I live in a house over one hundred years old. There is very little space in this crawl space (less than 2ft.)In order to run some duct work, and other things,I'm going excavate the crawl space, to a more workable area. My thought is to use the dirt on some rasied beds. I figure in should at least be weed free, since it hasn't seen the light of day for a 115 years. Any thoughts on how it would be for this purpose. I got to do something with the dirt anyhow. JACK

-- Jack C. (injack1@aol.com), March 15, 2002

Answers

Jack:

A hundred years ago most houses had chickens laying eggs under them and kids crawling in after the eggs. You may find anything under there, possibly a carefully wrapped package of old bills.

Seriously though, unless the space has been totally enclosed it is likely to have viable weed seeds. Some weed seeds can live for extremely long periods, sprouting when exposed to light, air and water. If the space is totally enclosed you may still get a weed seed or two that has survived the hundred years. l

As for the dirt, barring some kind of contamination it is indestructible. No reason not to use it. Don't be surprised to find some old spoons, bottles, bones, etc when you start excavating. Mac

-- Jimmy S (Macrocarpus@gbronline.com), March 16, 2002.

Dirt is the dark stuff that you find underyour nails and behind your ears. The stuff in your crawl space is soil...there is a huge difference.

Oscar

-- Oscar H. Will III (owill@mail.whittier.edu), March 16, 2002.

No reason why not. There may well be viable seeds, as someone said - particularly if they could have blown in. However, there won't be many live hundred-year old seeds. You may also find the soil is fairly high in clay or stones - any sort of building foundations involves excavation, and they wouldn't want to put that out in the garden if they could leave it out of the way under the house. However, against that you will probably have had a fair amount of dust and fluff, as well as all the things that have died down there or pooped down there - mice and rats and cats and kittens and insects and spiders.

Of course, when you're excavating around foundations, you want to be careful not to weaken them. I've even heard of houses collapsing, not to mention shifting and cracking walls, because people weakened or even undermined the foundations by digging.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), March 16, 2002.

Get yourself a pair of coveralls for when you crawl under a house. There are mites, paracites, critters of all sorts under there. As someone who in the past did reshore floor timbers, I speak from first hand experience. P.S., Leave the coverall outside, let the rain and sun sterilize them for you.

-- mitch hearn (moopups@citlink.net), March 16, 2002.

a thought..as you will be taking the dirt(soil,OK?) out gradually,manually digging..you could solarize it in piles under plastic before adding to existing beds or create new beds by positioning the soil over grass in a new location and allowing the soil to kill the turf while it solarizes under plastic...Lord knows what is /was/has been under that house!

-- Bee White (bee@hereintown.net), March 16, 2002.

We did the same thing and the previous posts are correct expect some dandy finds! We just scattered the soil, it did no harm but I can't say it did any good either. Have fun, kids LUV the job, at least I did!

-- Ross (amulet@istar.ca), March 16, 2002.

Sorry - another thought - if the house has been painted, and is over 100 years old, then it's likely had lead paint on it. I wouldn't trust the surface dirt from say the outside yard of an exposed crawl space, or anywhere where paint dust or flakes might have settled. People would also just gather up what they could when cleaning old lead paint prior to repainting, and throwing the debris "under the house out of the way" would be an obvious thing to do.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), March 16, 2002.