manures

Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn't think we'd be proud of this, but what can I say, we're a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I've got my own candidate for the worst soil ever - the stuff in the beds around my house. Oh, texturally, it is among the best I've got - sandy loam, warms up nicely, isn't too wet like much of the rest of my soil. It had some nice enough foundation plantings, and I mostly ignored it for the first few years I was here. But a…