Viewing post #679624 by chelle

purpleinopp said:An amount of material similar to the forest floor is fine around trees, especially since it's not dirt, not raising the level of dirt around the roots. Nobody rakes them up out in the wild.

Once you 'improve' some soil with such little effort, it's addicting, at least that's what happened to me. Too exciting to not share how easy it is, though not instant. All started with smothering a small patch of grass instead of trying to shovel it up. And I've never done that double-digging thing that was all the rage in garden books when I was a buyer of garden books, but have ended up with some amazing patches of dark 'dirt.' I have more time than strength :+)

Yeah, add what you can when you can, the wider variety, the better.

This area was shady but dry as a bone, machinery (riding lawnmower) packed clay that grew nothing well -watered, or not. We nixed the ride-on mower and started adding whatever decomposable material was abundant at any given time to the area. A few years later it looks like this...perhaps a bit too abundantly flourishing, even without the addition of synthetic fertilizers or additives, and very rarely (only once this year, so far) watered.





This yellow flowering shrub competes well with the evergreen above and beside it. It blooms in little light and is very drought tolerant.

These are three or four year-old seedlings that I grew from this plant.


Don't feel that you need to add a lot at one time, either; it's better for both you and your tree if you just toss on frequent layers of say, 2 or 3" worth of stuff rather than trying to cover it deeply all in one day.

When and if I notice that an area of the garden is becoming challenging -I know to add (even more) decomposables.