At the start of the "moving" of our household plan, I developed a concept for moving my entire gardens. The original game plan for moving my daffodil garden was, after a couple of false starts, to dig the new garden with a "back-hoe." The hard red clay soil have to be broken up, and dug for the first time with heavy equipment as the amount of garden would be back-breaking to do it by hand. The plan was that after the back-hoe had done it's job, top soil was to be brought in along with organic matter and sand. It was to all be mixed into the new beds, along with fertilizer and lime, with the back-hoe doing a final dig.
Daffodil Cocktail I kept thinking it was like making a dry "daffodil cocktail" as I added the ingredients. Being that there is no significant amounts of topsoil at our new home, we would have to haul everything in by the truck load. In that I planned to add 4 tractor truck loads of top soil called "LeafGrow," which is a mixture of topsoil and ground up leaves. Other ingredients was to add two tractor truck loads of sand, 100 bales of peat moss at 3 cubic yards a bag, two 35 pound bags of limestone, 30 bags of gypsum (40 pound bags), thirty bags of composted manure, and one flatbed truck load of chopped leaves. All that was left was the baking.
The bottom line is that the baking process didn't go. My plans went astray as my job started sending me out of town on urgent business, and my gardening needs suffered from lack of attention. The schedule for completion started falling apart from lack of someone to do the work. I had to change plans.
Getting Professional Help In the interest of time, I finally turned to a professional garden and landscape company, a nice guy that I met at - at . . . . I hate to say that I met him at a Golf course. You see, Golf and I really don't get along. Laughingly, I can't understand why someone would be taking their frustrations out on an innocent little white ball, and knocking it all around 40 acres when they could be gardening.
However, some of the principles for preparing Golf course "Ts" and "Greens" are very good for the red clay soil that we have here in Maryland. I learned that the Golf course trick to good growing is "sand." The Greens are made of 90% sand and 10% peat moss. I liked that formula, but wanted more peat moss. Best of all, the professional had the heavy equipment to do the job.
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