Soil is a very precious commodity and therefore we have gone to some considerable length (probably too far!) to recover soil from the various excavations for land drains, cable ducts, vegetable beds and planting trees.
Every hole dug is hard going with pickaxe and mattock and result in a pile of broken rock and stone with some soil mixed in. The ‘soil’ (largely rock dust!) is useful to fill raised beds when mixed with compost and the stone for backfilling land drains. Larger bits of rock will be used for paths.
To sort these out we have improvised a screen made from an old gate covered with garden netting. Below this is a second screen made from galvanised wire mesh. Large stone are retained on the netting and are ‘bounced’ down the length of the gate. The stones and soil that fall through the netting are then screened through the mesh with the ‘soil’ falling to the ground and the smaller stone collected in a bucket.
The system works well provided everything is reasonably dry otherwise it all sticks together and does not pass through the screen.
The one final process is washing the smaller stone. As the soil is clayey, quite a bit sticks to the smaller stones or just small balls of clay don’t go through the smaller mesh. If this was used for backfilling a land drain, the clay would clock up the perforated pipe.
The stones were washed in a sieve with water from the stream and the washings filtered using a bulk bag that gravel was delivered in. Wash water drained back to the stream. There was a 20m length of blue water pipe we found in our hedge that we recovered and by simply weighting one end in the bottom of the stream up the field we had quite a flow of water. This gave us another idea, more of which later…
This proved to be a very slow and back breaking task and I am not sure if simply leaving the stone out in the rain for a while would not achieve the same result!
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