Why ask people all over the nation when Florida's soil conditions are very well understood by the U FL Extension Service? If that is Hollywood, FL, you are very near where some of the first micronutrient studies were conducted (1920s) because the soils are critically deficient in several (copper and zinc on sands and peat, manganese on marl). There is an extension office and small experiment station near the main campus of Broward Community College (near the educational TV station, if it is still there). Many but not all of Florida's sands are acidic. The sands in southern Florida can be naturally more lime rich though. It takes a little but not extraordinary effort to successfully grow many vegetables and fruit there. A citrus-type fertilizer with complete micronutrients will solve nearly all soil problems, save nematodes. Growing most crops in cooler, drier winter will largely solve the fungal problems on leaves and fruit. New Zealad spinach and cherry tomatoes (old selections anyway) and some Latin American root crops will grow in the summer heat and near-liquid atmosphere.

I've got to weigh in on the slash and burn issue . . . For the most part, Europeans went from nomadic herders to semi-nomadic village farmers. Europeans practiced slash and burn agriculture for millennia before they began to settle more permanently on farms and in cities. Interesting article in the National Geographic this month on Jamestown. The authors point out that the Indians periodically burned the underbrush in the forests. After they were displaced by the whites, the forests tended to become congested with bushes and small trees. (What the hillbillies call "dog hair thickets" - because that's about how closely everything grows. ;o) Of course, when settlers cleared the land, they tended to cut everything both large and small, high and low, and then they burned it. The rain forests of the Pacific coast have been over-harvested, clearcut and lost for over a hundred years. It is only when rain forests are "over there" that we seem to show a lot of concern. Those darn poverty-struck natives . . . their survival is going to destroy the world ecology! Now, on the subject at hand, I once grew a bed of onions - supposedly a vegetable with a high requirement for potassium. I fertilized the entire bed and then put my wood ashes only on one-half. The difference was noticeable and I was sorry that I'd applied the ashes directly to the soil. I think my soil pH was already a little too high. After that experience, I was far more willing to add ashes to the COMPOST. I don't think that I was doing much to the pH of 2 or more cubic yards of composting plant material by tossing on a couple shovelfuls of wood ashes. Altho', I could get back into the pH confusion again here . . . Stevation, manure ash is a common fertilizer for village farmers. Imagine if your garden is a couple miles up a mountain path from your home and livestock corrals. Are you likely to be interested in carrying manure on your back to fertilize a your plants?? On the other hand (or shoulder ;o), a bag of nutrient-rich manure ash might be well worth the effort. Dad talks about doing this also as a farm kid in the Rio Grande Valley. Not sure why but I suppose it isn't all that easy to move heavy manure in a wagon pulled by mules, either. We used to burn boards and such in our corrals and would sometimes catch the manure on fire. Might have been the smell of burning cow pucky on a Summer morning that got Dad to thinking about farming with the mules. DigitS'

Oh Lord, how did this thread get bumped? Having had a fairly large A. concolor in my yard that ended up a dead fir...especially trying were the summers of 2010, 2011 and 2012...I want to post what Sam said with new emphasis and comments: I want to make the case for White Fir in eastern US. I agree with Donald Wyman "One of the best of the firs for planting in northern gardens and thoroughly reliable as far north as Boston. It is noted for withstanding heat and drought better than most of the other firs." which isn't the only thing they will potentially need to withstand. No, they are not the utterly craptastic, guaranteed failures that Picea pungens are, but I think DC is probably just about the very southern limit in the Piedmont...so let's be careful about saying "eastern US". I have seen good looking ones in SE PA and suburban Baltimore, but also some that appeared to be declining. They seem most consistent in NYC metro area and points north (or east). The incredibly heavy Hurricane Irene rains of 2011 was probably the turning point for mine, while Abies firmas laughed it off. A monthly 20+ inches of rain into a loamy clay soil is not something they encounter in their native habitat, to be sure. If I wanted to have one in my zn 7 east coast garden, as with ANY other western US fir, I'd rather have it grafted onto firma. (In fact I just bought one like that last year, I forget the cultivar, it's some kind of yellow-in-winter concolor.) While I'm talking rare firs, the last of my UNgrafted Abies delavayi died, proving the climate here is just a bridge too far. It took over 5 years for 3 to die though. I have no doubt they would be OK if grafted; there's a guy down in NC who has a grafted-on-firma A. spectabilis. And about the hollies mentioned above, 'Scepter' is now fully established and I think will take anything winter will throw at it, as is the case of the yellow berried aquifolium. As for the theory James G Esson could be a cross with a native American holly seemingly proposed by embo, now actually having such a cross in my garden, I can say it is absolutely clear it is not. If there is anything else in there, it's another Eurasian holly. This based on bloom time and appearance. James G. Esson blooms with the other aquifolium clade hollies, well before the American ones. The hybrid blooms between them and in fact it's going to be interesting to see if it gets enough pollination to produce a good crop of berries. Might be why the hybridizer never released it. The male hybridizer I bought in the picture above finally bloomed well this year, producing a crop of berries on James G. Esson. I had no other male aquifoliums and of course they being rareish garden plants around here, there was nothing else to pollinate it. (they will grow here, a couple english hollies have gotten the chop in this area in the past decade. Looking too decadently evergreen I guess bwahaha)

"Clay soils need organic matter to separate the soil particles so plant roots, moisture, and nutrients can flow or be found, otherwise the clay will hold the moisture and nutrients and not let the plant roots have them." There is absolutely nothing correct about this statement! If this statement were true, there would be large areas of this country bare of any natural plantings. Plant roots are very able to penetrate clay soils and access all the nutrients and moisture they need. Some plants are better able to do this than others, but clay soils are not the bane of a plant's existence that many make them out to be. They just tend to be more difficult and awkward for the gardener to work with but do not really pose many problems for plants. Miracle Gro/Scotts also makes garden soils (not just potting soils) and while these do not have any mineral soil component, they do contain some nutrient rich (comparatively) ingredients like composted forest products and compost. Plus all MG soil products are enriched with a controlled release fertilizer, generally a treated form of regular MG fert. Not endorsing these products in any manner - just correcting some rather glaring misstatements.