Something that I have to think about quite a bit at the new homestead is how to transform tons and tons, quite literally, of hard compacted clay into something that I can actually work with and that is really quite a challenge in my past garden.

It's basically just, hey, build a raised bed, put some good soil in it, work in it.

Now I have 12,800 square feet to deal with, so it's a different equation.

So how do you do it?

Well, the first thing that you look at is a deep mulch or deep composting system.

And that's really one of the easier ones because you don't have to do a whole lot of work.

You just put stuff on top and wait for time in mother nature to take its toll.

So let's look at that method and talk about why you might want to do it as well as some of the

pros and the cons. Well if you're doing a

deep mulch you have to get a lot of materials so let's take a look at compost for example.

With compost at a large scale you simply aren't going to be able to make enough on your property to transform the soil.

So you need to get compost from elsewhere, which means you need to find compost at a scale that's either not going to break the bank or simply is just enough

because for me if I wanted to do even six inches of compost over my entire

property we're talking about quite literally tons of compost. So how do I get it to my

property? How do I make sure that it's good quality? That's really the second

equation is how do you make sure you actually get good quality compost now at that scale you really have to go to a bulk supplier and in my case I've found one in my local municipality the landfill here in San Diego makes pretty good

compost which is held to quite a high standard from a regulatory perspective.

So is it perfect? Well no nothing is perfect but at that scale, it's quite nice.

And it seems to do really well, especially for my friend Bridgette over at San Diego Seed Company,

who, if she's growing enough and successfully enough to produce seeds to then sell.

It's certainly going to be good enough for me.

And another thing to remember is, the compost does not have to be absolutely perfect.

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