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 them in a wheelbarrow.
I am a rural 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.
I put all my spare time into spading, hauling ashes and sawdust. As we brought Hillcrest Acres to beauty and bounteous harvest, we had two objects to be kept in view.
We wanted something to eat now and some blooming beauty to remove the drabness from our as-yet unlandscaped acres.
Solutions To Improve The Soil
I did not intend to put fertility into the clay soil by using ashes and sawdust. Let none think that coal ashes have much value in feeding crops. Wood ashes have more plant food 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 trying to penetrate and work into a day 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 about 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. As crops grew in the summer, I added more mulch.
Application of Ashes and Sawdust
I knew too many of these materials could have disastrous effects, so I gave 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 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.
Balance Use of Ashes and Sawdust
The long-neglected and forsaken hill has become a thing of beauty and joy. But it is not doing it in 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.
44659 by William Derris Griffin