Hello,
My backyard soil looks very compact. On the Internet, it always says loam soil is good for planting trees and vegetables. A person had ordered too much such sand for his project, he gave away the rest to others. On his ads, he said it was sandy loam. I tried 2 times to plant a grapevine and a fruit tree with this ‘sandy loam’. It didn’t look good as the sand was hard after it was watered.
BTW, I don’t see any organic material in this sand. I got some soil information from “Gary’s Best Gardening”'s live stream videos on Youtube. He always advocated sandy loam without any organic material inside. I wonder whether my understanding is wrong with these lectures.
What do you think about it? Is it for planting or for a foundation construction project?
It’s always hard to tell from a picture, but the hardening doesn’t sound good. As far as what soil type to plant in, sand, clay, loam, sandy loam all have their pros and cons. The trick is learning to work with the soil you have. Sure, if soil texture was my only deciding factor when looking for a property, I’d go with loam or sandy loam. But you can do some pretty great stuff with most soils. Sometimes there’s not much you can do, but adding compost will ameliorate almost any soil texture issues.
I had soil that looked similar to that when I lived in Arizona. I added several inches of compost and silica sand to the top and then tilled that in with the native soil down about 8 to 10 inches. The compost and sand kept the native soil from binding together. I think I might have even tilled in some fine wood mulch. I had the healthiest trees and lawn in the neighborhood.
I think you should bury as many rotted trees and wood into the soil as you can and as much compost and then continually add compost and maybe mulching and think about adding correctly stored and not expired beneficial bacteria and mycorrhizae and humic acid to the established perrenial plants.
Maybe adding a outside earthworm compost as well in a shady spot.
I’m from the northeast and completely unfamiliar with arid soils but that looks alot like RCA to me. Adding compost and more organic matter will fix any soil. I also second the humic acid it has done wonders for my lawn along with bio-solid fertilizer.
I live in Colorado and we have clay soil here. There was a area last year that I tried to plant strawberries in. When I tried to dig with a small shovel it broke the shovel it was so hard. I ended up tearing out the strawberries because they did horrible and just disappeared over time. I started with 25 and ended up with 10 strawberries by the end of August. As a result I looked up how to fix clay soils and I found adding organic material is the best. I ended up adding peat moss to the soil and also added a product called clay buster. That part of the yard one year later just squishes below my shoes it is so soft now. Clay Buster is not cheap but I recommend it. There is also certain rootstock that do better with clay soil than others on certain trees. A good example is with cherry trees I found newroot-1 mentions it does well with clay soils.
Back to @ruwan2 's original question, is the problem soil what you brought in, the existing soil, or some combination thereof? You say the soil you brought in was a sandy loam, but I’m curious what sort of project the guy you got it from was using it for. Do you know? That could tell us more about what kind of material it is. Also, do you know what the existing soil on your site is? If you have clay, that could be part of the problem. Some kind of sand, when mixed with some kinds of clay, end up acting a lot like concrete.
