Re: New Beds in zone 8

> Bill, you hit the proverbial nail on the head.  Most clays (and 
> there are many) will indeed form concrete with sand added.  
> After all, clay is composed of ground rock among other things.  
> Adding more simply makes it tighter and heavier, until you 
> overpower it's ability to bind; very similar to mixing too much 
> sand/rock into concrete.  

The way it was explained to me that finally broke through my thick skull
was that clay has very very fine pores -- making it very dense.  The
sand is very fine particles -- with large pores, making it -- porous!
When you mix the two, the sand particles occupy the very fine pores in
the clay, leaving the mix with NO pores and therefore -- non-porous!!

Using ground up rock where the particles of rock are larger can help,
but there's no getting around the organic matter needed to help loosen
the soil.
-- 
Amy Moseley Rupp (amyr@austx.tandem.com)  Austin, TX, USDA z8b, Sunset z30
Amy Moseley (amy@ece.utexas.edu) Graduate Student in Software Engineering
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