The soil around this newly built house is very poor quality and it will take years to make it more healthy. Where possible, I am adding organic matter and choosing plants and gardening strategies that should help with this process.
One of the few places that has received no help from me so far is the flower bed in front of the house — what I now call the Pollinator Garden. This bed was already created and landscaped when we moved in, with the aforementioned poor soil and several inches of dyed black mulch. Here’s what we started with:
Over the past year and a half, I have replaced almost all of the builder-installed plants with native and pollinator-friendly plants. Each time I put a new plant in the ground, I added extra Mycorrhizae to stimulate root growth. However, other than that there has been little else done to improve the soil quality.
I finally drilled far enough down my to-do list to take this on as a project. The idea is to remove as much of the original black mulch as possible without disrupting the plants, and to replace that with compost and a light layer of natural mulch. One might argue that the best time to have done this would be when we first moved here, but I didn’t have the experience to know that then.
This is what the bed looked like at the beginning of the project (August 2024):
I was able to scrape off a few buckets of the original black mulch, which was added to pathways in the back garden. This mulch had formed a crust, under which was poor quality sandy dirt and stones.
Where the soil was exposed, I spread four bags of store-bought mushroom compost. On top of that I then spread two and a half bags of hardwood and cedar mulch (I mixed the two kinds). This mulch has a thinner texture than the original chunky black covering, and I hope that it will break down more quickly to feed the soil.
Going forward, probably a better time to replenish mulch will be winter, perhaps at the same time that plants are cut back, and it shouldn’t be necessary to remove old mulch. My hope is that the mulch I have added will decay and become soil.
Rewilding My Lot 
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