 Gardeners can seem like a strange breed, especially in the spring when they obsess over their garden soil. I know. I do it every year. I've been trying to garden in sandy soil for a couple of years now. To be honest, calling it sandy is a bit misleading - gravel is a better description. If you look at the image to the right, my garden soil falls all the way to the left in the yellow.
I'm accustomed to soil that falls in the center of the chart in the loam section. For nearly 20 years I was blessed with rich, dark soil that I had built up with organic matter. Then I moved. The new soil presented a challenge and I built raised beds. Don't get me wrong. I love raised beds, but it's not the same as growing veggies in the ground. I'm happy to to say that I now have a load of loam. It was a Mother's Day present that will bring me years of pleasure. I don't know the exact composition, yet. I'm doing the jar test for Testing Garden Soil while writing this post. This simple test will tell me how much sand, silt and clay the soil contains. I intend to mix some of it into my raised beds - they already contain peat moss and rotted manure - and use the rest to build up my garden soil and fill in some areas that need extra soil. My family thinks it way more soil than I will ever use - but that's just because they don't understand this gardener's obsession with soil. Until next time . . . HAPPY GARDENING!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |