Improving Garden soil

ok Now we convert the #'s to hundredths of an inch.

Jar 1......... 2.5 total with .375" of silt. that's about 85% sand ,15% silt.

jar 2......... 2.625 total with .8125 silt. That's about 70% sand, 30% silt.

You really want to wait a bit for the clay but it likely wont change the composition if as you say the water is mostly cleared out. How much stuff would you say stayed floating? This is your organic content. This is the measure of your soils fertility.

Sounds like you have sandy loam. If you add compost mixed in and add manure to the top like I suggest above. You will have close the finest garden soil possible. Many gardeners wish they had your soil.

P.S. If you wished you could add 15% organic matter and sell it to garden centers as potting soil.

Its been 24 hours and my clay layer is really thin---close to 1/16 in both jars. I thank you for the help and thanks to everyone else for your input.

I don't understand how sandy loam can be something where a person can bog to the knees when wet but real hard when dry. Doesn't make sense. I'll have to ponder that awhile to find an explanation. I made my soil to be almost the exact opposite proportions of silt and sand and it drains almost too well and never gets hard.

Martin

I love my silt-clay soil, though it does get hard on top if not kept covered by a mulch. The plants though, seem to love it. They grow crazy. Makes it look like i have a green thumb. I do HAVE to remember though, that I need to vober bean seeds with jsut compost and not the soil as the tops break off from the crust as I so learned this year with my purple pole beans

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It's not that I don't like mankind, I just like nature a whole lot more.

I do not know anything about soil types or what each type should or should not do. I was shocked after doing this soil test that my dirt has so much sand in it. 2 Examples here----1. Last year after everything was up and about grown, the butter beans were about ready to pick, but we started getting some rain, not alot but every day or two we would get a afternoon thunder shower etc(My garden never has water standing on it---all water runs off to the lower spot in the woods) Days later, My butter beans needing picking bad but the soil was so boggy that we could not walk into that section of the garden. I ended up parking my golfcart with trailer on the hard pack road, put on knee boots and walked into the garden and pulled the whole bean plants up, got a arm full and carry them to the trailer-----back and forth till I had them all up. 2. We have not had any rain in weeks now, I dug my potatoes which are planted in about the same spot as those butter beans were---I used a potato fork because we only had about 30 plants to dig(I planted about 30 hills, waited a couple weeks and planted some more, then in a couple weeks planted more)----I stuck the fork in the dirt no problem pushing it into the dirt about 3 to 4" but to get it deep enough to get under the potatoes I had to stomp, shove, stomp, shove to get it under to pop the potatoes up-----I started to go get the tractor and middle buster, but managed to get them out with the fork.

When working the garden spot in the beginning of the planting. I use a disk that cuts down about 9" then I hill the center of the rows a few inches higher than the walk ways when laying off the rows. I have never used a sub soiler because I figured if I broke the hard dirt up and deeper I would have a worse bog hole when its wet(Thinking that I bog half way to my knees when its wet is about 9") I know when the boys were 4x4ing the deeper they got the worse/boggy it got. When I got the soil sample for "jar 2" I dug down with a 4" wide trench shovel about 1 foot to see what the dirt was made up of that deep. It was hard to dig that deep---I thought about getting a pick-ax-LOL.

Maybe years of whatever plus your nephew haev given you a hardpan (ggogle it) making drainage worse. You need a deep subsoiler type plow to break up the hardpan- dunno if a regular tractor can do it but a tiller can't. Quicker cheaper trial than draiange tiling. And certainly you need mroe compost- dunno a cheap way for an acre.

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US Army veteran, military retiree spouse, and military; civilian; British NHS; and VA doctor.

OK I will pick up a subsoiler and get busy finding bulk compost material, get a soil test and make a better garden. Thanks everyone!!

I stand by the subsoiler to break up the hardpan. All those years of bare soil and little added back. It needs soil conditioners to add tilth. Tillers and disks are terrible things if you don't have enough organic matter in the soil. Compaction is the hardest thing to undo on low organic matter soils. Cover crops with legumes add nutients, but more important is organic matter. NickieL has it figured out....James

Could be a spring popping out of the hillside. I got hills (actualy valleys) with weak springs under the soil that keep the ground muddy if the overall weather is wet enough. And they dry up when the weather has been dry long enough. Around here there are creeks that have cut down into the base rock, sedimentary limestone, that are dripping wet all year long as ground water seeps between the cracks. If your hill were, say 8 foot deep soil covering a similar rock outcropping… it could keep the ground saturated long after the rain stopped.

I’m trying to do the same tractor gardening as you. My tractor wheels are on 54” (?) centers and I made raised beds on 60” centers and get 2 rows per bed. I need some special tooling to cultivate the raised beds… and good planning. I want raised beds for a number of reasons, one being that the beds and walkways will be permanent and I can just work the beds and not have any compaction. Right now I defiantly got hardpan… I took a hand cranked ice auger and doing that you can feel resistance of the hardpan and feel it break through too. I think over years of ripping and tilling in organic matter the permanent raised beds could become a deep V of loose humus, and the walkways become an opposite shape V of compacted earth. What I don’t know is if that would really be a good thing. Haha.

I know I do not have a spring, we basically are flat land. Yes I do have low and high places but not more than a few feet across a big area/field except where the creeks are that could drop of 8/10ft. The boggy garden is caused by 2 reasons---repeated rains softens the top soil and because when we get a decent amout of rain it fills the low place in the wood, actually looks like a pond when its full and this really softens the dirt. This area fills to a point then starts overflowing into a creek. The creek is probably 8/10ft below the pond/low place. My problem is the area that the water over flows needs to be dug down lower so the low place does not hold as much water. When the low place is full and starts over flowing, the water level is probably 1 ft or below the top of the garden soil in the lowest area and the water's edge is about 30ft from the edge of my garden. The garden does start a gradual incline away from the water, maybe up to about 2ft higher than the edge of the garden edge closest to the water. I know I need to get a track hoe in there and dig it where it does not hold as much water-----this would help alot. It will have to dig a ditch about 100yds long and remove several trees along the way. I am planning to do this soon, but I want to fix a dam/spillway where I can controll the water's depth. I think this would help or fix the bogginess. I can keep the water lower in the winter where I can work the garden spot earlier, then I could let the water get a little higher(if it rains) which would help with the watering of the garden. This low spot in the woods is totally dry right now because of no rain. When it gets dry my garden soil gets so hard a few inches below the surface. I feel if I controll the water's depth and get some/alot organic matter in the soil, I will have a good garden spot unless it does not rain for weeks. Thanks