David .........
DavidLMO said:I just Called you and raised you 10
I'll fold. Having excellent drainage is what made it possible to create a rose garden in glacier slurry ...
Rose literature says roses have to have nice loamy soil to grow well. I guess someone forgot to tell the roses ..
DavidLMO said:The latter after a heavy rain. When it has been dry for some time, the clay is so hard that it is near impenetrable. Jam your shovel into it? Bounces off. Jump up and down on it? You might get the blade in 1/4 inch - if yer lucky. I have on occasion had to use a hand sledge and a coal chisel to get thru this drek.
After days of heavy rain, I can go out and walk on my soil without worrying about compression or sinking to my knees in mud. I traded my Wellingtons for snow boots ...
The soil is moist, but there is so much rock in it, walking on it doesn't make any difference and I don't sink. As for "jamming my shovel into the soil" .. HA ! In the early days of the garden I had the same experience you wrote about, but I used what we call a "Trinity shovel" ... a digging bar ... and a hand mattock once I got down deeper to widen the hole.
DavidLMO said:Digging in a single planting hole can take an hour or two easily. And you always go a few feet deep and several feet wide - cause you have to fill the planting "hole" with something a plant can survive in
After the first year, I found that I didn't dare use any organic material in my back fill or else the plant would sink when the OM decomposed. Of course, I had to learn that the hard way ..
Now, I just use the native soil for my back fill and put all organics on top of the planting hole. The key for me was to grow a large root mass for the plant as its foundation before planting because then the plant had sufficient resources to withstand a lot of different kinds of stress.
DavidLMO said:Drainage? .... Surely you jest. A 1 ' x 1 ' hole can take an hour or so to perk.
Actually, an hour is pretty good. I was told by an experienced rose grower that if my rose hole drained over night, the plant would be OK. She was right. Many of the rose holes I dug didn't drain over night, so I just deeper and bigger holes. When it did drain over night, I planted the rose. None of them have died.
I have no idea what "Davids Sooper Sekrit recipe" is ...
One of the things I love about ATP is that people are quite willing to share their knowledge and experience.
I learned something about soil dynamics from Sue,
@sooby, when I asked a question about preparing the soil for a raised bed adjacent to the foundation of my home that will not drain.
She wrote,
"gravel at the base of a planter under finer soil actually impedes drainage of the top layer. This is because water doesn't cross the interface between finer material overlaying coarse material until the upper layer is saturated. So it has the opposite effect of what one would intuitively think. Sooo, based on that, it would make the planting soil hold more water. This phenomenon is called a "perched water table".
I don't know if that applies to your bed.
Smiles,
Lyn
