Ozark Top Soil

Reader Contribution by Phil Nichols
Published on March 21, 2019
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When we first mentioned our plan to relocate from Nebraska to the Missouri Ozarks, back in 1982, I can still hear our neighbor Jay—who had lived in rural Missouri as a youth—telling me how he hated picking up rocks. Being a strong-willed, strong-backed thirty-something I laughed off his reservations.

That was 37 long arduous years ago.

It didn’t take long after I set up housekeeping on our new homestead (wife and daughter remained in Nebraska while the strong young man worked to pull things together) before I began to understand Jay’s aversion to native stone. Clearing space for a garden, digging water lines, putting in fence posts, and every other task involving the ground required a fight to the death with rocks. I soon became familiar with an Ozark homesteader’s tool-of-choice—the steel rock bar. And I began to amass piles and piles of sandstone, native to our slice of country; old-timers hereabouts refer to them as Ozark top soil.

In our travels through the Ozarks, as we searched for a suitable homestead, I always admired the rock homes and buildings we chanced upon. Being a carpenter/builder by trade I made a decision early on to designate the stones that I was unearthing, for some useful purpose.

Using stone from our garden plot, my first project was a slip-formed (clamp on movable form) chicken house. My second was a cold frame. Both saw many years of service. Then in 2006 work took my wife and me away from home. For ten years we managed a private community in the central Ozarks, only occasionally making it back home for a day or two at a time. During our absence the chicken house and cold frame deteriorated badly due to weather and lack of maintenance.

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