Why I turned down a job with great soil

A few weeks ago, I went to visit a beautifully landscaped property just outside the County. It was a new cottage and it was surrounded by large, flat patios and big beds for planting. The landscaper had done a terrific job.

The area was ready to plant, with about a foot of dark, rich soil in each of the beds. As I usually do, I took a soil sample and sent it to the lab. The levels of nitrogen and other nutrients in the soil were sky-high – unlike the results from local soil I normally get. The beds were likely filled with triple mix or some other amended soil.

The client didn’t want a dense planting. Instead, she wanted the plants spaced out, without lots of leaves and stems at their bases.

I turned down this large project. Without replacing all the soil, I just couldn’t achieve the kind of results the client wanted.

All about the soil

It was the soil that settled the question. When a plant ends up in super-fertile soil, it’s going to grow like crazy. Not just the plants I add, but any weed seeds that find their way in. So the only way to make the site lower maintenance is to allow the intended plants to grow densely so they crowd out the weeds – something the client didn’t want.

On top of that, on this full-sun site, the kind of native plants available like poor soils – because the competition is thinner and their growth stays firm. Native, sun-loving plants in rich soils sprawl and they flop. It’s just a poor match of conditions and plants.

Sand and stones

I was working on a different new-build site at the start of the season. This one had no amended soil – just the kind of sandy, gravelly ground you find after construction.
My crew were wondering what on earth I was doing, planting into that stony, terrible soil. They thought nothing would grow there.

About half the planting was sun-loving grasses: little bluestem and prairie dropseed. These plants do fine in poor conditions, with growth that’s firm, not floppy.

Then, for flowers, depending on the exact location within the site, I added yarrow – a plant that loves disturbed conditions – asters, coreopsis, and liatris. These are all plants that can handle full sun and dry conditions, with low soil nitrogen.

I visited the site again the other day, 11 weeks after it was planted. The grasses were three times the size they were on planting day and the little bluestem had started to flower, the yarrow was in bloom, as was the liatris.

It’s still the first season, so there was still some open ground, but the site was working.
This was the type of planting the client with the rich soil wanted – and here it was a good fit for the conditions. And it was relatively simple for my client to stay on top of the weeds because there wasn’t the rich soil for them to feed on.

Getting it going

This site wouldn’t have worked if my client hadn’t helped it establish. Plants in pots are a very different beast to plants that arrive by seed. It’s quite unnatural to put a plant with lots of foliage in dry, hot, sunny ground and expect it to survive. The roots don’t have access to enough water to support the plant.

But my client had followed my instructions, deeply watering the site using a temporary irrigation set-up every couple of days in the drought of the early summer.
The heath asters were about to bloom.