Outdoor Enclosure Dirt

[way2gfy]

Hi all. Well I just ordered my 7.5' x 7.5' x 4' kennel for my DT. It is on Home Depot's website if you want to check it out. I am thinking of burying it in the ground about a foot or so for stabilty. Thinking about putting hardware cloth along the bottom so my baby can't dig to China and putting Concrete blocks along the inside walls so there will be no peeking out.

Now the dirt here in Las Vegas, Nevada is horrible. Gets very compacted and hard like cement. It would be difficult to grow any seeds and they grow well. Should I just take the dirt out and do mostly cypress mulch, play sand, organic soil and coconut choir mix or would it be okay to leave the dirt in there and just mix play sand in with the dirt so it doesn't get soooo compacted?

Thanks.

 

[katesgoey]

How are you going to "take the dirt out"? Here's my two cents: I got the Lowes' 8x13 huge kennels and added organic topsoil mixed with bed-a-beast coir (after soaking - and I used 12 bricks just for scattered around the top of the topsoil). I rake it out and planted grazing tortoise seeds and let it grow for a month - then I put the tortoises in their respective kennels. The new growth was gone in no time -even though I let them out to graze 1-2 hours daily. Bump was only 5" when I put him in his kennel. So, any of those additions that you mention would probably be fine (I'm not a big fan of the play sand though), just take into account that any new plantings will need to be either sectioned off, reseeded often, or allow more time to stablize before adding the torts Have fun!!

 

[Kadaan]

I don't think it's _bad_ to have hard ground, and I'm not sure about DT's specifically, but you could dig up a small section and fill it with organic soil to grow some plants in.

If you want to grow a lot of plants you could just put a 1' layer of organic soil with nothing mixed in across the entire enclosure and plant a garden in there .

 

[way2gfy]

I will probably rent some equipment from Home Depot to loosen the dirt and then shovel it out of the pen if I decide to take most of it out.

I was thinking about planting the Russian tortoise mix from carolinapetsupply in almost the whole pen. Do you think that is okay or should I do the grazing mix seed? I will have probaly 2 or 3 hides, with the openings facing different angles (East, West and maybe North, not sure on the North or even a South). The pen will be up against the side if my house and if I went to the next size pen (12') my pen would end up too close to the oleander bushes.

 

[Yvonne G]

Here's my 2 cents:

I would set up the kennel with rail road ties all around the outside of it, up snug against the kennel walls. Then I would fill the inside with the organic top soil or whatever kind of substrate you wanted, up to the top of the rail road ties. This in effect would be the same as burying the walls. You would still need a sight barrier around the inside, but 1x12 boards would do, as bricks or cement blocks would take away more floor space.

Yvonne