"Bill who putters" wrote in message
...


I always thought that what was local was best and cheaper. I swear by
wood chips. Marton NJ 20 miles away gave me green sand and I purchased
granite dust in the day. Other things brought in was various manures if
I cleaned it up the coop or stall.
Green manures are a given sort of like roots trying to help the soil.
Dried blood and bone meal too. (Prions) I've also composted barber
hair and sea weed along with fish and game innards.

Question ....are some amendments deleterious more than others?

Peat got me questioning thinking.

It's a question most gardeners I know grapple with Bill. I live in the
country and the garden on this farm has been made on the side of a stoney
slope. Farmers don't put their houses on good soil, they put it on the
shitty stuff because income comes from the good soil.

The unimproved soil was appalling - dunno how to describe it but it's the
colour of the poo a calf with the scours produces - yellow, unhealthy
looking stuff - it's full of small rocks quartz and shale/mudstone.

Everything I need for the garden except animal poop has to be brought in,
but to get some of the animal poop eg, the chook poop, I need food for the
chooks to be brought in. I have to hunt the plops the cattle leave all over
the paddocks.

I recycle and return to the soil as much as I can but all rose prunings go
to the tip and in spring when I'm overwhelmed with giant weeds, some of
those go to the tip too as I can't get to them before they get seed heads
and I can never make and turn a hot compost. My compost tends to be more
weed piles that rot over time. I'm better at tumble compost bins. Dead
chhoks get buried in the bottom of these weed piles.

I've found straw bales work as a good soil improver for me and also sawdust.
The sort of quatities of peat that you Nth Americans write about using has
never, ever been possible here in Oz. The most we could even buy would be a
small pack that could be used to line hanging baskets with so we've never
had the chance to use it to add to beds to 'lighten' the soil. In fact I
can't even imagine why you'd use it to 'lighten' the soil. I add sand and
rotted stuff from the bottom of my weed piles or rotted hay bales to break
up my clayey soil. That and turning in old dead stuff dropped on the
surface from weeding.

Interesting question. I'll have to think about it some more.