davidsevit said:what will happen if i put some garden soil from downstairs ontop of it some of my homemade compost and on the top bought planting soil?
for example plant sunflowers or sweet corn.
why?
to save money1.
to avoid evaporation since the planting soil has a bigger capacity of holding the water 2.
from the point of view of the plant i know it will meet another type of soil on its way down.....
how critical is it?
Rainbow said:
Out in the open, in a regular garden, there shouldn't be a problem with doing a "lasagna" type layering.
sooby said:The problem with layers is the potential for creating a "perched water table", where water doesn't move down from fine to coarser material until the fine material has become saturated. That's why we don't put gravel in the bottom of pots, for example, because it does the opposite of what one might intuitively think and actually causes the finer material on top to hold more water. There are some pictures that illustrate this phenomenon on this link:
http://gardenprofessors.com/co...
DaisyI said: ... Way back when (you reminded me of this), we used to use wicking that ran up the middle of the pot and into a reservoir to keep this from happening. I think the reservoir was under the pot - not remembering exactly how it worked...