any livestock, so everything just grows at will. 

It is interesting to see the areas that other forum members live in, this thread is an excellent idea. I will continue to look this place over and post more photos that will give a better description of the land that I call home. There are some sandy portions to the west, however I'll have to prune a path to get to them, the red cedars have blocked all of the old paths I used to use to get there. This place has a better layer of topsoil than the area south of me, but if I dig down a foot or so, the red clay soil is very evident. 
This was taken a few months ago, the soil is typical for that area. It dries relatively fast, but after a soaking rain is off limits for a few days.
This is the same area as the 1st photo, taken yesterday. This is the location that my garden enclosure will be built at next month.
This is the only bare ground I could fine other than the garden, it is just a trail heading into the woods at the end of the garden. There are definite color variations in the soil on this place. Everything from light tan, to brown, to light red, to dark red. Without plowing or tilling, the different colors of soil just aren't easy to see...

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks for all those photos, woodeye .  You had mentioned my rocks in our compost thread, but I thought I’d put the pictures I took just a bit ago to share over here in this one.


This is a photo of the area where we moved rocks (some with the help of a visiting front-end loader) to make a ring to go around a fire pit we bring out on occasion.  There never used to be vegetation in this area, but the land is beginning to recover from overgrazing, so it looks like we’ll have to trim down the grass at some point.


This is the biggest rock in the arrangement.  It came from a natural terrace just up the hill where it had broken out of the the wall, so to speak.  I didn’t take a tape measure down with me, but I’m pretty sure it’s about three and a half to four feet long.



This is the area where some of those rocks originated.





This is a view of the “terrace” from the side.  This is part of what we call our “way back.”  Down below here was the only area to have much of any vegetation when we moved in.  We are just letting it be a meadow, though trying to pull out or cut down the exotic invasives that don’t belong.

[woodeye]

Great photos, chrysanthemum. There is so much difference between our places, and this will probably sound strange to you, but I do wish I had some variety on this place such as a few acres with rocks like you have. When I lived on the place south of this one, I used to have permission from the neighbor that was south of it, to cut firewood or haul rocks, but that land has since sold. There was rocks all over it. One in particular was too big to move, it was 3 feet tall or more & the shape of a recliner, aptly dubbed the "chair rock". Very little imagination needed to name that rock. I hauled numerous loads of rocks up to the house for rock beds, and even though most of it was technically sandstone, some of it seemed halfway between sandstone and hard rock because it didn't break up easily. 

In the 3rd photo, on the left side, do you know what kind of trees those are with the dark, deeply furrowed bark? To me they resemble hickory bark, and since there are several kinds of hickory, I'm thinking they may be a variety of hickory that I have never seen. Hickory is my guess, but I may be way off the mark.

Cool...

[chrysanthemum]

Your wishing for “a few acres with rocks” did make me chuckle a bit. That’s what we have, of course. We do appreciate the beauty of it, but it’s also beautiful to see some areas beginning to fill in with grasses and flowers. The property had been severely overgrazed, and I think that overgrazing allowed a lot of erosion to take all the topsoil away from the slopes.


In that 3rd photo above, that is a big Red Oak Tree. I have an advantage in that I can see the leaves on it in real life. We have a bunch of Red Oaks all along the outside of the back yard, but they don’t survive well in times of drought. There were several dead ones standing when we moved in, and we’ve since lost at least two more. The leaves are beautiful in the fall, and we let them just stay on the ground to decay there and help build the soil back up.

I took some other pictures that I didn’t post earlier.  This is standing toward the top of our property in the area we named “The Northern Wasteland” when we moved in.  This area levels out and actually has some of our best soil, I think, though there is still a huge amount of rock.  It was an adventure trying to find places to drive t-posts to put up the garden fences.




This is a photo along the bottom of the shed that is behind my garden area.  My husband and I dug all around it over Memorial Day weekend to install some fencing to exclude armadillos and skunks.  It was tough, tough, tough, work.  We had previously been blocking areas with rocks, so we put a number of them back on top of the buried fencing.  I think this might be a bit more like what the native soil should be if it hadn’t eroded away.


This is the path I walk on every day to get to my garden gates.

[woodeye]

Boy I missed badly on the latest episode of 'Name that Tree'. I don't even have red oaks either, but I should have been a better contestant than that. I guess red oaks like rocks maybe? There was red oaks in the area of the rocks that I used to haul away. I'd never given that any thought. You rock people really rock, you got it all!

Some of your place reminds me of way back in the 70's when I had several jobs in southern Oklahoma. Healdton, and Lone Grove were the names of the towns if I remember right. First time I'd been in those areas and it was so different than home that I remember thinking I was in Mexico. I enjoyed all those jobs though, and the foreground of your 1st photo looks just like what I remember seeing there.

Cool again...

[hmoosek]

I’ll be sharing some, but right now a thunderstorm is brewing. It’s been coming in multiple waves with high winds. It bout beat my peas to death, but hopefully they will bounce right back. The porch plants came inside. I heard a knock at the door and they wanted in. Haha.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

What a cool idea! I like that suggestion a lot. I agree, it will be interesting to see all the different soil types of our various members around the world.

Basically, I live in an old creek bed, full of gravel bars and a few outcroppings of bedrock, much of which won't even grow weeds. Up around my house there is no dirt to speak of, just rocks and gravel, much of my yard is bare ground, because like I said, you can't even grow weeds on some of it.

The farther away from my house you get, the better the soil, if you get all the way down by Woodeye's house, the soil's actually pretty good.

My pH is around 5.4 it's good for growing blueberries, blackberries, and pawpaws, but almost intolerable for cucumbers and other 'sweet soil' loving plants. When we first moved here, back in 2004 we were looking for a garden site, but there didn't seem to be any likely soil around here.  My sons and I dug a gas line ditch and had to haul away a wheelbarrow full of rocks every 2' feet.  We had to buy topsoil to backfill the ditch because there wasn't enough dirt to cover the gas line up. 

Then, one day, my youngest son, who was about 6-years old at the time, was playing around with a sharpshooter shovel out back; he would stand it up on end, then jump on the shovel like it was a pogo-stick.  To my great surprise, he sunk it up to the hilt in the place where he was standing!  I ran down there where he was playing and said, "Let me see that shovel for a second."  Everywhere I put it, I was finding silt just as deep as the spade part of the shovel was long.  Then, out of curiosity, I tried a rock bar in that spot.  I jammed it into the ground, wiggled it around and jammed it deeper.  Each time I did that, it sank several inches, until the rock bar was about 3' feet in the ground.  I was elated!  It was like the Beverly Hillbillies when Uncle Jed struck oil!  Woo-Hoo!!!

We didn't have a tractor back then, or even a tiller, so we borrowed a team of mules from a neighbor and plowed a garden spot about 30' feet by 75' feet and planted our first decent garden in years. 

In years to come, we enlarged it to about a quarter acre. (Currently, it's up to about half an acre)...

I think it was around 2008 when I heard rumor of a State-wide Plasticulture grant, to incentivize beginning farmers to start growing truck crops for the budding farmers markets that they were promoting at the time.  I signed up for the program as soon as I heard of it  I told them our circumstances, and that we were currently working with a team of borrowed mules.  They put us at the top of their list. 

When Micah Anderson first drove out here from the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture to lay the plastic, he said, "When I turned off onto your property, I thought to myself, 'This guy must be crazy if he thinks he can garden down here!'" Then, he said, "Add to that, the fact that you told me you were working it with a mule, and I though to myself, 'That poor old mule!'"

This is a photo of my backyard, right out our back door.  Even after nearly 8" inches of rain in the month of August, the grass still won't grow here.

This is a photo of the ground in my front yard; same thing, no grass will grow there either.  I haven't mown since the first week of June.  The drought here was pretty hard on most of my lawn.  I have tall weeds in spots and bare ground in others, it sort of reminds me of my Father-in-Law's head.   (I love you, Chester!)

This is a close-up of just about anywhere you care to look around our yard. 

This is typical for what kind of rock we are looking at here, mostly iron stained chert.

This is what it looks like if you put a plow to it.

This is what it looks like if you put a road grader to it.

Just more of the same, a bit farther down the road.

Same 'o, same 'o.

This is a steel survey post at our property line.

This is the old roadbed, beside the new roadbed.  Who knows why they moved it over?  Maybe, they were looking for dirt?

This is a cut-away where the dry creek bed behind our house has washed down to bedrock about 3' feet below the surface.

when you get to my garden spot, about 500' feet South of our house, there is 8" inches of topsoil covering about a foot of red clay, then at 18" inches deep, you'll hit creek gravel.  At about three feet deep, it's bedrock. As you can see from the photo, I have to be really careful, or I'll plow a hole through the topsoil and hit red clay.  This is red clay seepage where I got a little too close in places.

This is the silt lying just above the red clay.  It's pretty good stuff!

This is just a shot down one of my rows.  They are from 150' to 200' feet long. My rows are set on 10' foot centers.  That way, I can sort of rotate my soil, by growing cover crops and moving over to farm the walkways every other year.  (Only this year, none of my seed germinated.  I've planted 15 pounds of red clover seed since last September and haven't had a single seed germinate.  (I wish the Farmer's Co-op was required to get their seed germ tested.)

This is another spot where I shaved it pretty close and churned up a little bit of the red clay that lies below the silt.  (Thank, God, for silt)!

This is right next to my garden, where the drought killed the grass so bad that it still hasn't greened back up after nearly 8" inches of rain in August.  That just makes it easier to spot the copperhead snakes that we seem to have an over abundance of.



Overall, it's not too bad here though.  Plenty of trees and lots of good shade in most places.  I never liked mowing much anyhow.

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks, heavyhitterokra, for all those pictures and details. All this time I’ve been imagining you overrun with grass all over your yard. This gives me a much better idea. Good shade trees are a wonderful thing, I agree.

[chrysanthemum]

triffid , I was just reading some of your posts about beans and noticed once again in your signature the words “brown calcareous earth.” I find that so intriguing because where I live I have high amounts of limestone in the soil (and we find fossilized clams and seashells about). A lot of our topsoil eroded away before we moved here, and to me the land is white more than brown. I’m wondering if you have pictures of your native soil that you could share here so that we could all enjoy seeing it. You’re quite close to the coast, right? (I’m a couple hundred miles inland up in the hills, so it makes it especially fun to find seashells.)

[triffid]

Yes, right on the coastline on eroded chalk. Left behind so much flint it was used as a building material here. Very frustrating when trying to dig with a spade! I'll try to remember to get some pictures when I'm next at the plot.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

When I zoom in on the photos of your land, they remind me of the terrain around Falls Creek in Davis, Oklahoma. Every time I see your acreage, I half expect to glance down and discover a dinosaur track.  You have beautiful building material there.  If I had rocks like those, I'd probably be busy half the time, trying to build rock walls and would probably end up with a small castle. None of our rocks here stack up, they are mostly just busted, fragmented, pieces of chert.  They make the ugliest walls you can imagine.

[chrysanthemum]

Nothing would thrill my younger son more than finding a dinosaur track. A somewhat local park has a model of a “dinosaur trackway” that was built to replicate prints that were discovered nearby a.good long time ago after some flooding. I don’t remember the details of when and exactly where, but we took my little one to that park for a picnic on his last birthday. Because the prints are a model, they can be walked in by folks, and it’s just amazing to see those things.

We have rocks and rocks and rocks. My kids have built a few fire rings, but that’s about it. They helped pick out the rocks for our seating in our fire pit area, and we’ve moved rocks from time to time for various purposes, but we haven’t done any actual building. I’ve seen some pretty nice stone walls around here, though.

[chrysanthemum]

Sept 13, 2022 2:38:35 GMT -6 triffid said:

Yes, right on the coastline on eroded chalk. Left behind so much flint it was used as a building material here. Very frustrating when trying to dig with a spade! I'll try to remember to get some pictures when I'm next at the plot.

I forget that your garden isn’t in your backyard, except that you probably call what I call a “backyard” a “garden.”  I’ll look forward to pictures.  Thanks.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

here is a link to an article written by USA Today, discussing newly found dinosaur tracks at Dinosaur State Park in Texas.
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/08/23/texas-drought-reveals-dinosaur-tracks/7879831001/

The severe drought of 2022 has exposed new tracks that appear to be more numerous and in better condition than the old tracks they had found there previously. Those are incredibly interesting photos to see and read about.



It really seems crazy that up until the mid-1800s Americans, in general, had never seen or heard of dinosaurs. It was reported in 1804, that the Lewis and Clark Expedition stumbled onto dinosaur bones somewhere in South Dakota, sketched them, and went on, not having a clue what they were looking at. The word, "Dinosaur" had not even been coined at the time. William Clark wrote in his journal that day, “We found a backbone with the most of the entire laying Connected for 45 feet. Those bones are petrified, Some teeth & ribs also Connected.”

In the meantime here in my own garden, I've not found anything nearly as cool as a dinosaur track, but interesting nonetheless for a garden plot.