Bay-Friendly Gardening Guide - Chapter 3

Short Description
Bay-Friendly Gardening starts here, on the ground floor, with a … stone of organic gardening and a universally recog-. nized soil amendment. …

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Content
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The Nitty Gritty on Soil
Every gardener’s ideal is a soil called loam.
Dark and wonderfully crumbly, a good
quality loam has high organic content, is
teeming with life, contains all the nutrients
that plants need, holds moisture well, and
drains well. It has excellent structure and
texture, and provides the optimum combination
of soil’s main components: minerals,
air, water, organic matter, and soildwelling
organisms.
Minerals
Gardeners categorize soils based upon the
size of their mineral particles. Coarse sand
(which has the largest particles) is at one
end of the continuum and fine clay (the
smallest of the small) is at the other. In the
middle is silt. The physical character of any
garden soil is determined by how much
sand, silt, and clay it contains.
You can feel this character - a soil’s texture
- between your fingers. Clay soil is
smooth to the touch, and if you squeeze it
when it’s wet, it holds together. Sand, on
the other hand, is loose and grainy regardless
of whether it’s wet or dry, and the
grains are visible to the naked eye.
Soil texture greatly influences a soil’s waterholding
capacity, because water molecules
are attracted to the…