Too rough for the garden blog
9/10/07 11:27 pmOkay, I finished digging up the damn flowerbed and now I have all sorts of venom and vitriol stored up for the FUCKING ASSWIPES that "prepared" it in the first place.
A little background first. We bought the house new in 2005, first owners. The house had a modest foundation planting of horrid gardenias and one azalea. I Hate Gardenias. So the first spring there I ripped them all out by their roots With Much Glee, and tossed them out. Planted 2 more azaleas. Also planted a myriad of spring bulbs, most of which are NOT happy in the shade, which is the environment of the flowerbed, being situated on the north side of the house (which is the front), and with a huge oak tree in the front yard. The flowerbed is in constant dappled to moderate shade.
Anyway. I was tired of having nothing in the front flowerbed, so I've researched shade gardens and decided to put one in there. My struggle with it will be detailed in my gardening blog, at![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lorrisgarden if you aren't already a friend there. The first step in installing a shade garden (or any garden, for that matter) is to make sure you have the proper soil to put your outrageously expensive plants in. So I've been dutifully digging up the flowerbed with a garden fork.
Now, I live in West Georgia, about 10 miles from the Alabama line just off Interstate 20. Georgia, what parts aren't sitting on the granite bedrock, is composed of clay. And not just any clay; no, this is the famed Georgia Red Clay, which is slick and slimy when wet, hard and near impossible to break when dry, and dyes everything it touches (dry or wet) a bright, permanent orange red. I expected to find clay in the flowerbed under the thin layer (about 2 inches) of organic matter which has been the result of assiduous mulching on our parts for the past 2 years.
What I did NOT expect to find were the various rocks, limbs, boulders, and pieces of broken glazed sewer pipe that was used to fill in the flowerbed. And what I REALLY didn't expect to find was the 1/4 thick layer of what seemed to be CEMENT I discovered about 5 inches down!! Now, I was having to dig this fucking thing 8 to 12 inches deep. Encountering concrete at 5 inches was not a welcome discovery, not to mention extremely strange. Some wiggling of the fork managed to break through it, and I took it over to the swing under the oak tree to investigate my prize.
It turns out, it wasn't really cement. The workers, no doubt undocumented to a man, had put a layer of builders' sand on top of the native clay 5 inches down. Then, instead of putting a layer of topsoil in the bed and then MIXING THE TOPSOIL, SAND AND CLAY TOGETHER, making a nice friable soil that anything would grow in happily, they then chunked in just about anything they could find to fill the bed (in addition to every fucking rock they could find, they also added three coat hangers, some used shoe strings, and no less than 4 broken bottles), topped it with a scant couple of inches of topsoil, plopped the original plants in what amounted to fucking BUCKETS in the ground, and called it good.
The sand worked in concert with the marvelous water-retaining properties of the clay to form thin, brittle cement. So my flowerbed in the front was nothing but a parking lot with some mud on top. No wonder just about all my bulbs rotted in the ground. There was nowhere for the water to go, assuming of course that the heavy clay admix would let it go anywhere in the first place.
So now I've busted through the cement layer to the clay substrate, brought that to the surface, and today I spread 140 lbs of builders' sand and 350 lbs of topsoil on the broken up clay. I've turned the ENTIRE mix (clay, sand and topsoil) once so far, and my word is that going to be some lovely soil. I'm going to turn it 2 or 3 more times, in order to bust up as much of the clay clods as I can and to make sure it's as well-mixed and beautiful as possible. My shade garden WILL NOT DIE.
At least not because it has shitty assed soil.
A little background first. We bought the house new in 2005, first owners. The house had a modest foundation planting of horrid gardenias and one azalea. I Hate Gardenias. So the first spring there I ripped them all out by their roots With Much Glee, and tossed them out. Planted 2 more azaleas. Also planted a myriad of spring bulbs, most of which are NOT happy in the shade, which is the environment of the flowerbed, being situated on the north side of the house (which is the front), and with a huge oak tree in the front yard. The flowerbed is in constant dappled to moderate shade.
Anyway. I was tired of having nothing in the front flowerbed, so I've researched shade gardens and decided to put one in there. My struggle with it will be detailed in my gardening blog, at
lorrisgarden if you aren't already a friend there. The first step in installing a shade garden (or any garden, for that matter) is to make sure you have the proper soil to put your outrageously expensive plants in. So I've been dutifully digging up the flowerbed with a garden fork.Now, I live in West Georgia, about 10 miles from the Alabama line just off Interstate 20. Georgia, what parts aren't sitting on the granite bedrock, is composed of clay. And not just any clay; no, this is the famed Georgia Red Clay, which is slick and slimy when wet, hard and near impossible to break when dry, and dyes everything it touches (dry or wet) a bright, permanent orange red. I expected to find clay in the flowerbed under the thin layer (about 2 inches) of organic matter which has been the result of assiduous mulching on our parts for the past 2 years.
What I did NOT expect to find were the various rocks, limbs, boulders, and pieces of broken glazed sewer pipe that was used to fill in the flowerbed. And what I REALLY didn't expect to find was the 1/4 thick layer of what seemed to be CEMENT I discovered about 5 inches down!! Now, I was having to dig this fucking thing 8 to 12 inches deep. Encountering concrete at 5 inches was not a welcome discovery, not to mention extremely strange. Some wiggling of the fork managed to break through it, and I took it over to the swing under the oak tree to investigate my prize.
It turns out, it wasn't really cement. The workers, no doubt undocumented to a man, had put a layer of builders' sand on top of the native clay 5 inches down. Then, instead of putting a layer of topsoil in the bed and then MIXING THE TOPSOIL, SAND AND CLAY TOGETHER, making a nice friable soil that anything would grow in happily, they then chunked in just about anything they could find to fill the bed (in addition to every fucking rock they could find, they also added three coat hangers, some used shoe strings, and no less than 4 broken bottles), topped it with a scant couple of inches of topsoil, plopped the original plants in what amounted to fucking BUCKETS in the ground, and called it good.
The sand worked in concert with the marvelous water-retaining properties of the clay to form thin, brittle cement. So my flowerbed in the front was nothing but a parking lot with some mud on top. No wonder just about all my bulbs rotted in the ground. There was nowhere for the water to go, assuming of course that the heavy clay admix would let it go anywhere in the first place.
So now I've busted through the cement layer to the clay substrate, brought that to the surface, and today I spread 140 lbs of builders' sand and 350 lbs of topsoil on the broken up clay. I've turned the ENTIRE mix (clay, sand and topsoil) once so far, and my word is that going to be some lovely soil. I'm going to turn it 2 or 3 more times, in order to bust up as much of the clay clods as I can and to make sure it's as well-mixed and beautiful as possible. My shade garden WILL NOT DIE.
At least not because it has shitty assed soil.
