Clay

Last week I was talking to my brother on the phone about my gardening project. He built raised beds at his home in Texas about 20 years ago. He was telling me about how he ordered a truckload of topsoil to fill them. Big mistake. In central Texas, there isn't a lot of top soil. What he got was pretty much clay. Vegetables don't like clay. I laughed. My poor brother trying to grow vegetables in Texas. I had tried to grow vegetables down there when I was in grad school, and I'd given up.

Originally, I had wanted to fill my boxes with compost. I thought I'd mix in a little local topsoil to ensure good mineral content. Over a three week period, I casually called around looking for compost. I called the garden columnist at the local New Bedford Newspaper and sent her an email. No response. I called a garden center in Marion. And I did daily web searches. From those searches and several calls, I found several places that would sell me soil -- but not compost. They suggested loam and said this was perfect for my raised-bed vegetable gardening. The only compost that I could find locally was in bags. I would have had to spend $800.00 to fill my beds with bags of compost.

Loam. It sounds soft, doesn't it? Certainly it sounds softer than plain-old topsoil. Right? I decided that loam was the best I could do. And I could afford a few bags of manure and a good organic fertilizer to enrich the loam. Plus, weeks had gone by, and I needed to fill my boxes if I was going to get some cool weather crops in. 

So I had six yards of loam delivered and filled two boxes. I planted one with strawberries. Then I put a soaker hose on the second one. I pulled off the hose and raked the loam around a little. What I saw wasn't good.

When you push a rake into wet soil, at least a little water should squeeze out. None did. In fact, the soil just snapped back like Jello. I went back and checked the strawberry box. It had been drying for a day. I knocked on the soil. Hard as a brick and cracking. Turns out that "loam" is just the local word for topsoil. And the topsoil that I got wasn't any better than the topsoil that my brother had gotten in Texas.

I went to one last garden center. I hadn't been able to talk to them on the phone because it is a small family operation, and when they're working, they don't answer the phone. They just had bags of compost, too. But they suggested Sunny Nook Farms in Rochester. I called. And by 9 AM yesterday morning, I had compost being dumped in the yard.

You can see the difference in the color of the compost and the loam.

I dug out in between the strawberries and filled the holes with compost.

Then I dug out the other box that I'd filled with loam.

Then I filled that box and the one next to it and a little box with compost (mixed with a little topsoil) and planted my cabbages, kale, lettuce, and broccoli. And I wrapped chicken wire around the newly planted beds to keep the rabbits out until I can build my fence around the whole garden. Yesterday was exhausting. And I learned something about New England soil.