Learning To Be The Backyard Gardener
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Image via WikipediaLearning to be a gardener is a lot of fun. But the process of learning to be a backyard gardener has it’s ups and downs as things don’t always go the way you planned it.
My wife and I are slowly becoming the backyard gardeners we have long wanted to be. We are starting small and will add to our gardens, both vegetable garden and flower gardens, as we have time.
We have only begun but already we are learning and making progress. We do have a friend that has been a backyard gardener for more than 10 years now so we have a bit of an edge. All we have to do is ask questions.
I would even, eventually, have her writing gardening articles for me as she and her husband have a lot to teach.
Our biggest hurdle this year is going to be working the ground. Our soil is a very heavy and damp clay, through the entire property. So learning how to deal with it is a priority.
We do have a couple of raised beds that were here when we bought our home but the soil is just as bad there. I guess I better start digging if I want to become the backyard gardener I hope to be.
If you have any tips for dealing with the soil in our yard please leave us a comment explaining what you do.
Tagged with: backyard gardener • gardener • learning to be a gardener
Filed under: backyard gardening • learning to be a gardener
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I’ve dealt with this both personally and, ahem, professionally. In other words, I have horrible clay soil myself, and I’ve researched this as part of my job writing about organic gardening.
I wrote a LONG comment to you this morning, but my computer had a hissy fit and died, so pardon the point-form version:
–Raised beds will help with drainage.
–Dig in as much organic stuff as you can—compost, but also peat moss or, even better (because it’s a renewable resource), coconut fiber. Mature compost is always best; among other things, it is the food for worms, which themselves deposit the best compost, and whose tunnels help aerate and irrigate heavy soils.
–be aware that both peat moss and coconut may lower your soil pH (esp. coconut, which has a pH of about 5.5), so you may need to use some dolomitic lime to re-establish a balanced pH. Depends what your soil pH was to begin with—in the eastern US, where there’s a lot of rain, soil tends to be acidic, so you might well need the lime in Florida; in the west, soil tends to be alkaline.
–Sand, gypsum, and other products are sometimes recommended and sold as amendments to help “lighten” clay soils, but there are warnings and caveats for each. I don’t have extensive experience here, but I’ll pass along what I’ve read. In brief:
–sand seems the obvious thing to add, but since a number of good sites warn that adding sand to clay creates cement (uck), be careful. (I read this just after I’d incorporated A LOT of sand into a couple of my beds, so I’ll be able to report by summer’s end whether I had cement and whether anything grew in it.) I’d do the following: first, don’t use sand without a lot of organic matter as well, and second, use “sharp sand” (sometimes written as one word), not smooth river sand or possibly impure industrial sand.
–Whether gypsum helps depends on details about the sodium levels in your soil and the exact type of clay involved. I don’t yet follow all the ins and outs, and wouldn’t want to try to reproduce it all here, but it sounds as if you’d only want to use gypsum in a dry area on alkaline soil.
–Mulching isn’t mentioned on any site I’ve consulted about this issue, but I’ve noticed that beds covered with row covers don’t get nearly as crusty and hard as open ones. I’m going to see if mulching helps preserve the friability of the surface soil.
Good luck with all this!
Excellent comment, that’s a lot of helpful information.