I would check your numbers again. Blood meal at 2-11-0 does not sound right. Normally, blood meal is nitrogen rich, sitting around 15-2-1 or so. If the soil test came back with bone meal, you are going to need phosphorus. Nitrogen can never hurt and most likely your tests did not include a nitrogen test (or at least they rarely include an effective nitrogen test). Go ahead with the 1-15-0 bone meal and don't sweat it too much. Michael

You do not need to test all 20 beds seperately, you could sample the soil in each of the beds, mix them together, and have one test done that will give your an overall picture. If you are going to grow pretty much the same thing in each bed, ie. vegetables, flowers, the requirements will be about the same and so one soil test is all that is needed, same thing as testing a large garden plot of 400 square feet. What material do you have available to add to your compost? Any leaves? Any possibility of getting lots of leaves? What is the level of organic matter in the soil now? How is the drainage of that soil? How workable is the soil? What does the soil smell like? How many earthworms are in each shovel full of soil from those beds?

The current recommendation is not to amend the soil as too much amendment (which many people would do) creates an artificially ideal environment which the roots never want to leave! That being said, I do usually mix a little soil conditioner in with the native soil (so that you truly are conditioning and not replacing). Probably the amount of conditioner is no more than 20% of the soil around the plant after it is all mixed in. If there is loose soil at the base of the plant, that usually falls off and I mix that in instead. I like to have enough organic matter in the soil in the area to attract worms to come and do their thing! Be sure to press the soil in firmly around the sides (with your shoe if the hole is big, with your hand if it is small) and down into the hole. This eliminates air pockets and gets the dirt settled around the roots (if you don't do this it will settle later on it's own and leave part of your rootball exposed. Water well at planting time and mulch well but don't pile the mulch against the stem of the plant. Water as needed if we don't get rain - check with your finger to see if the area is dry to be sure. Plants like the laurels and gardenias won't show drooping foliage so you can't judge by just looking at them. When I water, I make sure to get some water on the top of the rootball as well as around the sides. Hope that helps.

I have red clay soil and it can be turned into beautiful garden soil with the addition of organic matter. We're in our 16th year here and the soil in the areas we've amended bears little resemblance to the clay we started with. We added organic matter to it as much as we could in the early years, amending each area well before planting. Then we mulched, and we continue to add mulch regularly. As the mulch decomposes, it further enriches the soil. Red clay is full of minerals and plants grow great in it once you've added organic matter to improve its tilth and drainage. Have you ever gone for a walk in a woodland? Ever notice how brown, humusy and rich the soil is there? We have about 10 acres of woodland filled with beautiful native plants of all kinds. The soil is brown, rich, humusy....just gorgeous, rich soil. When we first moved here, I wondered why the soil there was so gorgeous when just a few yards away in the area where we had built the house, we had dense, compacted, hard-as-concrete red clay. I incorrectly assumed the woods grew there because the soil was so great. Then, in our 2nd or 3rd year here, we transplanted a bunch of tiny oak trees out of the woodland and up into the yard area. Guess what we found? There was about 8 or 9" of brown, humusy soil, but once you dug down that deeply, it was the same yucky red clay we had up the hill where we built the house. Those gigantic trees might be growing in humusy rich brown soil, but they started growing in red clay and their roots are deep in that clay. Over the last few decades, as leaves, bark, dead trees, other dead plant material, insects and even wild animals died and decomposed there on the floor of the woodland, they all combined to created that brown, humusy rich soil. So, in an odd way, the red clay---by being rich enough to feed and nourish the trees when they sprouted---in essence created that brown, rich soil. No one dug out all the old yucky red clay dirt and replaced it with brown rich soil.....it happened naturally, in its own way and its own time. To enrich our soil, we added any form of organic matter we could to the soil....compost, chopped/shredded autumn leaves, pine bark fines, composted animal manure....you name if....if it was organic (from nature), we added it. We added lava sand, Texas green sand, soft rock phosphate....you name it....all in the name of improving the soil. As the soil got better, earthworms and all other manner of earth-dwelling creatures thrived in it and further improved it themselves. When we were searching for land here, I deliberately searched for land with clay as opposed to the fast-draining sugar sand common in my area, or even the brown sandy loam found in some parts of our county. Given the choice, I'd choose red clay every time. It is a lot easier to amend it than it would have been to amend the sand, which tends to drain much too quickly in our area which stays much too dry most years. With red clay, so many nutrients are already there. With sugar sand, the nutrients aren't there and you have to add them. All that clay needs in general is organic matter added to it to make it great soil. I've never regretted choosing property with clay soil. We actually have a few pockets of sandy soil, and I have more trouble with them. Among other things, voles tunnel through the sand and eat everything they encounter. I'd be a raving lunatic by now if we had only sandy soil and not clay because the voles would have eaten virtually everything I've ever planted. Don't fear your red clay soil. It likely is highly fertile and only needs to have organic matter added to it to make it both retain water properly and drain well. Once that aspect of clay soil is fixed, it is perfect. Dawn