The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Small Home Landscaping

Make Garden Soil Pay Big Dividends

No soil is ''hopeless"; by improving drainage or adding fertilizer and organic matter, "difficult" gardens can be made to yield bumper crops.

THE soil in which you dig, cultivate and grow plants is composed largely of sand, silt and clay and these vary in their proportions. It is the variation or the excess of one over the others that determines the kind of soil you have. If the soil contains a great amount of sand over the others it is a sandy soil, or a sandy loam, depending on the amount of the other materials present. All sandy soils contain certain amounts of silt and clay. Pure sand has no value in a soil sense. Sandy soils are open, easy to work and, given sufficient water, plants grow there with little difficulty.

The most difficult soils are those with a larger proportion of silt and clay and very little sand. These soils are heavy, patty like and dense. Water moves very slowly, they stay wet a long time. Dug, or otherwise worked in this condition, the soil becomes hard as bricks on drying. It shrinks and opens into cracks; roots are broken or dried out—or root development is poor. There is poor aeration and without air roots cannot grow.

The great fault of all heavy soils is a lack of porosity. The first step in improving soils is digging, plowing, rototilling or otherwise working the soil, mixing and turning it, breaking up lumps and clods The more you can reduce the soil to a fine granular condition the better the growth of plants. But digging or plowing will not give porosity to a heavy soil. It will run together again and pack as before. These operations must be accompanied by incorporating with the soil materials which will aid porosity. There are two main kinds. One kind involves the gritty materials—coarse sand, screened coal ashes, cinders or pea gravel. Any of these used in quantity will open up the clay structure, admit air, help drainage and prevent the soil from packing. The second class of materials are called organic matter. Included are manure, compost, green manures (grass, clover and the like grown and plowed or dug into the soil), vegetable matter, rotted or half rotted leaves, peat moss, sawdust and similar materials. When mixed with the soil these materials undergo decomposition and become the substance called humus. Humus is necessary for all soils and all plants. Though not all soils, especially the sandy ones, require gritty materials, all—without exception—must have humus if they are to function and support plants and crops.