Urban soils

[Skippy]

I live on the edge of a small town so I'd class myself as Pretty much "semi-urban". My soil is pretty decent , dark , fertile and sandy. When digging it I always have a bucket or two by the side of me to put any rubbish in that I turn over.This year there were a few bits of glass and a paintbrush but I've never actually filled a bucket with rubbish any year for the past 8 or 9 years I've been digging it. None the less I've grumbled (that must be a first - a gardener moaning about his soil!)
However, as my work nowadays involves a fair bit of garden maintainence I'm comming into contact with a lot of other peoples soils and I'm begining to realise that I'm fortunate in many ways. Ok so I've dug in manure and soforth every year and taken out a bucket of crud but I'm finding some gardens are more like the bottom of a bulders skip than a fertile haven brick ends , concrete ,glass , tiles and stones stones stones are common and the age of the property doesn't seem to matter either.
If you live in an urban envoiroment what are your soils like and have you strived to improve them ?


Pete

[niknik]

Its a bit more like archaelogy than gardening!
just dug a bit more of my small garden yesterday, and full of very old builders rubble, and other assorted junk!
just never found anything old enough to really be of interest though!


You never know, what you might find, after all they dug up a king in a carpark!

[diggernotdreamer]

I live right in the countryside and when we put up the first polytunnel we got the poles in fine. When we started digging in the tunnel, we began to realise that what we had thought was a nice pile of rotted down cow manure was in fact disguising that the place had been used as a rubbish tip, we had to get in a skip to take the first lot of rubbish away that we dug out, then we had the outside smoothed last year and had to go and get rid of another 200kg of general waste and the same of scrap metal, old beds, tractor doors, old chain saw, toys, shoes etc etc. The soil was quite compacted in the field where we put the vegetable garden and was mostly clay loam, which after just 4 years of putting rotted down chicken and duck shavings, has now turned into the most wonderful, dark and friable soil, people here can't believe the quality of the soil and said I must have been very lucky, but it has just been application of the composts and no digging, good soil does not just happen.

[Skippy]

, good soil does not just happen.

Yes very true , my soil wasn't too bad when I moved in but I've dug in compost over the years and it's lovely and easy to work nowadays. A large area of the garden was slabbed when I moved in and I lifted them and grow on the ground and I was surprised that the soil was still pretty good underneath.
I like the comment about archaelogy and funnily enough since posting I dug up a small aluminium snuff box. Recently , too, I was grubbing out a bush and found a concrete foundation for want of a better word cast in the ground and seemingly having no relation to anything else. It was about 8ft long 1 ft wide and about 4" thick. I've managed to lift it whole and move it and plan to reuse it in a different spot, well I hate waste


Pete