"Whether you will see that "bathtub" affect or not will depend on how water moves through your soil, because if it does not move easily you could have a bathtub, some place where water accumulates."
Well, yeah! This is what we've been talking about from the very beginning, so it's hardly enlightening .... and I'm not sure why we need to go on a tangent and take in the elementary lesson about topsoil, but ....
".... but the best method is to get sufficient levels of organic matter into that soil which will then open the soil up so water will flow more freely."
Sorry, but that is wishful thinking. For at least this singular thread, you need to let go of the idea that adding organic matter is the cure for all ills. If you are dealing with the problem of a bathtub effect in the middle of thousands and thousands of acres of a soil type that drains poorly, do you really expect the gardener to amend the entire surrounding acreage? Even if he is dealing with a relatively SMALL plot of ground, like a lot that has been stripped of topsoil so that he is growing in clay, it's STILL not reasonable to think that someone will haul in compost by the double-bottom load and incorporate it in the entire volume of surrounding soil so his garden can drain.
BTW - if the water has someplace to flow TO, installing $50 worth of drain tile will be a heckofalot less expensive than buying, trucking, and incorporating hundreds, if not thousands of yards of compost into the surrounding soil - which in many cases would only be building a bigger bathtub.
No one argues that having a plentiful presence of organic matter in the soil is a good thing, but to habitually ignore other primary factors in favor of promoting a rigid ideology as the answer to everything is, at a minimum, imprudent.
Al
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Soil
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