We have a spot where I think fill from a highway cut must have been dumped a long time ago. The spot was sort of a moonscape when we first moved here. We simply stopped mowing it and left a circular 'wild-garden' in the lawn. Funny thing is that grass that's mowed won't grow there but a whole bunch of wild grasses, daisy, Brown Eyed Susan’s and other wild flowers do just fine. It turns into an OK wild garden and given us something different each year. We just can't mow it.

A couple of days ago I took about a yard of compost out of our pile and tilled it into an area along the house where I used sand fill to improve the house's back grading. It would have been better to wait until fall and let new material added this spring compost more thoroughly. But I hope to get the area to grow things just fine with a little initial help from ag lime and chem nitrogen.

We got the compost from putting leafs, pine needles and bedding straw into a shallow excavation in our bush, covering it with soil and turning it several times a year. There's about three more yards left in the pit and we've only been at it 2.5 years. Although your area is a lot larger than mine, a idea might be to improve the soil for a few years by planting ground cover and then tilling in the cover and a lot of soil improvement material over several years. If you're in an area that gets winter, the ground cover would keep you from having a mud flat except for a several short periods a year.

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