How Much Land Needs To Be Cleared For A Garden In The Woods

pollinator

Posts: 362

Location: south-central ME, USA - zone 5a/4b

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posted 5 years ago

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My experience with this has been that the soil doesn't want to grow annuals and other things that prefer bacterially dominant soils for at least the first year... This may have a lot to do with soil disturbance (specifically, how much or little disturbance you make and how much of the fungal colony beneath the leaf drop layer remains intact). Areas where I've dug the soil up a bit and "turned it", even if only a little, were much more receptive after a shorter time (2-3 months). We have a layer of gooey bentonite just below the relatively thin humus layer from the poor logging practices used here in the past, then brown/red clay below that, so any soil disturbance I make turns everything to pudding for the spring and fall, then cement for the summer, so I try to do as little disturbance as humanly possible. That means waiting longer before anything, even white dutch clover, will take. Forest soil is naturally more acidic, even under maples, because it is fungus-dominant. Barring a quick pH test of your soil which would tell you in plain numbers, if you dig down and find worms working, you should be ok right off the bat, but if there's no worms, you can assume the soil is too acid to take most veggies. Give it a year to let the soil biota do its thing and you'll have much better success with them - you can use worms and annual grasses as an indicator that the soil pH is in a good place for your garden veggies.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there may be allelopathic compounds in the top layer of soil that will retard the sprouting of many sun loving, annual vegetable seeds (another thing I've run into with quite a bit of white pine, eastern hemlock and balsam fir mixed to sugar maple, alder, aspen and birch). After a year, this doesn't seem to be a problem any longer, but even a lot of the grass seed I spread in the first season after clearing some "pasture" from brushy growth took a full 4 months to even sprout (by which time, the growing season was nearly over!).

All the various perennials you mention (except perhaps the mulberry and goji - not sure on those) should do fine with the fungal-dominance and most any allelopathic compounds. In fact, blueberries and strawberries are going to prefer it greatly around the pine stumps, so the sooner you put them in, the better I'd definitely wait before planting lettuces and broccoli into that soil, though, even if only to spare yourself the heartache of seeing half the seeds not even sprout while the thousands of maple shoots come screaming up from your stumps (you currently have a coppiced woodland and it's going to want to behave like one). Tomatoes might be ok if you can keep them in some sun, along with other perennials that we usually grow as annuals, but you should definitely give the soil a little time to shift from the one paradigm to the other