Gumbo Clay Gardening

There's nothing like yardwork to remind you of your first gardening lessons -- those achy, breaky, frustrating times when you were sure that all you had to do was dig a hole and drop a plant (or some seeds) in it and voila! Instant blooms! Instant garden! Instant success!

Hah.

We put in the blueberry bushes today. Tonight we put our tired, achy bodies into the hot tub and said, "aaaaaaaaaaagh!"

I don't know about you, gentle reader, but we have soil around these parts that's ... a challenge. It's clay. Heavy, silty black clay. If you want some real exercise, just try digging this stuff for awhile! But it reminded me that even though you're "planting native" you really DO have to prepare the site for the plants if you expect them to grow well. Take this blackland prairie clay (please!) as a "for instance."

It's a fine-textured soil (clay particles come from rivers) that tends to stay wet and sticky for a long time. You might think the moisture holding is good, but the trouble is that it also compacts easily into a hard, dense ...well, clay. Just like potter's clay. Not many plants grow well in that.. And when it finally dries out, it shrinks down (causing your foundations to settle, too) and forms clumps hard as rocks.

Your soil may not be heavy clays like mine. Very few of you will have a nice, loamy soil that needs almost no work. More commonly, you'll have sandy, clay or silty soil, and this will mean that you'll need to add something to the planting bed to help your plants grow better. Alas, it's not quite as simple as digging a hole and heaving half a cubic yard of something into the space. Some serious gardeners approach mixing soils with the reverence of a chemist mixing up a formula.

I've read books and articles that recommend stripping off the top 6 inches of soil or so and then tilling the soil and mixing in compost and other soil treatments such as lime, gypsum, sand, vermiculite, perlite, oyster shell, wood ashes, grass clippings, sand, manures, compost, leaves, sawdust, and peat moss -- and yes, it's true, this is the correct way to set up your area for successful plants. It's what commercial gardeners do when they begin tilling the soil -- but not every amateur gardener is able to do this. While your heart may dearly want to do this to your landscape, your pocketbook (and your muscles) may not be up to it; particularly if you're trying to restore a large area of land. Furthermore, such treatments aren't a one-time thing (yes, I can hear the

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