IceFire wrote:
cellengrac wrote:I carried my little rabbit garden gifts down to the planter box yesterday. This will be my third year in our stepping stone house. It is on a steep hill have had a lot of problems figuring out how to garden on a hill. I am relocating to the front yard this year which isn’t as steep. I am ordering some peet pellets to start next week. I am also ordering some extra to use next year.
I tried the potato cage last year using wheat straw and it didn’t work either. After if listening to The video on the other post this may be my forever house. Any tips on gardening on a hill would be very much appreciated. I have always had a level to gently rolling yard. After tilling the first time most of my good dirt washed over the cliff so I am saving all my animals gifts kitchen scraps leaves and what not to compost but that will be another year before I have enough.
We used to live on what I referred to as “the hill from he!!” Over a period of a couple of years, I terraced it, to give me some level planting areas, and keep everything from washing down the hill every time it rained. You can use cinderblocks, those “castlewall” blocks, rock walls, etc. as retaining walls to hold the soil in place. Start from the bottom, build a retaining wall (it can be as low as 6 inches to a foot or more, depending on the steepness of your hill) then level the ground back a couple of feet. At the back of that terrace, do another wall, and repeat. People in many cultures around the world have used terracing in order to farm on steep hills.
IceFire is right, about the only way to do it is terrace, use blocking methods and build up small areas. We live on the side of a mountain, in the woods, on a rock.
So I have little garden areas here and there where I have modified the area to put in a crop or two, then something else in the next area. I use logs for terrace building, because that’s what I have. The horse area is quasi level, but still on a significant enough slope that we have lost about 4″- 6″ in “soil” over the last several years, so I put big logs at the edge of their area, collect the top soil that drains off the mountain, and cart it back up to the garden areas. One…..bucket….at …a …..time…. 
Statistics: Posted by Stahlrosen — Fri Jan 27, 2017 7:01 pm