Yes, that's the link I pasted above. Someone had pasted it here in the permaculture forum last year. I was so happy to find that. It explained what I'd been doing for decades in greater detail than I ever knew, even though I was already doing it.

Adding OM is not something I do once, or even yearly, but much more often. Whenever something presents itself, I spread it on beds, some contributions seem too small to bother, but it all adds up. I've eliminated the 'pile' step from composting, and do all sheet composting now, in place, on beds. When it's 95 degrees and nearly that number in humidity, OM decomposes/'melts into the soil' in days. But the benefits of it last much longer, if the soil life is kept alive. I believe making various contributions often is the key to that. It's like lasagna gardening, that's never finished.

Grass from mower bag, leaves, kitchen scraps (anything but bones, or anything really salty or greasy,) small yard trimmings, pine needles, pulled weeds, leaves, no OM leaves our yard, and I'm always looking for possible additions from sources other than our yard or kitchen.

It's a lot harder here in AL than when I lived in suburban central OH where people bag leaves and there's as many as you feel like carting home, free for the taking, right at the curb. And I carted a lot home, trip after trip, a few bags at a time in the trunk of my car. Nobody bags leaves here, most of them are burned. So a primary/huge load of fall leaves isn't even an option. Raking up what falls in our yard doesn't cover beds more deeply than a few inches. When I lived in OH, 2 feet of leaves would disappear over winter.

I know nothing about adding other stuff, but if folks try something, and it works, it's a good thing. Adding something like sand or grit sounds like much too much effort to me if it has to be incorporated below the surface. Not chiding anyone who wants to, (or in any way for anything, in above posts or this one,) but I would not spend effort adding anything that doesn't benefit the health of plants by adding some type of fertility, humus.

I don't till, and all of what I do stems from being lazy, not having the option to till if I wanted to, and economically challenged most years. If I think anything I don't want to do is unnecessary, I definitely don't do it. I've arrived at this point many years after asking myself, "Why do I have to mow grass just because I have a house? How can I eliminate that odious task from my life? How can I start gardens without digging up grass, or this awful double-digging thing I've read about?" The asking of those questions led to others like, "What would happen naturally?" And, "How did people do this before there was store-bought stuff?" "Why is the soil so soft and spongy, dark, when walking through the forest?"

I've never tested any soil anywhere I've lived, or bought anything except some mulch (before I fully understood that "a mulch" doesn't have to be purchased, or consist of only shredded wood,) as a soil topper or amendment. Even if I had a budget for such things, I've seen that it's not necessary. I don't spend money on gardening at all except to buy plants, seeds, and the occasional new pot for container plants, fertilizer for those.

A good book about this subject...
Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony, Second Edition [F. Herbert Bormann, Diana Balmori, Professor Gordon T. Geballe.]

This covers more than gardening, going into how to have a property that enhances nature, not one that uses unnecessary resources and creates pollution. It's meaningful to anyone, IMVHO, but its' primary focus is the more dry areas in the west.

Sandy, I couldn't agree more about the lawn. We love when it sometimes bakes into dormancy mid-summer and doesn't waste our time and $ mowing it. If we didn't have a big dog, all of the grass would be on its' way out. I'd have to work a little harder to find more OM to replace the grass contribution to beds, but not nearly as much effort as mowing, and definitely no money spent. Also agree, finding worms every time you dig is a sign there's life in the soil. (And helpful when you want to go fishing!)

Tiffany ...

I think we all work over time to find what works in our climates and with our native soils to improve our soils to make our gardening efforts more successful.

>>>When it's 95 degrees and nearly that number in humidity, OM decomposes/'melts into the soil' in days. But the benefits of it last much longer, if the soil life is kept alive. I believe making various contributions often is the key to that. It's like lasagna gardening, that's never finished.

Since I don't have the kind of humidity you mention above, the OM I put on top of my gardening beds fries to a crisp and does not hold moisture in the soil. Nor does it decompose until the rains come as we do not get rain during the summer months. The incorporation of different materials along with OM into soils like mine is primarily to maintain the excellent drainage created by having different textures of material in the beds.

I wanted t raise the level of the beds I created, so I tried to replicate the texture of the native soils because that is what works in this garden.

I don't till either because I think, in my experience that changes the structure of the soils, but I do add OM to the top of my beds. Regularly ? No. I don't create enough OM on my property to do that. I have to drive half way down the mountain to a friend's oak forest to glean bags of leaves to bring home to shred to mulch my beds. I don't have much lawn left. I've been removing it to create beds over the years. I certainly cannot count on lawn clippings for a contribution to the OM I add to my garden.

This year, because of the drought and because the leaves dried up so quickly, I am going to the chipping pile to get wood chips to put over the shredded leaves I've already used.

If I followed your Ohio practice of putting down 2' of OM for my winter mulch, I'd kill every plant I've put in the garden because that kind of mulching would introduce the perfect environment for canker and other fungal diseases.

I think we have to adjust to the climate where we are gardening. There is no one perfect way.

I can say, until the drought, I had plenty of worms and the soil was very much alive. For now, I just want to keep the plants alive. The worms will come back.

Smiles,
Lyn

>> I've eliminated the 'pile' step from composting, and do all sheet composting now, in place, on beds.

I think you're smart, and get the maximum "milage" out of the raw materials that way. I'm not sure whether I resist sheet composting mainly becuase it looks untidy, or simply and emabarassingly that I resist changing my methods becuase I'm stuck in my ways.

I bet it looks better when you add some materials on top of a 3" layer of similar stuff, than it looks when I drop weeds or clippings on top of bare soil or a thin layer of mulch.

I think that if I had access to 10 times as much compost as I do, my methods would be very similar to your methods (assuming it kept the deeper layers from reverting to pure clay.


>> Not sure right now if I actually ever need to till again, but I do think it's necessary in the earlier years of improving your soil. Just my opinion...

That is my exact practice, and it would be my firm opinion except that I've read about so many "lasagna gardeners" that I have to acknowledge that their way must work, too.

I think that partly, "everybody is like Frank Sinatra: I did it MY way". Partly, everyone's soil, climate, situation, goals and abilitiies are different and they find methods that work for them in their back yard.

I know the temptation to proselytize the theory that "MY WAY" is "THE ONLY WAY", but I also know that that theory is worng, worng, wrong.


>> Adding something like sand or grit sounds like much too much effort to me if it has to be incorporated below the surface.

I enjoy the turning and mixing, I really feel like I am CREATING the mechanical soil structure, which seems to me the very first requriement for fertility. Fropm the amount of trenching and digging I did in my first few years in this yard, I MUST have some mole DNA in my ancestry. Deep digging IS fairly intense work, but it doesn;t strain my legs as much as weeding or sowing or transplanting.

And, maybe it's a factor, when I was a kid the only garden task I was allowed to do was the twice-annual turning of the soil to break up clods and incorporate leaves and compost. Since that was my only connection to the garden, I formed, I guess, a soil-digging fetish.

And for sure, two years of double-digging and turning compost under changed that from "nasty dirt" to "fertile soil". I didn't know, then, that simply piling 3-5 times as much OM on top of the soil would have a similar effect in a similar number of years. (That soil started out MUCH better than my current clay. I'd guess it was clay loam with 30-35% clay. part of its problem was simply that it was totally compacted, so the first few years of tilling and adding OM accomplished turning solid blocks into fine crumb structure and "adding lots of air".

I find the hardest part about adding sand and grit is the cost and difficulty of hauling, even if only by wheelbarrow from the driveway to the farther beds. HEAVY!! And making a big difference takes a lot of sand. But making a small improvement during the first few years is enough to get my beds jump-started.

I'm really glad that a few people have said they also found sand helpful in clay soil that started out "too clayey". It seems to be a majority opinion overall that "clay + sand = concrete", as if the fault came from adding sand, not from withholding organic matter.

Nothing can be real soil without organic matter. Pure clay needs OM even more than most soils.

But my theory is that if your "dirt" started out near the very tip-top of the soil triangle (more than 60% clay, less than 40% sand or silt), it will probably help if you can add enough sand or silty to bring it into the middle regions, even if it would still be called "clay" and not "clay loam" by a pedant.

From what you've been saying, it sounds as if very frequent and plentiful additions of lots of OM can reduce the need for that "non-clay mineral fraction".

All I had before this discussion was that, when I was trying to make as many new beds as possible with a very limited compost budget, and starting with rock-hard relatively pure clay, it seemed that a little sand and grit and insoluble fibers went a long way towards making the improvement from my small amount of compost "last longer".

Now that I think about it, that supports one of my other theories, which is that soil is better when it has "enough of everything". If anything is TOO low a % of the soil, it gets much worse. Picture soil trying to be fertile if it had almost NONE of any one of these:

air
water
organic matter
soil life
clay
sand
silt

Maybe when two or three ingredients are all too low, increasing one of them can sometimes make up for other lacks.

If it doesn't have "enough" sand or silt, it needs a lot of OM to make up for the lack.

If it doesn't have enough OM OR sand OR silt OR grit, adding even a little more sand multiplies the benefit of little more OM.

Plus, sand and silt last forever. When "not enough OM" decomposes and turns into "WAY not enough OM", at least having a little sand and grit help keep it aerobic until I DO buy more compost.