Dirt Screen

[Tom King]

On my to-do list has been to make a dirt screen for several years.  I have a mountain of composted material that has a good amount of foreign material in it.  Also, when trying to spread it with a blade even one rock will make it impossible to spread it out with an even surface.

I just haven't had time to build one, and never even ordered the material.  A young man had this one on Marketplace for sale that he'd built for one job.  It was pretty cheap, so I decided to get it expecting to have to beef it up some, but figured it was worth what he was charging for it just to give me a better start.  The frame is pretty lightweight and it just has OSB for sheathing.  The screen is hog panel wire with rabbit wire over that.

I decided to try it like it was and to my surprise it works great just like it is.  I stir up a bucket full with the tractor out of the side of the mountain and slowly sift it out over the screen.  It sheds half the material but I can either run it again or just push that aside and get some more fresh.

What it produces is pretty amazing stuff.  This is three buckets full.  It turns about half of what I drop on it into really finely screened pretty amazing looking stuff.  I will still beef it up when I can get to it, but for now this is going to be a big help.  It's 8 feet wide on the inside which is plenty big enough for my 7' loader bucket.

 

[Mark J]

Watcha gonna do with the dirt?

[Tom King]

I built this drag for speading and leveling it, but it doesn't work good if there is one rock in it.  It works great with nothing but clean dirt.

I need to cover the 2 acre lake point with a couple of inches to get grass growing on the whole thing so we can rent it for weddings as well as leveling it all out.   Most of the topsoil was lost down there when I took down a lot of trees.  It's going to take years if left alone.  Also lots of evening up other grass areas so I don't have to slow up with the mower.  Holes in pastures and trails, etc., etc.  Plans to build a horseshoe court under the shade trees in front of the rental house.....   Lots of uses for it here.  That stuff grows grass like nothing I've ever seen.  I've let several hundred lake lot owners dump leaves back there for over 40 years and it's all composted now and full of worms.  The trouble is that they dumped a lot of stuff other than leaves, so it needs to be screened.

 

 

[Beechwood Chip]

On 8/7/2024 at 12:44 PM, Tom King said:

I've let several hundred lake lot owners dump leaves back there for over 40 years and it's all composted now and full of worms.

Do you compost sawdust?  I figure sawdust is pure carbon, so it's good with a good nitrogen source.  Autumn (fallen) leaves are also carbon.

Of course, pure carbon will compost if you leave it long enough.

(Disclaimer - I'm a city boy, but I sometimes drag bags of sawdust out to friends who live in the country)

[Coop]

My hat’s off to you. I’ve done the same on a much smaller scale for my vegetable garden but for multiple inches over a two acre site, I’ll be darned if I wouldn’t haul a few truck loads of quality soil in. 

[Tom King]

I can't buy topsoil that good here.  When we built a couple of raised beds we bought one single axle dumptruck load for $275 to put in one and I filled another one with this stuff unscreened.  It was night and day difference between the two.  That was a purchase price of $1.57 a cubic foot over ten years ago.

It would take a hundred thousand dollars worth to buy enough to put a couple of inches on that point, and results would be questionable.  This will only cost me some diesel fuel and time.  I like having projects.

Once I get a good sized pile of it, I'll pay a friend of mine with a Bobcat and dump truck to come move it down there for me.  It's just a few hundred yards, but one bucket full at the time is a slow process just moving it with the tractor.  He can move a lot of dirt in a day or even half day.  

I thought about buying a dump trailer, but I can get him to move it for a fraction of what a trailer would cost and I don't really have that much other use for one.

To answer the question about sawdust, it has some in it from several decades of horse barn cleaning, but the majority of it is leaves and yard debris.  What I produced at work on jobsites was not enough to bother with moving.

 

[Tom King]

It's all just work from the tractor seat, so not like it's really hard work.  

[Tom King]

Change of plan.  I saw this dump trailer on FB Marketplace tonight and the seller is delivering it at 10 tonight.  My plan is to weld the dirt screen on top of it after I beef it up a little and eliminate two handling steps.  Otherwise, I've have to get it out from under the screen one bucket at the time to put it in a pile and then get someone else to come load that in a dump truck and move it.

This way, it will get screened into the trailer and I can go dump it where I need it.  Height will be no problem anywhere here.

It couldn't be much better for my use, and the price said jump on it quick.

https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/8014925421932911/?

[Coop]

There ya go! I saw the biggest labor being getting the dirt from behind the screen to a trailer or your tractor bucket. You took care of that! Good investment. 

[Chestnut]

On 8/7/2024 at 6:11 PM, Beechwood Chip said:

Do you compost sawdust?

All of my sawdust gets spread in my small wooded area as ground cover. It takes years to break down when spread flat. If i mix the sawdust with "green" organics, materials higher in nitrogen, it'll break down in months.

[Tom King]

The seller of the trailer brought it this morning.  He wanted to push and get it here last night at midnight, but I talked him out of it because it doesn't have tags or lights on it, and chances of getting a ticket were much higher than in the daytime.

He is a real nice 18 year old young man that had to quit school to take over his Dad's landscaping business when his Dad passed suddenly.  This trailer was too big and heavy for what they really needed for moving leaves and yard debris around the Triangle area and would have needed more time than he had to get it road legal.  He had found a deal on a lighter one that was road legal and ready to go to work.

I was very tempted to give him some more money, but he seemed really glad to get rid of this one, and I believe he'll make it just fine.

For those that don't know about tractors, the bigger they are, the easier they are to operate.  Mine is big enough to be easy.  The steering wheel takes almost zero effort to spin, and for loader work the power reverser lets you shift from forward to reverse with a two second smooth movement using your left little finger to flip the lever beside the steering wheel, without having to even use the clutch.  Hydraulic levers to control the loader take very little effort too, so over all it's really pretty easy work as far as physical exertion goes.  Much different than a tractor without power steering that you have to shift gears on.  The old ones were real work with a loaded bucket.

[Tpt life]

Sprinkle soil over sawdust or grass, and two weeks gets almost all of it to black compost. The microbes are in the soil, so mixing it up speeds things tremendously. 

[Von]

On 8/13/2024 at 8:23 AM, Chestnut said:

 If i mix the sawdust with "green" organics, materials higher in nitrogen, it'll break down in months.

I do this as well with all my "clean" saw dust (anything without lots of finish, glue, or other non-wood in it) and it composes quickly along with my food scraps and other greens.

[Tom King]

It has a brand new pump and hoses.  I just need to fab a mount for the pump.  It was originally built to be pulled by a tractor and use a tractor remote to operate the dump function.  That would work fine if I had another smaller tractor, but it will be easier for me to pull it with the truck since I'm using the mid sized tractor to load it.  The big tractor will tear the ground up too much turning on the point.  The diesel dually won't have any trouble pulling it the few hundred yards I need to move the dirt.

The springs are on top of the axles, but if I change to above the springs it will lower the bed 7-1/2", which will be worth it.  No clearance problems where I need to use it.  I think if I drop it I won't have to build a ramp to get the tractor bucket high enough to dump dirt on the screen.  I can also get rid of the OSB since I'll be cutting that part below the slope off and welding it on top of some angle iron pieces that span the bed.  The bed is 8' x 12'.

I've already thought about several other places here that can use some smoothing out with some good dirt and the top dresser drag.

I don't have anything else that uses a pintle hitch, but was able to get one that will work off Amazon that will fit the receiver on the truck, so that was a simple fix.  They have the ring welded onto the trailer that would require a lot of cutting to get off to change to a ball type hitch.

[Mark J]

Tom, after you screen out the good dirt, what do you do with the leftovers?

[Tom King]

Sorry I missed that question.

A short answer wouldn't make much sense.  Where that "compost" is in the picture with the big excavator used to be a steep hillside.  The spot where the composted dirt is about 150 feet long and 50 feet across, before that excavator piled those small mountains up.  He dug that up off the steep edge that was about 10 feet high.

When I built a spec house every year for 33 years, they were all on wild wooded lake lots within a couple miles of our place.  I had them dump the stumps in one other place and the smaller stuff too small for firewood and woods mold over that hill.  After several years of doing that I'd get him to come level the top off so you could back up to the edge and dump over the edge with most of it rolling down the bank.   That was 1974 through 2007.  I also started letting people with places in nearby lake developments come dump leaves there.

There was a five acre parcel of woodland adjoining my property back in that corner.  The owner sold the timber off of it, and I was worried they would sell it for non lakefront houses, so I offered him to trade 16 acres of land I had up in Virginia with small Pines on it.  He took the offer and I had a big bulldozer convert the cut over five acres push all the small stumps and stuff back there over that hill.  That was 34 years ago.  We used it to enlarge our pastures, which have since been downsized to 10 acres but including that piece, and the rest of what used to be pasture converted back to timber, since we only keep a couple of horses now.

Long story shortened some, the now composted stuff covers about 3/8 of an acre tapering from nothing to 10 feet thick on the back "cliff".  

Where the excavator is sitting in that picture, he dug out on the other side of it up to where he piled that stuff up so that there is now a drop-off right where the machine is sitting in that picture.

I could run the stuff over the screen again and probably get a lot more dirt out of it, but there is so much there that right now I'm just pushing it back over the ledge.  It can keep sitting there until everything rots and maybe someone else, like my children, can get some more of it.

In short there is plenty of room for it, and the only way to see it is to walk back there behind the shop or fly over in a helicopter.  We have 163 acres, so it's not like we need that spot for anything else.