November 21, 2024

VIDEO: Loose soil can be TOO Loose!


If you are aiming for only loose soil, you should consider the downsides to loose soil. As they say, too much of any good thing can be a bad thing.

28 thoughts on “VIDEO: Loose soil can be TOO Loose!

  1. I bought some seeds from you just a month ago gave my mom your info thank you so much for all your videos we live in zone 5 so pretty much everything you do we do.! 🙂

  2. Thank you Luke! Having this issue in one of my raised beds now. I just wasn’t sure what was wrong with it. Just knew it wasn’t right…wasn’t holding water etc. I did add our own compost a couple of weeks ago but still not fixed. Should I add some clay?

  3. On the bottom of my raised garden beds is very compact compost. The 12 inches+ on top seems perfect and delivers great produce every season
    Should I turn it from the very bottom or is that layer suppose to be dense to hold water better

  4. Thanks Luke for the visual demonstration. I just ordered a cubic yard of garden soil and noticed some clay in there. I was worried and wondered why they added clay in their blend.

  5. I got the loosest soil thinking it would help my carrots, beets, radishes grow. Nothing will grow in that bed. my other bed is so compact that plants are having a tough time to grow and take forever. My other bed is in the middle and things grow great. Goldilocks is right! Lol

  6. Silt generally just refers to a particle size that is in between clay (tiny) and sand (fairly large, any larger and it would be qualified as gravel). It' usually refers to inorganic material. I think it's actually desirable to have more than 10% organic in the top soil layer.

  7. I enjoy the channel and watch virtually every show. What I have not seen or maybe overlooked is an explanation of how growers of veggies available at big box stores have such fantastic root development in the individual cells. My cells in a 72 cell flat barely have enough roots to hold together when up potting into 3" pots and today when I up potted from those to 6" pots, roots were circling unhealthily at the bottom with very little root activity in the rest of the pot.Start with potting soil mix in seed starting tray and transplant into finished compost/soil mix and they have been outside in sun for 3 weeks. How can I go from brown thumb to green thumb?

  8. Hi Luke.. I have 3 raised beds that I used bagged raised bed soil to fill about half way combined with composted manure, some native soil about 5 years ago. I add amendments, compost and composted manures every year at the end of fall crops and apply fertilizer in early spring to ready for planting. The soil looks like and does not retain moisture like the bed that you have. Besides adding more compost, composted manure and other organic matter as I have been doing without much difference would adding some clay to the bed possibly be helpful? I am thinking about removing half and replacing with native soil from a prior pasture area which is sandy loam from my property and mixing together to see if there is any difference. I just don’t want to make it worse.

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