Joe Doe wrote:
In article
aHlwYXRpYQ==.0bdc64e9a04750ad21973fa5d482c920@104 4114666.cotse.net,
wrote:
My soil is good--I pretty much replaced rather than amend, and got the
clay out of here.
Do you replace entire beds or merely the soil in the planting hole?
Julie Ryan in Perrenial Gardens for Texas STRONGLY recommends against the
practice of "pocket planting".
Joe, I am not talking about hardpan clay here. North Carolina is not
Texas. And, I live in an old neighborhood that was never stripped of
topsoil. So--what I have is 6 inches of loam on top of red clay that is
still diggable. In my professionally prepared bed, the guy scraped back
the good stuff, dug out the clay, drilled deep holes in the hardpan
beneath, then mixed the good loam with black, bagged garden soil
and "soild conditioner," the latter apparently rotted pine bark fines and
manure--and refilled the bed.
According to her the clay (which holds
water well but is slow to absorb) will shed its surface water into your
foreign soil and so the amended soil will be a sink for water that the
clay sheds on the surface.
I did originially plant my roses in "flower pot" holes--just dug out the
clay and put bagged soil in. Five years later, the above has still not
happened, and we have had veritable floods. I think the above is utter
nonsense, for what that is worth. (I did apply think mulch every year,
which has, of course, broken down to rich loam. You need to do that in TX
too.
Second, the clay walls of your planting hole
will be slow to absorb and the water stays stuck and promotes root rot.
What you say here is precisely why you need to get the clay the hell out
of there. Regardless of what Field Roebuck and other "experts" say, clay
soil sucks for roses. They need to DRAIN. And, even if they did not, clay
is too damned hard to work. People who advocate planting roses in clay
soil are either cheap or masochists. Clay is for pottery.