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Why Good Drainage is Important for Your Garden
This is just one of the reasons that we are renovating our demonstration garden:
The tracks are from several weeks ago, when we were working to remove the remaining concrete from the wheelchair garden area. There had been a little bit of rain a few days before, and the bobcat left these ruts. Ugh. Since then, they haven’t drained. Granted, a lot of this water is from yesterday and today. Still…it isn’t even pretending to drain. It’s just sitting there.
The first part of our garden renovation is going to be putting in drain tiles that will help move water away from the garden, especially through our lovely, sticky clay, compacted construction pad. When our building was originally built, this area was compacted like the foundation area. Then a little topsoil was added and proclaimed “ready to garden.” Yeah, not so much. These conditions are why we have always used raised beds and worked hard to develop a high organic matter loam soil in those beds. Even with the added drainage, these conditions are also why we will always use raised beds in our Demonstration Garden and also why we recommend that almost all home gardeners in this area also use raised beds.
Many parts of Sedgwick County naturally have a very heavy clay soil like is below our demonstration garden. If you can dig a hole in your garden or yard and fill it with water, and it takes more than 24 hours to drain, you absolutely need either a different location or a raised bed or berm to make your garden successful.
Why does it matter? Isn’t it just water that the plants can use? Actually, it matters a lot. Plant roots need oxygen as much as we do, and if the soil is full of water, there is no space for air! Water can smother the roots of the plants and increase the ability of some problematic diseases to move around in the soil and infect plants.
It might seem ironic to be talking about drainage as a problem after such a dry year. But if your soil is compacted and poorly drained, even a dry summer doesn’t protect you from problems. If anything, it makes it worse because your soil is either soggy or rock hard.
Improving soil drainage and structure. The reason we recommend raised beds so often is that they are a relatively quick solution to a problem that might otherwise take many years to fix. The way to actually improve your soil as it is will vary with the exact problems, but it would include a combination of deep tine aeration/ripping, incorporating organic matter by the ton, and probably planting some deep rooted cover crops like winter radishes that can break up the soil over several years (and incorporating them for more organic matter). Even then, you will still have a heavy, clay soil, albeit with better organic matter and drainage. Given all that work, raised beds seem like a good choice, don’t they?
Garden Renovation, Phase 1: Demolition
This week we officially kicked off the garden renovation. There’s no turning back now!
This is Tuesday morning, before we started working. The plants look sad, but they were still productive.
If it was green and growing, we pretty much pulled it out on Tuesday. There were A LOT of peppers and green tomatoes on those plants.
Case in point. I know you don’t see any peppers in this picture, but trust me. Most of those bags are full of peppers. It was pepper palooza!
I could be wrong, but I think we might need another compost bin. Just maybe.
This is as things were winding down yesterday morning. All the rest of those bricks and blocks are gone now. All that’s left is some of the trash lumber, the wheelchair height bed, the table, and the compost area. And a whole bunch of dirt.
Note to self: raised beds do NOT need 2-3′ long pieces of rebar to secure them to the ground. Really, they don’t. Not even in Kansas.
It was pretty cool to see the root remnants of the plants we pulled on Tuesday. This root system is from the pepper garden. I guess we did a decent job of watering, because the roots seem to go all the way to the bottom of the raised bed area and even a little deeper.
We also realized just how important (and nice) all the drainage work is as a component of the renovation. After not having rain for ages, then 2″ over the weekend, there was water standing in the packed clay 12-24″ inches below the surface. When we pulled the demonstration table out, we saw it had literally been standing in water. Yuck!
The First Time Gardener: Getting to Know Your Soil
There’s no doubt that our soil is an incredibly important part of our gardening success, and there’s a lot that you can learn from your soil by doing a couple of simple tests. You can also learn a lot just by going out, feeling your soil, and paying close attention to what you feel! Here are 4 simple tests you can do in your garden to get to know your soil better.
Simple Test #1:
Pick up a handful of moist soil and form it into a ball. (The soil shouldn’t be dry or muddy to do this test.) Then gently squeeze the ball of soil. If it crumbles gently, it is probably a loam soil. If it doesn’t crumble at all, it probably is some type of clay soil. If you can’t get it to form a ball, it is probably either very sandy or too dry for the test.
Simple Test #2:
Take your ball of soil and moisten it a little more if need be. Now try to flatten it into a soil “ribbon.” Can you make a ribbon? If so, estimate how long it is. The longer your ribbon, the more clay in your soil. A loam soil will form a very short ribbon or no ribbon at all. A sandy soil…well, you couldn’t even make a ball, right?
Simple Test #3:
Take your ribbon/ball of soil from the first two tests, and break off a small piece. Pour a little water into your hand and massage the soil into a muddy thin paste (almost watery). Feel the thin paste. Does it feel gritty? That’s sand. Does it feel sticky? That’s clay. Does it feel smooth (but not sticky)? That’s silt. Depending on how much you feel one characteristic, that indicates how much of each of those 3 components is in your soil.
Simple Test #4:
Take about 1 cup of your soil and put it in a quart jar. Add a teaspoon of granular dish detergent if you have some. Fill the jar about 3/4 full with water, and put on the lid. Now shake the jar thoroughly so there isn’t any soil on the bottom. Set the jar down and set a timer for 2 minutes. When the 2 minutes is up, measure the amount of sediment in the bottom of the jar with a ruler and write it down. After 2 hours, measure the amount of sediment again and record it. In 24-72 hours (whenever the water is mostly clear again), record the amount of sediment in the jar again.
The measurement you took after the first 2 minutes is the amount of sand in your soil. The amount of sediment that accumulated after 2 hours minus the first number is the amount of silt. The last measurement (minus the earlier measurements) is the amount of clay. Use those 3 numbers to calculate the relative percentage of sand, silt, and clay in your soil.
From there, you can plug your percentages into the Soil Texture Triangle to get an idea of what type of soil you have.
Using this chart, I would classify the soil pictured above as a Sandy Loam, with quite a bit of organic matter as well!
So why is it important to know what type of soil you have? What difference does it make if you have lots of sand, lots of silt, or lots of clay? You’ll have to check back next week to find out!
