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A Gardener's Notebook: The latest incarnation of my column detailing the trails and tribulations of my garden. Join the list and ask your own questions about gardening Subscribe

Last week I mentioned a problem with some of my garden beds. They seem to be constantly dry no matter how much I water. They also seem very hard and compacted. From my previous research into this subject it seems that there is not enough organic matter in the soil. There are several ways to get more organic material into the soil, such as compost and peat moss, but I decided to "hit the Internet" again and see what further information I could find on improving the soil of your garden.

Amending the soil

The best advice I can find about compost and other organic amendments is this, keep at it. It is only after a fairly long time that the quality of soil will change. Like all things in nature, improving the quality of your soil will take time. If your soil is particularly bad it may actually require constant amendment. Then again, as gardeners we all like gardening and working with the soil.

Poor soil can be caused by a number of reasons. If you irrigate your garden this can have the effect of washing both organic matter and nutrients out of the soil. It can also cause a build-up of minerals and salts, especially if you use untreated well water to irrigate. Usually, heavy rains will help to wash these salts out of the soil, but if you have been in a drought situation, like so many this year, these rains may have not yet arrived.

After the rainy season you can apply some fertilizers to help refresh the soil, but I try to keep these amendments at a minimum. With so much leaf mold and other compostables in my garden I should be able to recycle my plants back into the garden. Of course, this depends on getting my compost pile to actually compost. Whether it is the lack of moisture, the lack of green material or just general lack of knowledge my compost pile cooks very, very slowly. This is definitely near the top of my gardening project list in the New Year.

A little Internet info

When I am doing a general search on the Internet, one of the first sources I turn to is actually many sources in one. MetaCrawler is a "meta-search engine." This means that when you perform a search there, it is actually sent to many search engines at once. All the returned results are then combined and presented in one, sorted list. This can speed up your Internet research quite a bit since you don't have to visit each search engine individually.

Resources

Online

Below are a few web sites with some good composting and soil amendment information. If you want to see the entire list of sites returned by MetaCrawler visit: this link.

Master Composter

Gardening at About.com

Yard & Garden Info from Ohio State University

Books

All About Compost: Recycling Household and Garden Waste

Easy Compost : The Secret to Great Soil & Spectacular Plants (21St-Century Gardening Series)

The Secret Life of Compost : A 'How-To' & 'Why' Guide to Composting-Lawn, Garden, Feedlot or Farm

Soil and Composting : The Complete Guide to Building Healthy, Fertile Soil (Taylor's Weekend Gardening Guides)

Let an Earthworm Be Your Garbage Man : All About Earthworms-For Garbage Disposal and Soil Fertility Composting, the cheap and natural way to make your garden grow

Until next week…

Keep digging!