Soil Matters

You've got visions of glorious flower beds swirling through your mind, but first the hard part — laying the foundation. Exactly how glorious those flowers are going to be depends in large part on what you've done with the soil at their feet. A few gentle reminders:

Don't work the soil when it's wet. You know this already, but sometimes it's hard to remember when you're itching to get out into the garden. Tilling or cultivating wet soil — with a tiller, a garden fork or even a hand cultivator — can completely destroy the soil structure, forcing clay particles closer together and restricting air and water movement through the soil. The soil will then dry into adobe-hard chunks that are extremely difficult to break up. Undoing the damage could take years. To determine if your soil is ready to work, squeeze a handfu l— if it forms a sticky or muddy ball, it's too wet. If it crumbles through your fingers, it's perfect.

To amend or not to amend.. When you're preparing flower beds, vegetable gardens and perennial borders, you naturally amend the soil with organic matter. Whether it's compost, peat moss or well-rotted manure, organic matter improves any soil. Besides adding essential nutrients, it helps sandy soil hang on to water (and those nutrients); it improves aeration and drainage in clay soils. Compost, "gardener's gold," is a multi-purpose soil amendment that suppresses weeds and supplies many minor minerals and microorganisms — and, best of all, you can make it in your own backyard.

But when it comes to trees and shrubs, the advice is different: don't amend the soil in the planting holes. Adding goodies such as bagged top soil, compost and the like creates a container effect — the tree's roots will love it in the beginning, but a few years down the road they won't want to leave such a sweet spot and venture into more forbidding territory.