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What to do with soil...

danielle1990danielle1990 Posts: 4
in Problem solving
I recently started taking care of our local community garden, and am a total novice when it comes to gardening. The garden has some beds with mounds of soil on them, what do I do with them? Should I leave it and add fresh compost so it makes it a higher mound? Or should I shovel the top off so it's more even and then add fresh compost?? 

Is there a special reason for the mounds, or did my predecessor just pile it all on? :D
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  • Papi JoPapi Jo Posts: 4,254
    Welcome to our forum, @danielleverdoesaFfm6jXL !
    Is there a special reason why the care of your local community garden was entrusted to a total gardening novice? ;)
  • danielle1990danielle1990 Posts: 4
    We all got to start somewhere @Papi Jo! City life has never blessed me with a garden, but I don't lack in enthusiasm what I might lack in knowledge :)

    Is there a special reason for the shade? Or is that how you welcome all newcomers? Haha (only joking ;) ) 
  • Blue OnionBlue Onion Posts: 2,995
    Welcome to the forum.  
    Do you have a picture you could post?  Maybe they are edgeless raised beds?  Or maybe the ground is prone to water logging and this helps keeps roots from rotting?  Or maybe the no-dig mound method?  
    Utah, USA.
  • GreenBeeGreenBee Posts: 9
    Hi and welcome

    It may be that the mounds may be locally generated compost that gets distributed around the community gardens, that tends to be what happens on our local plots.

    I suggest you try to reach out to your predecessor and also gather some of the community too, many hands and all that.
  • LiriodendronLiriodendron Posts: 8,328
    Are they planted already?  If not, are they intended to be flower or veg beds, or both?
    Since 2019 I've lived in east Clare, in the west of Ireland.
  • B3B3 Posts: 27,505
    The thing about soil is that when it's gone, it's gone. It doesn't grow back. So make sure that you really don't need it before you do anything drastic.
    In London. Keen but lazy.
  • danielle1990danielle1990 Posts: 4
    Thanks for all the help everyone! I've attached two pictures below @Blue Onion
    It's a mix of borderless and borders, I added a picture of the compost bin just to give you an idea of the height of the mounds.. I'd say around an extra foot in height? (they are not as gritty though, the soil in the raised beds seems quite sandy/grey to me and has little to no rocks) as in the other picture the plants conceal them! 

    @Liriodendron There are some plants growing already, as you can see in the pictures below but there are a lot of open areas as well. The soil is very compact, I tried to use a cultivator on it to loosen it a bit, but that would take a lot of brute force! 

    I say community garden, because it's next to the community center on our block but it's been taken care of by one local resident before me who has now moved away, I don't have her contact details @GreenBee but I could ask if the housing community would give them to me. The garden hasn't been tended to for quite a while - there is a serious English Ivy problem I'll need to tackle (but that's for another time/post :D )  

    I think she has only grown plants in the beds and I suspect some veggies in containers, but I'd like to grow some produce in the beds as well as keeping the plants. 


  • didywdidyw Posts: 3,573
    Well done @danielleverdoesaFfm6jXL on volunteering to take on this pretty little garden. I cannot see that there is excess soil in the raised beds but I think they would need a top up with some decent compost.  The one in the middle of the top picture does look as if it is mounded up. You could scrape some of that away and top it up to refresh the beds.  Is that compost that has spilled out of the compost bin in the picture below?  Is the door still around, or has that long gone?  Perhaps you can find something that will block up the hole so that the compost doesn't spill out and you can start adding waste green stuff (chopped up fairly small) at the top, to create more compost over time.
    It all looks very shaded.  I would spend this year clearing as much as you can - including pulling out as much ivy as you can - you won't get rid of it all and it will keep growing back - clearing out the rubbish, adding compost to the tired spent soil, adding a feed to the beds with shrubs in and generally getting to know the bones of your patch.
    Feel free to come back to the forum, with pics of the plants to find out more about them, asking for ideas of what will grow in the space...  
    I know how difficult it is to find volunteers to take on any kind of job, so hats off to you.
    Gardening in East Suffolk on dry sandy soil.
  • LiriodendronLiriodendron Posts: 8,328
    If your town has a Facebook forum, or similar, you could post pictures on there and ask if anyone has any spare plants they could donate - or any time to help you with developing the garden.  The town where I used to live in West Yorks, Todmorden, started a movement called "Incredible Edible", using spare land all over the town (planters in the railway station, outside the police station, in school yards, round the medical centre etc) to grow mostly food crops, for anyone to pick and use.  It started with two neighbours who had small gardens putting spare produce on their walls with a notice saying "Help yourself!".  The Incredible Edible movement is now worldwide, so you never know what your bit of gardening will lead to...   :)
    Since 2019 I've lived in east Clare, in the west of Ireland.
  • JennyJJennyJ Posts: 10,576
    The bed nearest the camera in the first pic looks as if it's a raised bed where the wood sides are badly rotted. Maybe the others were raised beds whose wooden sides have completely gone.
    Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Soil type: sandy, well-drained
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