You say you travel quite often for work... You may need to reconsider your list of plants. Roses will need feeding and watering plus summer snipping so they remain tidy, although the Carpet Roses could be useful for you. Gladiolus - may need to be lifted to avoid the harshness of winter - unless you treat them as annuals. Alocasia/Calocasia will need to be brought in for the winter. Be sure to have a plant trolley and a place in mind. The stems are unpleasantly slimy once they've been frosted. Depending on the quality of your soil, you may have to lift your perennials every two-three years to refresh the soil and divide the bouncy ones so they don't Rule the World. Twice a year applications of compost with, perhaps, blood and bone, or a chemical compound will help you have the intensity of display you need in a smaller area. It basically has to work hard and be a visual feast for at least three out of four seasons, so it must be fed, groomed, and ruthlessly refreshed. Find a very good plant supplier so you can get your young bedding plants early. Once they're out showing their cute flowers in the store they are going to take a while to bulk up in the garden, if they ever do. Pot them up if you must so you can better catch the season, but don't let them receive any check to their growing if you want a glorious garden.

Did you do a soil test by sending in a soil sample to a soil lab or did you use those little test kits you buy at the store? If you used a soil lab, they'd tell you exactly how much to add, and I'd probably do what they said. If you used a little soil test kit purchased from a store, those things are notoriously inaccurate and I wouldn't do anything to my soil based on what one of those showed. Testing for nitrogen can be very tricky. Nitrogen is highly mobile in soil and sometimes doesn't show up well in tests, particularly when the soil is tested when temperatures are cold. Some labs no longer test for nitrogen for this reason, or they are careful to note that nitrogen can test differently in the same soil at different times of the year. Much depends on whether you're starting with soil that leans heavily towards being clay or sand or if you're starting out with a nice sandy loam that already has good tilth. You have to tailor what you are adding to your soil to whatever type of soil you start out with. It probably is an oversimplification to say this, but the answer to most soil issues is simply to add more organic matter to the soil. I don't worry about how much nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium are in my soil. I just add enough organic matter to give the soil good tilth and, in general, the organic matter contains enough N-P-K to enable plants to grow well in that soil, and it also contains all the micro-nutrients (aka trace elements) like magnesium, molybdenum, copper, boron, manganese, iron, zinc, and sulfur that plants need. Too often, gardeners focus on the N-P-K in their soil and never give the micro-nutrients a single thought. If you just focus on adding organic matter to your soil, it will tend to have everything the plants need to grow well and the more you improve the soil by adding organic matter regularly, the more fertile it will become. Because I started with dense red clay in most parts of the garden, I added 6 to 8" of organic matter (not all at once--I would rototill a couple of inches into the existing soil, then pile more on top of the ground and rototill it in, etc., until I had added 6-8") to break up the soil. All I was aiming for at that point was to break up dense red clay that was perfect for making red clay pots but not so perfect for growing ornamental and edible plants. The first few years I tried to add a variety of different materials to make up for what I perceived as deficiencies in my soil---adding sulfur to lower the pH, blood meal to increase nitrogen, soft rock phosphate to increase the amount of readily available phosphorus, etc. Once I felt like I had the soil where I wanted it, all I have done since then, for the most part, is add organic matter and let it do its job. I don't bother with soil tests because my plants will tell me if they have a problem, and you will learn pretty quickly what different symptoms indicate. For example, if nitrogen is too low, you will see decreased plant vigor, sluggish growth and yellowing of the oldest leaves on the plant. If phosphate is too low, you'll see poor flower and fruit production. If your soil has inadequate levels of calcium, your plants will be very susceptible to disease and may have tip die-back at the top of the plant. If your soil is low in potassium, you may see winter kill of plants that ought to be able to survive the winter or increased susceptibility to diseases. If your soil is low in zinc, you'll often see huge amounts of weeds. It can take time to learn what the different symptoms you observe are telling you, but once you learn how to "read" your plants, you will know if you have healthy, nutritious, well-balanced soil....or not, and it isn't as hard as you'd think to read the plants and decipher what they're telling you. The best way for me to explain what I try to do to my soil would be to say that I am trying to recreate the forest floor inside my garden. When we walk through our woodland, do we see perfectly brown or brownish-black topsoil? No, of course not. We see all kinds of organic matter lying right there on the ground decomposing---leaves, twigs, sticks, bark that has sloughed off trees, deadfall limbs or even entire trees that are rotting and decomposing right there on the forest floor. You may see the decomposing remains of insects, birds, reptiles or small animals. It all decomposes where it fell. No one goes into the woods and tries to plow, rototill or dig all that organic matter down into the soil. Over time, various creatures that dig into the soil (anything from microorganisms that are invisible to the human eye to ground-burrowing insects, earthworms, armadillos, skunks, possums, etc.) will carry the nutrients from the soil surface deeper into the soil, and so will rainfall. The forest enriches its own soil naturally and is self-sustaining, so I just work as hard as I can to add amendments to the soil surface in my garden and let them decompose and be worked into the soil over time. This doesn't mean that I never rototill my soil---I would, in fact, like to stop rototilling and do no-till-gardening, but I am an impatient gardener and like to get the organic matter down deeper in the soil more quickly that it would get there without rototilling. In areas where we have some sandy-silty soil, I don't feel the need to rototill it as much as I do the dense clay either. Just in the last couple of weeks, I've been going back and adding a couple of inches of compost on top of each raised bed. There is no need for me to rototill it into those beds and, in the case of something like the bed where asparagus and strawberries grow, it would be impossible to till it into the soil without destroying the plant roots. The compost will feed the soil and the soil will feed the plants and you won't see me out there in the garden with a Miracle-Grow sprayer in my hand unless I see a fertility issue that needs a quick fix, which in my garden is extremely rare. Remember, too, that just because plants need a certain amount of various nutrients, that does not mean that more of any nutrient is better. Excessive amounts of various nutrients can have an adverse impact on plant growth, often because too much of one nutrient can prevent a plant from taking up and using a different nutrient. All too often, people overfeed their plants N-P-K because it is too easy to buy fertilizers with too much of those elements in them, and then they think they've taken care of their plants' nutritional needs so they don't add anything to the soil (like compost, for example) that adds the micronutrients all plants must have in order to thrive. When was the last time a gardening friend told you "I am going to add some boron to my soil?" (grin) That's an extreme example and my point is that if you just add organic matter to your soil, you likely won't see a boron or copper deficiency. Copper, by the way, becomes unavailable to plants when there is excess nitrogen in the soil so it is common in some places to see copper deficiency symptoms in plants, but the issue more often is that the soil is overly rich in nitrogen and not that the soil lacks copper. Many gardeners focus so heavily on adding nitrogen to their soil, particularly via synthetic fertilizers, that they end up with big, beautiful, leafy plants with foliage so dark green that the leaves almost look blue-green, that they send up doing more harm than good with all that nitrogen. I went to a house once that had three gigantic tomato plants, spaced about 10-12 feet apart from one another. They were huge and their color was so dark that from a distance I thought they were three cedar trees. Up close they looked incredibly lush, thick and gorgeous. It was summer and guess what was missing? There wasn't a single fruit or flower on those plants. Call me crazy, but I thought most people grow tomato plants in order to have tomatoes! Obviously the person who had planted and tended those plants had overfed them nitrogen, and they did it, I am sure, with the best of intentions. They just hadn't learned, yet, that there is such a thing as too much nitrogen. My advice is to add all the organic matter you want to your soil, and it is best if it comes from a variety of sources. Compost (and particularly home-made compost) is my favorite and because we are in a rural area with tons of space I keep multiple large compost piles working all the time, but I add tons of chopped and shredded leaves to the top of each bed as mulch every year, and as they decompose, they too feed the soil. Sometimes I add purchased cow manure to the beds, or mushroom compost. In the early years, I added tons of pine bark and hardwood mulch directly to the soil. I didn't care if the bark and hardwood tied up nitrogen as they decomposed because I knew there were other ways I could add nitrogen to the soil to compensate for that occurrence. What I cared about at that point was breaking up the dense, red, highly compacted clay. Remember that plant roots do not grow, technically, in soil. They actually grow in the air space in between soil pores....so to have great plant growth, you need to break up soil that is tight or highly compacted so that the roots can move about freely. I've had friends lament and moan and groan and talk about their horrible clay soil, only to discover they don't have clay at all---they just have sandy loam or a sandy-silty blend that is so compacted that it resembled clay until they broke it up and added organic matter to prevent it from being compacted back into hard layers of soil again. Gardening is an adventure. People have done it for thousands of years, largely without all the synthetic fertilizers available the last 60 or 70 years. It is possible to garden without ever buying an actual fertilizer product, although I think most people nowadays amend the soil to improve it and then also use limited amounts of the fertilizer of their choice, whether it is organic or synthetic in origin. Focus on giving the soil what it needs, which mostly is lots of organic matter, and the soil will feed the plants. Actually, I should say the plants will take what they need from the soil. They cannot absorb nutrients that aren't there, but once you add organic matter to the soil, most if not all of what they need will be there in the soil just waiting for the plants to use it. In a hot climate like ours, organic matter in the soil decomposes quickly and gets used up quickly, so you must continually add new organic matter to the soil on a regular basis. The easiest way is by mulching and letting the much decompose in place. As it decomposes, it feeds the soil beneath it. I also mulch all my pathways heavily and then, in late winter, I scoop up all the decomposed mulch from the pathways and dump it onto the adjacent growing beds. I then put down a new layer of mulch---usually some combination of grass clippings, old spoiled hay, and leaves that have been chopped up by the lawnmower and caught in the mower's grasscatcher bag. I add mulch throughout the growing season, both to the surfaces of the growing beds and to the pathways. The mulch suppresses weeds, and it helps keep the soil beneath it cool and moist, but the main reason I regularly add more mulch is because it is like doing composting in place. To me, it is so much easier to use my pathways as a sheet composting site than to have a compost pile 100' away and to have to carry one wheelbarrow load after another of compost into the garden. It all goes back to the forest floor analogy---Mother Nature doesn't go through the forest and clean up all the 'garbage' that has fallen to the forest floor, pile it up someplace, let it decompose, and then carry the compost back to the forest---it all happens in place. I try to garden in such a way that most of my soil improvement (after the initial effort to break the ground and add 6-8" of organic matter rototilled into the soil) takes place from the top down as organic matter used as mulch decomposes in place. Don't be afraid that you'll be adding too much organic matter to your soil. Unless you are in the rainiest part of OK, which is eastern OK, where rainfall is often 40-60" or more a year, you likely cannot add enough organic matter to create a problem. In some of the rainiest parts of OK, I do think a person could add so much organic matter that their soil holds too much moisture for too long, but for most of us, that's not going to be an issue. Most of us deal with the opposite issue of not having enough moisture for much of the growing season. Sometimes we humans overthink things and try too hard. The truth is that enriching soil is pretty simple---just add compost. Making compost is also something that some people put huge amounts of effort into---adding this to the pile, adding that---turning the pile, watering it, etc. I am a lazy composter. I pile stuff up. It rots. I use it. Could it be any simpler? No, but it can be a lot more complicated. I feel like my life is busy enough and complicated enough without me making my composting and soil amending complicated. I try to keep it simple. For me, if I try to make gardening too technical and too complicated, it sucks all the fun out of gardening. Above all else, in order for it to be rewarding, gardening has to be fun. I try to focus more on having fun and less on doing things that are technically and perfectly correct. Dawn

One of our composting experts and friends on this site, David Hall (DcHall_San_Antonio), recently gave a great list of some of the major benefits from soil high in organic matter: ************************************************************ "Chemical fertilizers rely on an assumption that plants only need three elements to survive and thrive. Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are those three. This is the equivalent of saying that we need protein, fat, and sugar to live. While this may be mostly true, pure protein, pure fat, and pure sugar do nothing to supply the vitamins, minerals, and diverse supply of bacteria and fungi in our diets. Here is a list of a dozen things that you can do with organically fed soil that cannot be achieved with conventional chemical feeding. 1. Decompose plant residues and manure to humus. 2. Retain nutrients in the form of stable humus. 3. Combine nitrogen and carbon to prevent nutrient loss. 4. Suppress fungus and bacterial diseases. 5. Produce plant growth regulators. 6. Develop soil structure, tilth, and water penetration/retention. 7. Clean up chemical residues. 8. Shift soil pH to neutral and keep it there. 9. Search out and retrieve nutrients in distant parts of the soil. 10. Decompose thatch and keep it from returning. 11. Control nitrogen supply to the plants according to need. 12. Pull minerals out of inorganic soil components for plants. Soil microbes need sugar and protein to thrive. When you apply synthetic ferts, none of the things on this list gets done. The microbes normally get sugar from plant roots. Protein in nature comes from dead insects, plants, and animals. The organic gardener applies protein artificially in the form or organic fertilizers. It is usually in the form of a ground up meal made from plants and animals to try to replicate the natural process." ******************************************************* With that being said, many times it is difficult to find good organic or natural fertilizers and soil amendments from garden stores because most of the garden people that we meet are non-organic users. Therefore as an organic gardener, we have to be creative in order to find our supplies. This is a simple list of sources for uses in foliar teas, composting and green manure techniques, and other soil amendments: 1. Deer plot mixes or cheap bird seed bags - 50 lb bag is a great source of economical cool season cover crop seeds. Most contain a mixture of legumes and grasses like crimson clover or hairy vetch or winter peas, oats, winter wheat, and rye. Most bird seeds contain sunflowers or millet or other types of non-legume seeds that can be planted as excellent cheap cover crop seeds. Bird seeds make great composting ingredients too for extra protein-nitrogen to speed up compost decomposition. 2. Catfish or pond fish feed - Excellent source of alfalfa meal and fish meal for topdressing or compost teas. Like cat and dog foods, some people may not consider it a truly organic soil food source. But it does contain lots of protein and micronutrients. 3. Cat or Dog foods - Some people would not consider this a truly organic source of soil nutrients. It does contain lots of protein and micronutrients. There are some amounts of corn gluten meal in these feeds. (NOTE: Probably not enough to really do the job of weed seed suppression control in lawns or gardens.) 4. Seaweed - If you can't collect it free from the beach, you can buy economical packs of fresh seaweed from oriential markets for compost teas. (To be on the safe side, it is a good idea to always wash your seaweed first to remove any salt.) Take all your remains from your teas and recycle them into your compost piles. If you liquify the seaweed in a juice, you can use the whole product as a foliar feed or soil drench. Even though most fertilizer companies rate seaweed with a NPK of 0-0-1, it contains at least 1% total N and over 3% total P. Seaweed may contain as much as 60 trace elements. Seaweed and other algae plants are some of the greatest soil amendments on earth, or should I say in the ocean. Seaweed also contains beneficial growth hormones and benefical fungal food sources for soil microbes. 5. Fish emulsion - Commercial brands contain no fish oil and little or no aerobic bacteria. Homemade versions supply extra beneficial oils for beneficial fungi and fish bones for extra calcium. Free fresh fish parts are the best if available. However, cheap canned fish products will do fine. Experiment with canned mackerel, sardines, herring, etc. If the fishy smell is a big issue, just mix your fish products with a lot of high carbon sources like sawdust, leaves, or straw in a 5 gallon closed bucket. You can add molasses to your fishy mixture to speed up decomposition by increasing the microbial growth in the mixture. The molasses will also control the fishy odors. Let this mix decompose for at least a week or more before adding to the hot compost pile or to your compost tea recipes. The extra carbons will help absorb the offensive odors as well as keep most of the organic nitrogen in your compost pile or your compost teas. Also the aerobic bacteria kill break down any bad pathogens that may exist in decaying fish meat. Read the other FAQ's on aerated teas and homemade fish/seaweed emulsions also. 6. Fava beans, soybeans, and other legume cover crops - Mostly all bagged dry beans and peas in grocery stores will sprout and make great warm season green manures. Fava beans and soybeans can found in oriential markets or health food markets. 7. Horse and cattle feeds - These contain a great supply of alfalfa meal and corn meal and other proteins for soil amendments or compost teas. The whole corn or oat seeds in the bags, may sprout and give you an extra green manure benefit. The extra molasses ingredient from the feeds draws and breeds lots of beneficial soil organisms. Molasses also contains sulfur which acts as a mild natural fungicide also. NOTE: Check the label also for total salt content in the feeds. Most grain meals that I get are no salt (less than 0.7%). 8. Corn meal - very cheap source for a nitrogen activator for heating up the compost pile or as a topdressing. Great natural fungicide also. Corn meal is a great phosphorus source also. 9. Liquid molasses, dry molasses powder, brown sugar, corn syrup - source of fast consuming sugars for feeding and breeding the aerobic bacteria in compost teas. Most microherd populations love the high carbon content in sugar products. Sugars are best dissolved and broken down by microbes in compost tea that has brewed at least 1-3 days, before applying to the soil. If too much sugar is added on soil straight as a topdressing, it may cause a temporary nitrogen deficiency in the soil as the microherd populations grow too fast. Molasses also contains sulfur which acts as a mild natural fungicide also. Molasses is also a great natural deodorizer for fishy teas. NOTE: Recent studies have shown that unsulfured molasses or dry molasses powder is best for faster aerobic microbial growth in tea brewing. For a more fungal tea don't add too much simple sugar or molasses to your aerobic teas. Use more complex sugars, starches and carbohydrates like in seaweed, rotten fruit, soy sauce, or other fungal foods. 10. Alfalfa meal - best source is 50 lb bags of rabbit food or alfalfa hay bales. There are also 100% alfalfa pet litter or beddings if available. Alfalfa products are best used in teas, mulches, or as topdressings. Alfalfa is an excellent natural complete fertilizer, containing great amounts of N, P, and K, and many growth hormones and micronutrients. 11. Blood and Bone meal - this classic combo can be found almost everywhere these days. However blood meal is very expensive. Bone meal can be even cheaper if purchased in 20 lb bags from feed stores. Since blood meal is totally soluble, it can be added to compost tea recipes.. With a NPK around 11-0-0, it has the highest total nitrogen ratio of all natural fertilizers, and may burn plants if used improperly. Steamed bone meal has a recorded NPK around 0-11-0. Usually steamed bone meal has a total N from 1-6%, 11% soluble P but 20% total P, and 24% calcium. Raw bone meal has more total N but none of the P is water soluble. 12. Urine or Urea - yes, human urine is an excellent source of organic nitrogen for compost teas or as a free nitrogen activator for composting (45% N). (NOTE: Unlike human manure, any pathogens, diseases, or other mild toxins in human urine are quickly killed and digested within 24 hours after they escape the human body. Therefore human urine is very safe for all types of composting methods.) 13. Animal Manures - High in N and great sources of P and K and soil microbes. Use only vegetarian animal manures, like cattle or horses, in order to be on the safe or conservative side for all your gardening uses! Chickens are not vegetarians. However chicken manure is a safe, classic, high nitrogen, highly alkaline farm animal manure. Chicken manure is ok, mainly because the foods that chickens consume are easily broken down by normal gardening composting systems. DO NOT EVER USE ANY PET MANURES OR DOG OR CAT POOP! It is extremely dangerous to humans. There are special hot composting procedures that must be performed to use toxic, pathogen or disease prone, heavy metal manures like pet poop and human manures. So don't do it! Always compost animal manures first or use aged animal manures before applying to the soil or as an ingredient in foliar teas. 14. Grass Clippings and Green Weeds - Excellent sources or organic N for special foliar teas or use as an organic mulch/top dressing. Some gardeners even hot compost strange weeds and herbs like kudzu, bull thistle, dandelions, comfrey, stinging nettle, thorns, ivy, etc. 15. Wood Ashes - Wood ashes, not charcoal ashes, are great organically recommended soil amendments. Wood ashes contain up to 70% calcium carbonate or calcium oxide (natural liming agent) and lots of potassium. If you have native acidic soil, a little sprinkled wood ashes are perfect for your lawn or garden as a soil amendment or liming agent. However, if your native soil is highly alkaline, never put wood ashes straight on your soil! Wood ashes is absolutely safe in a hot compost pile. A hot compost pile always buffers the pH of its ingredient organic matter materials so that the mature compost has a near neutral pH. The main disadvantage of composting wood ashes is that the high alkaline ashes will chemically react with high nitrogen products in the pile like animal manures or grass clippings, thus creating excessive ammonia gases that will be wasted and evaporated out of the pile. Therefore if you compost wood ashes, only use a few cups of ashes per cubic yard of compost piles. The above soil amendment products can also be buried straight in the garden soil for trench composting. You can also bury these materials in planting holes under the roots of heavy feeder transplants like tomatoes for extra NPK for plant growth. You can poke holes in the soil around crop roots with your spade fork, to get more oxygen in the soil to further increase organic matter decomposition and increase microbial activity in the soil. All natural soil amendments as well as homemade compost, do more than just fertilize the soil and growing plants. Most natural soil amendments have a total NPK rating sum total less than 20 (i.e. fish emulsion NPK = 5-1-1, compost NPK less than 4-4-4). Don't be fooled by the numbers. Most P and K ratings only record the soluble available portions in the products. The N portion recorded could be either the soluble, insoluble, or total N portions as based on the company. The insoluble non-reported portion of OM is continuously consumed and broken down with the existing OM in the garden soil, thus raising the available soluble nutrients for further season crops. Happy Gardening!

Ultimately, adding anything organic to 'break up clay soil' is counter-productive in the long run. As in, years down the road in most climates - so this is where Embo's question about the type of plants comes into play. If you just have a vegetable garden, go ahead and work some pine bark fines or whatever in the soil. If you are growing permanent long-term landscape plants, likelihood is you are just going to turn the area into more of a quagmire eventually. The only true long term solution is either calcium sulfate or calcitic limestone, if the soil is the type to benefit from it, or the incorporation of agents that permanently change the soil structure. An example would be something like Permatil or Turface that is added to athletic fields. And mind you even this won't fix underlying drainage problems if they exist, although calcitic limestone, applied generously over several years, improved a part of my garden from being so gooey my subcompact tractor almost got stuck it in, to being merely prone to mushiness. Basically, in some clay soils, especially near coastal areas like where I live, magnesium and sodium ions long trapped in the clay are displayed by calcium, forming a clay that aggregates more readily giving water more space to move down into lower soil strata. After a heavy rain now, I can sometimes actually hear a sucking sound as this happens. I still need to fix the drainage in that area with new tile drains, but it's made it a bit less treacherous.