My land contains a little peat swampland in one corner and I have dug there in the past for potting soil and for peat to spread around my bushes and cedar trees. But now I have a new potato patch and need more peat & muck to improve the sandy soil there. But it will also be a project to enhance habitat for wildlife, especially for frogs and salamanders.

Yesterday I started digging out peat in an existing small depression in the swamp before it gets too hot and buggy. What I'm getting is a very dark colored peat, almost black, maybe it's actually muck. Not sure. It has a squishy consistency almost like mud. There are pieces of wood in it so my guess it was mostly formed by leaves, bark, needles, twigs, and is woody peat, one of the better types. This will go into my garden.

It's hard work. First I have to chop the sod and surface roots away to get at the good stuff. Then I fill 2 buckets at a time by hand using a short rake and spade and then carry them to a little garden wagon and dump them out. Then I use a hand cultivator tool and sort of rake thru it breaking up clumps and picking out the chunks of wood and roots. It's very clean and nice looking stuff. It has a nice earthy smell too. I'm not sure how deep it goes, but I've gone down maybe 2 feet at most and haven't hit sand yet. There is a little water in the bottom where I am digging, so I work around the edges and backwards. It's really amazing how much peat you can dig from a very small small area.

I can already see the outlines of the little frog pond to be in the making. The outlines will be irregular so it looks natural and more inviting to wildlife. It could have a small flowing outlet into a small brook that winds through the swamp over the peat bed, but I'm not sure if that's desireable or it's better to keep it as an isolated basin. Opinions?

This must be an extinct lakebed or embayment now mostly filled in with peat deposits. In fact, where I am digging looks like it used to be a micro basin of open water, so digging it out will be restoring useful habitat for frogs and other amphibians.

Making a little frog pond is fun!

In my case, first there is a 6" rooty loose peat layer, where the material falls apart and look dark brown and fibery and woody, damp to wet. There is also old pieces of wood in it. Then, below that, is a totally different material thick that is dark gray to black in color, very compressed, almost clay-like, dry yet sticky, and is difficult to break apart. I think it is compressed muck. Then, below that is another type that is different again. It is greenish in color, slimy, wettish again, and has long fibers in it that look like grass or sedge. This looks lower quality to me. I haven't gone deep enough to hit substrate mineral soil, the above is no deeper than about 2 feet down. I'm thinking some of this material must be very old, ancient, and began to accumalate thousands of years ago. No mastadon or wooly mammoth bones yet tho :-)