Know Your Soil

The key to having a great looking garden is by knowing what type of soil you have. Now some of us are more versed than others, but here are some ways of telling what you have and different ingredients to help those soils out.

Grab a handful of wet soil and knead it into a tight ball. Rubbing your thumb against your index finger, pinch the soil to form it into a ribbon. If you can make a ribbon, but it's less than 1 to 2 in. long, you have loam soil.

SAND: When you try to form very sandy soil into a ball, it just won't hold together, even when it's wet. So there's no chance it'll form a ribbon. That's sandy soil. If your soil forms a ribbon less than an inch long, you'll want to treat it like sand and add amendments.

CLAY: If your soil forms a ribbon 2 in. long or longer, you have clay. Unless you have plants that like clay, they won't be healthy.

Amending the top 6 in. of your soil, will help you grow great plants. But to get even deeper root growth, remove the amended layer and spread more ingerdiants in the treanch. Till them in and then replace the first layer.

Organic Ingredients: Some examples are Bark chips, Compost, and Peat moss.

Inorganic Ingredients: Some examples of these are Sand, Perlite and Vermiculite.