Four Soils

This past week we built a 4 soils garden. We wanted to have this garden ready for our family camp in a few weeks to serve as an illustration to the kids when we go over the parable. The idea behind this garden came from a parable told in Mathew 13. The parable of the sower talks about seed that falls upon 4 different soils. The first soil was the path which was compact so the birds ate whatever fell on the path. The second was rocky ground where the seed sprung up immediately but were quickly squelched by the sun. The third soil was full of weeds that chocked the seeds out when they grew up. The fourth and last soil was the good soil the produced grain one hundred fold.

To build our 4 soils garden we used a pallet that already had 4 squares so it required little work. The pallet was placed upside down a few weeks ago which has allowed weeds to grow up in it. Now after coming back to it we first weeded 3 of the 4 squares in the pallet.

Next we filled a square with plain old dirt, which had a good amount of clay in it. After we place the dirt in the square we worked on packing it down to make it the compact path the seed fell on.

For the third square we filled with gravel and left as is. And the forth square we were able to fill with compost. If you don’t have any compost you could use potting soil.