I irrigate using water from the town supply and I'd reckon I've put in hundreds of hours turn the little top-soil we have, adding manure, kitchen vegetable scraps, wood shavings, etc, etc, to it.
I use a potting mix in the potted plants though but aslo add a touch of manure every so often.
I can dig down about 8-14 inches before reaching the rocky, clay type soil that is normally found around.

If you like Joanna & and Spikey then hopefully you'll also like my other very good friend, Lady E, the Wedgetail Eagle.
She was my first rescue when I found her as a very young fledgling almost starving and half dead trying to get a drink from my pond one very hot summers day over 8 years ago now.
I took her in, fed her up, had a Vet check her over but he was pretty sure that she wouldn't recover, surpris, surprise for him.
2 weeks of hand-feeding her with raw minced kangaroo meat, hard boiled eggs and a mix of of mineral water and vitamins she'd gone from approx. 1.2 kilograms in weight to a nice hefty 3.7 kilos, could walk around the yard and was bwgining to flap her wings once again, 6 weeks later she weighed in at very nice 5.2 kilos, could flap enough to actually lift off of the ground and reach about 6-8 feet in the air and could feed herself from a bowl as well as tear chunk of meat from kangaroo bones.
Now she is fully grown, has a wing span over over 6 feet, weighs in at aguess of around 13 kilos, comes back to my house for the occassional free snack, pat and stroking of her head and is living in the wild, as she should, but still lands on my outstretched, bare forearm without even leaving the slightest scratch.
She has also presented me with her mate and their young every breeding season since I first released her back into the wild.

@Triphid ❤❤❤❤ she is spectacular! And her, your, story is wonderful.

@Heidi68 I'm very lucky to have been able to 'sneak' those photos of her, normally if she see a camera she immediatelky flies away.
She met with my nephew Henry for the very first time last year, it was something well worth remembering to see him and her as he hand-fed her and then she calmly sat next to him, head slightly bowed as he stroked her head and patted her neck.
I think that memory will stick with Henry now until the day he dies, the smiles on his face were something else to see.

We get a few native ground cover plants around here but not many and they are ptotected by Law but one can harvest seeds from thembut mostly there are just native trees like Eucalypts, Mulga, She-oak and other varieties of Acacias, etc.
This winter I plan to sow Sturt Desert Pea seeds that I've collected over the last year or so, they are very hardy and thrive with only the natural water from rainfall, filtrated water can kill them faster than you can say your alphabet almost.
All my gardens and vegie beds are grown only on Chicken manure and either cow or sheep manure when I can it from a friend's Grazing Property.

My gardens were always being ravage by snails until Joanna the Goana ( pictured on the left) visited quite a few years ago now and decided to stay, now Snails Nil and Joanna very well fed and contented though the snail main course is no longer on the menu these days but she does her bit now by raiding the nests of the inported Sparrows at nesting time and catching the adults as well when they roost for the evenings during summer.
My latest 'newcomer' is Little Miss Spikey, a pygmy Echidna, saved last winter when I found her mother curled up in a hollow tree that I was about to cut up for firewood, brought her Mum home and rehoused her in my gardens as well until my kind, wonderful (???) Evangeloon neighbour complained to the Local Wildlife Service claiming I had her caged up.
They took Mrs. Spikey away but neither they nor I realized that she had left her daughter hidden elsewhere in my yard.
Little Misss Spikey now calls my yard her domain and has set about ridding my gardens of ants, thankfully, though she is also very partial to a snack, hand-fed to her of course, of either Mealworms or ant eggs mixed in with fresh, finely minced kangaroo meat.

As far as I know weare still on Level One Water Restrictions since the drought has not broken out here as yet.
I cheat a bit with my pond, I have a float valve system in it that is attached to the faucet in the gardens so when the level drops it alowws water to flow in freely, plus, all bar my potted plants are under a drip irrigation system as well.