eclayne said:Thanks Trish and Dave. Showing the process is so helpful. Adding some soil to beds to help hold water is interesting too. Part process, part experiment. Do you have clay in your soil?
This is something I could spend a long time talking about, actually. Our soil in East Texas is widely variable and even just 20 feet apart from each other you can have land go from pure sand all the way down over to solid clay. It's really strange, actually. We have an area we call the sand garden because it's pure sand, and we have the "red garden" because it's a nice red loamy clay.
Mixing the reddish clay soil with compost produces the best garden soil you can imagine. I think at this point we've pretty much nailed the technique and we've seen dramatic improvements in our gardening in the last year thanks to that. We should do a podcast about our soil so we can geek out on it and talk about it for half an hour.