I have chickens for food scraps, they decompose it for me and then deposit it for me.

tveguy3 said:I have chickens for food scraps, they decompose it for me and then deposit it for me.

Plus, they help with the insect problem, and are excellent at "guarding" those plants !!! . And, any that "slack off" in their duties get invited to dinner on Sunday

There is nothing that sounds more like 'home' than chickens around a place. I would keep them solely for that if I could.

Lestv said:Sand with clay will turn the soil rock hard if you don't mix in other soil additives too, such as compost. While not true cement, the silica in the sand will form hard plates with the finer particles in the clay after the clay gets saturated with water (a heavy rainstorm).

My garden has the littlest of sand and when it's dry out there's cracks all in the surface like a dried lake. Luckily puddles never form, but all my irises are sitting up about the soil level on very small mounds. Hopefully I'll have some good strong anchor roots to support this. After this spring I never want irises here to sit in a puddle again.

Sounds smart, Gabe, and may be something I need to do after getting 1.3 inches of rain last night!

I have been doing the same thing as Gabe, setting the iris rhizomes high. Unfortunately they sometimes sink in the clay as it settles over the year and need a spade to lift them and fill underneath them. The only rhizomes that have rotted this year are those that settled well into the soil and were completely covered, and then only older rhizomes, not the new increases fortunately.

Or the **** gophers that are making mince-meat out of one area of my iris garden.

Yup -- moles are responsible for that happening in my beds.