My name is Ross and I’m so excited to be the new farmer out here at Harvest and provide helpful advice for your gardening adventures!
My first recommendation for anyone seeking to have a successful garden is to know your soil. As you may know if you’ve dug around in your backyard, we’ve got a nice ‘black-gumbo’ clay soil out here at Harvest. As this area has been a working farm for over a century, the soil has taken a toll with the extensive growth of cotton and corn. This has left a great opportunity for our community to learn about and improve our soil!
The thick clay you’ll likely find in your backyard does have its advantages - mainly that it holds moisture and nutrients well.
To improve our local soil, I recommend amending the soil with larger-sized particles, such as wood chips or sand. These are readily available at home improvement stores or with soil companies. The best way to add them in is via compost. Mixing the sand or wood chips in with your compost, allowing them to slightly decompose, and then mixing that mixture into your garden soil. This will improve drainage and add tilth (a farmer word for healthy soil).
Now, some of you might be thinking, “Compost? How do I do that?” That, my friends, is a broad and crucial topic that we will become an ongoing discussion in future articles…
~Onward & Upward