Thanks, I'll mulch it in from now on. Sorry, I always forget to fill in the location field when I post. I'm on the Jersey shore, zone 7a. I've been battling what I think is crabgrass for a while (I posted pictures on here a while ago and others seemed to agree). I used subpar preemergent and applied it too early. After getting fed up with Weed-B-Gon after the crabgrass popped up, I applied Tenacity about 10 days ago and most of it is now pretty white. Of course when I mowed a couple days ago I notice plenty of spots I missed. I have tall fescue, seeded from scratch about 1 year ago after grading our yard. Following your advice, I rarely water the lawn. In the beginning of June I was doing it 2-3 times/week, but in the last 2 months I think I've watered twice (and once was mainly to water-in milorganite bc we didn't have rain in the forecast). I'd estimate 60% of my lawn is full sun, 30% partial, 10% full shade, and all three areas are performing well.

kim - yes i KNOW i need to get a soil test done. been procrastinating it. but i DO know that it needs organic matter. i live 1/4 mile from the arkansas river and my soil is almost entirely sand (i can run water on a depression for DAYS and have less than an inch standing. and when i remove the hose, it drains in minutes). there is a sand pit on the same 1/4 section as me even. i have a degree related to botany, and minors in hort and agron, so i know how to determine the soil quality. my questions are about improving the soil quality with organic matter, particularly root crops. dig - i am going to try all of the common stuff as well, using cover crops and manure when i can find it. i plan on keeping most of it in alfalfa like i said, to provide the bulk material for my sheet mulching. i have chickens, so will have some manure from them as well as a boost for breaking down the sheet mulch. axe - the reason i want to do those root crops is for the amount of OM they put deep in the soil. some of those roots go down 12 inches. and if i had a fibrous rooted legume planted with them, the amount of OM in the soil would be substantial. one reason i want to go with primarily no till, is because the land was unbroken until this spring and the weed seeds are PLENTIFUL. i have done my research and it seems sheet mulching will be the best option for covering those seeds, and preventing them from germinating. i'm trying an area this fall, and will see how it does next spring. this isn't the best application of sheet mulch, but it will give me a better idea of if it will work. i sorta did it in one spot in my orchard where i just dumped all of the leaves from last fall, and planted some tomatoes there this year and they have no weed competition, they are 3 times the size of my other tomatoes, i havent watered them yet, and they have produced TONS more tomatoes compared to my other plants. that kinda sold me on the sheet mulching idea. to give you an idea of how weedy my site is here is the list of dominant species as they appear on my property (seasonal succession): geranium maculatum, bromus tectorum, aegilops cylindrica, digitaria sanguinalis, sonchus oleraceus, setaria glauca, conyza canadensis, and ambrosia trifida. with a little bit of amaranthus palmeri and retroflexus, chenopodium album, solanum rostratum, and abutilon theophrastii for good measure. there is also some weedy mirabilis species, that i have yet to determine what it is. it has a MASSIVE taproot, and that is the only species i know i will have trouble with when sheet mulching. the rest i think will be taken care of. WHEW! enough of that weed tangent!! i am trying several methods to control the weeds, but if i cant find a solution that works well, i will pose that question to you guys at a later date. so again, has anyone used root crops as a method of building soil organic matter?

Amy, I suspect that you wanted a nice, high-quality soil mix but got plain old dirt instead. That's fairly common nowadays unless you deliberately seek out a mix that is guaranteed to have a certain percentage of humus or compost in it. It probably would be a good idea to get a soil test (they are fairly inexpensive through OSU's lab) to find out what the N-P-K numbers are, and also to learn the CEC and pH. At least then you'd have an idea about some of what might be lacking in the soil and then you could work on fixing it. The fact that Roselle is thriving while others things are not isn't as much of a helpful clue as we'd like because Roselle can grow in soil pHs ranging from the upper 4s to the lower 8s, which is simply a huge range, and I have found it grows just about as well in poor soil as in good soil as long as it has adequate drainage. If your soil had herbicide contamination at even a very minor level (a few parts per million), you should see symptoms like curled, twisty and malformed foliage on the bean and tomato plants, as those two types of plants are particularly sensitive to herbicide carryover. So, if their foliage looks pretty normal, I doubt there is enough herbicide residue in the soil to affect the plants. The fact that some plants are thriving and others are not points to some sort of nutrient deficiency since different plants react in different ways to nutrient deficiencies. The melon plant could have distorted growth from a pest like aphids or a disease. Since adding Espoma's Garden-Tone helped, I'd look at the label and make a list of the nutrients it contains (not just the N-P-K but the micronutrients as well) and study that list. Something (or everything) in there is what helped the plants after you added it. That provides some sort of clue as to what nutrients your soil may be missing. Also, do not discount the importance of the microbes that are included nowadays in all of Espoma's Tone fertilizers. Those beneficial microbes are essential to break down nutrients into components that can be used by the plants. Healthy soil (the kind that is rich and humusy and smells almost like the forest floor) contains billions of invisible microbes per tablespoon of soil. Often, when plants fail to thrive, they are growing in a fairly sterile soil that is missing all those microbes and is therefore low in microbial activity. A great book that explains the importance of microbial activity in soil is Jeff Lowenfel's "Teaming With Microbes", which discusses the garden soil food web and why the microbes, which include bacterial and fungal hyphae, are so important as well as what we, as gardeners, can do to encourage them and to not harm them. Soil microbes are why I mulch so much (endlessly, endlessly, endlessly) and why I largely cold compost instead of hot composting. (I keep a separate hot pile for diseased plant matter, but that hot compost doesn't go back into my fenced garden area.) I also have increasingly (albeit slowly) converted to no-till. Only some of my beds were no-till this year, but likely all of them will be next year. It has taken me a long time to get the clay soil to the sort of tilth that I wanted, and I wasn't willing to give up occasional cultivation of the soil until we had that kind of tilth. I think we're finally there, though, with the front garden beds. The less you disturb the soil, even when planting, the happier your microbes are and the more of them you'll have, so in recent years, most of my soil amendments just get placed on top of the soil, and are gradually carried down into the soil by rainfall, soil-dwelling creatures like earthworms, and of course, any time I plant something and disturb the soil. I suspect the bigger problem with the soil you purchased is that it was largely sterile and didn't contain a healthy population of soil-dwelling microbes. As the organic matter you've layered on top of the ground decomposes, your soil microbe level will increase, and that will continue forever, as long as you're adding mulch or compost or cover crops to the top of the ground each year. You don't have to work cover crops into the ground with a tiller. You can just cut them off at grade level and let them decompose on top of the ground. You also can encourage microbes by feeding them some dry molasses (or even table sugar) just by scattering it over the top of the ground. In a year like this with all the excessive rainfall in some months, it probably isn't fair to totally blame the soil. I think the weather has to bear some of the burden since it left many of us with perpetually soggy ground for several months, and plant roots often struggle in soil that stays too wet for too long. There's likely nothing wrong with the soil you have now that a few years of adding compost and other organic matter from the top down won't fix over time. What ought to happen is that every year the soil gets better and better, just like Ruth Stout discovered with her mulch garden. I've seen rock-hard red clay that you couldn't even penetrate with a shovel, mattock or rear-tine tiller turn into beautiful, brown, rich soil teeming with microbes, but it took years of amending to get it to that point. I did see, however, substantial improvement in only 2 or 3 years, and substantial improvement in the uppermost few inches of soil in 7 or 8 years. I continued rototilling for as long as I did in order to get organic matter down more deeply in the clay soil. I haven't used the big rear-tine tiller in my front veggie garden in years now, but have used my Mantis cultivator at times to work more organic matter down more deeply into the soil. I didn't use it much at all this year---only on a couple of the raised beds that still are not in as good of a shape as the others are. I'd say the soil we've built in the veggie garden over the past 17 years is almost as good as the soil in the adjoining woodland that has built itself on top of red clay over the past 70 or so years. I did "cheat", though, by bringing up a lot of half-rotted wood humusy-composty stuff and leaf mold out of the woodland in the early years and we worked it into the soil. I had to ignore the traditional gardening admonitions to not work wood chips or chunks into your soil as it would tie up nitrogen (it does) as it breaks down, but I just added enough nitrogen to compensate for that and I kept adding the chunks of wood for many years. I thought when I did it that I'd have big chunks of wood in my soil for many years, and I wanted that because I wanted the wood to feed all the microbes as it slowly broke down and decomposed, but found instead that the soil microbes and soil-dwelling creatures made those wood chunks disappear in a year or two (depending on the size of the wood chunks), so I add some wood mulch on top of the beds every year, often in fall, so that the wood can decompose and work its way into the soil. If I don't put lots of mulch of some type on top of the garden beds in late fall or early winter, then cool-season weeds can sprout and fill those beds in no time----and long before planting season rolls around in late-winter. Really, the cool-season weeds aren't even that much of an issue in and of themselves because they provide tons of organic matter to add to the compost pile in winter when it mostly is just getting kitchen scraps and autumn leaves, but they can become an issue if you let them get so big that you cannot pull them out easily. And, of course, pulling them out disturbs the soil and your microbes, so I'd rather mulch than have a garden full of winter weeds. When I use cover crops or green manure crops, I prefer to use the kinds I can cut off at ground level and let decompose in place. That includes using fodder radishes or turnips that will (eventually) rot in the ground where I leave them. There's a lot you can do to improve the soil you have now, and none of them have to involve bringing in a lot of outside amendments or rototilling. You can improve any soil from the top down by piling stuff on top of the soil and letting it decompose. Nobody goes into the forest and works fertilizer or anything else into the soil. Mother Nature and her creatures do it without any help from us humans, and they make beautiful soil. However, a soil test would tell you if there is a major nutrient deficiency you can correct quickly so that next year's veggie garden gives you the results you want. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I'm all for using every method possible to get the results I want, so I think combining a soil test to search for deficiencies as well as top-down soil improvement would give you the improved soil you want. Dawn

Topsoil or fill would be your best bet but would suggest screening first to remove any unwanted items like rocks or roots or general debris. There is generally minimal OM in either topsoil or fill. That dos not necessarily mean it will devoid of nutrients, however! btw, N will almost always test low as it is the most mobile of the plant nutrients and consumed in the greatest quantity. It will measure differently at different times of the day, as well as the time of year, before or after a heavy rainfall and even from sunlight to shade. Most professional labs do not test for it unless specified and if using a home test kit, just throw away the results........they will NOT be accurate.