On 3/4/2015 5:24 PM, ~misfit~ wrote:
Once upon a time on usenet George Shirley wrote:
[snipped again]
Was going to start amending the last raised bed today, got another
!@#$% cold front moving in and it might freeze by the end of the
week. Drat! my pear tree is currently in full bloom, might mean
another year with no pears. Have to go to town and buy some dirt.
Never thought I would be buying dirt but we live on six inches of
river sand atop five feet of Houston gumbo clay so we have to amend
everything we plant.

We *finally* have some rain forecast for the next few days after not having
rain to speak of since just before Christmas. I hope the forecasters have it
right this time. It annoys me how the forecasters think that 'hot and dry'
is a good forecast and rain is a bad one - even when most of the country's
experiencing extra-dry conditions and large parts are in drought!

The soil here is rich - but only 4" deep. Below that it's a hard clay pan
that takes a crowbar to break up (I know from when I mistakenly planted
trees in the ground). My using raised beds isn't so much because there's no
soil, rather because there's not enough of it. (I used to wonder why I'd
always get blossom end rot on my tomatoes, despite regular watering before I
put the raised beds in.)
Sounds just like our "dirt" here but nothing rich about it as the
builders put sand on top of the hard clay pan. I wondered why my first
blueberry plants weren't doing well. Turned out they were drowning in
their pot holes.

I made my own 'dirt' originally, with the first raised bed (peat and my own
compost mixed with pumice sand and vermiculite). However that got very
expensive and it was at a time that my back got worse so that now I no
longer have significant amounts of compost coming on. These days I buy
'compost' when it's cheap. In early spring the big chains usually compete
with each other and I can get four 40l bags of it for under $20. It's
largely pine bark from our forestry industry and hardly composted at all so
isn't high-grade. However I try to leave it in the (perforated) bags in
contact with the soil in a cool and shady part of the section for a year
before I use it. Then it's a much better product, black. rich and crawling
with critters.
We used the "Square Foot Gardening" soil mix, one third rich compost,
one third peat moss, and one third vermiculite. Lots of fun putting
five-gallon buckets of each on a ten by ten foot tarp and then tossing
the stuff around. We both developed nice biceps doing that. The high
dollar stuff here is the vermiculite followed closely by the peat moss.
Lots of beef lots here in Texas and the droppings get composted with
grass cuttings, hay, and whatever dry stuff is available. We buy the
"Black Cow" brand as it seems to have more good stuff in it. This year
we bought some earthworms to put in the beds, hoping they will help.
When we gardened in another state we lived on an ancient sand dune that
had a rich loam topping about three feet deep, toss a seed in the ground
and jump back. I miss that but it is a challenge to see your garden
produce food from that which was nothing but bags of "stuff."

I also add used (cheap) potting mix - which I tend to have lots of due to my
growing dwarf trees in containers and having to pot them up regularly and my
constant experiments with cuttings put into pot mix, only a small fraction
of which have taken this year.

I wish I had the room to do that again. Very small property with a big
house on it, lots of concrete sidewalks,driveways, etc. We do have a
composter barrel and it takes a good bit of time to make a decent
compost as we're not allowed to have heaps. Tut, tut, neighbors might
not like the earthy smell of a compost heap. Nothing here gets wasted,
kitchen scraps, grass clippings, whatever comes our way gets composted
or dug into a virgin bed for later use.