Show #50/6611. Front Yard Makeover-From Soil To Furniture

Improving The Soil

The most important thing you can do with a new garden or with existing soil is make sure that your soil is right, before you even get started. With this site we basically had very typical, more compacted, red clay. Very, very little loam, very little sand. So they went in, tilled it up and got as many of the rocks and the roots, all of that out. Now we have nice soil from a friability standpoint. It's nice, it's soft and fluffy.

But we've got to amend it, we've got to make sure that we're building a strong foundation and a great canvas for all these amazing plants that we're going to put in. So, what they’ll do next is go back in here with a soil amendment that's a blend of 60% of aged, milled pine bark and cow manure. There's great nutrition and nutrient holding capacity in this mix. Plants love it. Eric's favorite is Black Kow. They used about 30% Black Kow in this mix, and then added about 10% sand to make sure the soil will have really good drainage. All of that went on top of the already tilled up red clay soil. We now have about two inches of this blend that is then tilled into the soil to a depth of about six inches. One can readily see what we have is this really, really rich, beautiful, dark brown, almost blackish garden soil. And that's because they went the extra steps of using these soil amendments. The plants are going to thrive, just wait and see in about one month. They're going to look amazing.