Growing limited crops on poor soil.

[kenneal - lagger]

I recently learned that it's possible to grow potatos in grass clippings, it made me wonder if I should start cutting more land for hay and spreading it on my veg patch. I'm in favour of "concentrating" the veg into a smaller area tightly spaced, to minimise weeding, so building s small area of great soil is more important than keeping a large area of average fertility.

Keep a cow or some milk goats in a shed zero grazing the land and use the dung produced to fertilize the gardened area.

I've also concluded that free-ranging my pigs is not doing my soil any favours, as they regularly concentrate on a small area and strip it back to bare mud, which can't resist erosion.

That depends on timing. If you can take the pigs off in time to plant a cover crop for the winter you will have some excellent soil for the following spring.

[adam2]

Update time.
As was suggested upthread, a load of purchased compost was obtained. Mixed composted food waste, composted bark, leaves and wood chips, and waste paper that was intended for recycling but that had rotted in storage.
Also wood ash from somewhere with a biomass boiler.

One field was ploughed with very widely spaced furrows as earlier described and the compost added to the furrows.
Another field had the mixed compost simply spread on the surface.

[UndercoverElephant]

We have the same soil problem in west wales. Fortunately we also have an enormous pile of horse manure, and we are trying three different techniques. In the first section we have dug in a lot of manure and manually removed the largest stones, the second is no-dig - covering with cardboard and then dumping a load of manure on top of the cardboard, and in the third, which is right next to the manure mountain, I am removing the existing soil to make banks around a bed, and then filling to about 30-40cm deep with pure rotted manure. Without the manure it would be ten times harder, of course. We also have a second manure heap, which happens to be on the only sheltered south-facing wall available to grow things. In that case the plan is to excavate to a level surface and put a fruit cage there, and grow fruit bushes in soil which is pure, compacted, rotted horse manure.