Beginner Gardening: New Gardeners! Why did you start?, 1 by RickCorey_WA

RickCorey_WA wrote:
>> I wish I could send you some of what we sell, it's really nice stuff!

I wish that, too! I happen to know that "Cedar Grove" gets biosolids free fropm the town of Everett befoe they compost it further with even more sawdust and yard waste, then charge $35 per yard. PPPFFFTTT.

If I had a truck, and could get it really filthy,. I could haul my own Class A biosolids and have the biggest compost heap in town. If they let me!

The park manager recently came by to tell me to fill in the walkways between my raised beds, do more weeding, chip my branches, remove this bed, hide those things away, etc etc. I'm hoping to placate him with minimal compliance. On the upside, he siad they have a "tree contractor" come b y once each summer, and he would ask the guy to dump me a few yards of wood chips. Even if I have to buy and haul bags of manure/compost mix in my Ford Escort's trunk, I could compost that with pleasure!

>> I get amazed at people (customers at work) who want to just plop their new acquisitions into this local clay garbage and expect it to do ok.

Maybe tell them to bring in a handful of the soil surrounding the dead plants for you to "analyze".

If they say the soil is too hard for them to get their fingers into, remind them that they need to grow in SOIL, not concrete.

Or grow in pots.

I would like to give away seedlings at the park where I live, but I picture the over-55 residents looking at a seedling in a Dixie cup, then looking at their bulldozer-scraped, compacted-clay "soil" and parking the Dixie cup on top of the clay.


The sad thing is that even breaking up that clay won't help: shattering and then amending a hole below grade just creates a deep mud wallow. Like a hole in concrete. You need to dig down, create a "floor" that sloopes toward one edge or corner, and then away from that colrner, always going deeper in a downhill direction until you reach a spot where the grade is lower than the floor of your bed.

Or build a raised bed and buy or make the soil.

Before someone gently explained that you should MOISTEN hard clay if you wnat to break it up, I had to swing a very heavy pick 'way up over my head just to chip that stuff.