Gardening on the Run
GROUND WORK
Soil is not just dirt. It is the topmost layer of the earth’s surface composed of a complex structure of organic matter, minerals, and a host of living organisms that entraps water, air, and provides the nutrients essential for healthy plant development. In fact the Soil Conservation Service of the USDA, the nation’s keeper of our country’s soil, has ten different classifications for soil based on their structure and fertility. Mollisoils, for instance, are soils high in organic matter and have that characteristic black color you see in the corn and bean fields of the Midwest farm belt. For our purposes, though, there are three basic types of soil: sandy soil, clay soil, and loam.
Sandy soil is composed of mostly minerals and silica and is low in organic materials. It is gritty to the touch and although it drains readily does not hold water or nutrients well. Clay soils are composed of clay minerals and silt that are dense with little air space and absorb water readily. They are slippery to the touch when wet and when dry tend to be very hard and even crack on the surface. Loam, for want of a better description, is a balance of these characteristics with a structure that is high in organic matter. It tends to be crumbly in texture and is soft to the touch. The structure is open allowing for air and space to encourage root growth. It will drain well yet holds water and nutrients in its structure for use by plant root systems. Loam, if you haven’t already figured it out, is the only acceptable soil type for an Executive Garden.
Unfortunately most residential properties are not blessed with a natural loam soil. Your soil will tend to sand or clay depending on the area of the country you live in and even where and how your home was built. Many developers harvest the valuable natural topsoil on a site and put back just enough to support that picture perfect lawn, about two to three inches. Your garden will require 8” to 12” of high quality loam type soil if you expect to grow something more than weeds.
Your first real opportunity to get your hands dirty is to test for the soil type in your selected garden location. Dig a hole 12” deep at the center of your designated garden plot. Take a handful of soil from the bottom and moisten it if dry. Ball it up in your hand and release it. If you cannot make a ball you have sandy soil. If you can make a dense ball and it squishes between your fingers you might want to consider ceramics as an alternate hobby. If you can make a ball but it crumbles apart easily like chocolate cake you have loam. I wouldn’t expect chocolate cake. Nine times out of ten the soil below that picture perfect lawn of yours will be a mix of sand, clay, rocks, and construction debris that is as lifeless as the back side of the Moon.
Fortunately soil quality is one of the most controllable variables in the garden. It is largely dependent on the investment you make in the addition of organic materials to your soil structure. Organic materials in the form of decaying plant material opens up the soil structure, provide nutrients and a home for the microscopic flora and fauna that are essential to healthy soil. This is particularly true when setting up your garden. Generous additions of organic materials such as composted yard waste, peat moss, and composted manure will transform that lifeless soil into a productive environment for your plants.
As a shrewd CEO you know there is a hard way to do things or an easy way. The hard way is to use a state of the art roto-tiller to churn up each of your 4X12 foot beds while adding organic materials. While this will no doubt appeal to your penchant to exercise power it can be an agonizing experience depending on the original soil quality. In addition the resulting beds will most likely be less than aesthetically pleasing as the roto-tiller is an infrequently used management tool.
The easy way is one that you often utilize to solve difficult problems. You just acquire the perfect loam, or at least the constituents and integrate them into a well functioning, efficient system that will provide the proper nutrients and moisture levels for your plants.
Garden Cubicle
A perfect model for such a system already exists in your own organization, the office cubicle. In gardening circles they are known as raised beds. This is to avoid all of the whining about not having a window view or space for a coffee pot. Unlike the office cubicle a raised bed system will actually make your plants more productive and easier to manage.
A raised bed, as the name implies, is a bed of soil that is built over the top of the existing ground level. With a raised bed the soil nutrition, texture, and moisture holding ability can easily be improved over your existing soil profile. Although an enriched mixture of soil can be simply piled up to achieve this, the use of a retaining wall system makes the task easier and more manageable to maintain. There are many materials that can be used to retain the soil such as wood, stone, concrete block, or brick. There are also commercially available kits utilizing recycled plastic and the like. Whatever method you utilize it should accommodate a depth that can retain 12” of soil.
A simple approach to bed construction for the executive garden is to use two twelve foot 2”X 12”’s and one eight foot 2” X 12” cut in half to construct a four by twelve foot rectangle that is 12” deep. . If you don’t feel technically qualified to make the one saw cut required have the lumber yard cut the eight footers for you. The four foot ends should be secure with hot dipped ring nails or preferably drilled and screwed. The screwing you can handle, as I am sure your former employees can attest to. Use cedar or a treated wood product that does not contain CCA. CCA is an arsenic compound that can leach into the soil. There is some controversy about this in the gardening community, but why take the chance. You are way too important to the U.S. economy. Once assembled these basic units can be positioned right on top of the grass per you garden plan. The two to three inches of top soil in the sod layer will give your plants 14” to 15” of growing depth. Each bed of this size will hold about 1.8 cubic yards of soil that is easily worked and will drain readily. The total cost, not including your labor at $250.00 per hour, for twelve beds constructed in this manner is about $400.00. They are highly manageable and will last for years.
Executive Garden Cubicle
