Re: Re: Soil pH

In analogy to California climates, then, you would be almost Napa Valley conditions, or perhaps even farther north than that.  How cold are your late June-early July temperatures?
 
Sutton's 11 inches is supplemented heavily with irrigation seasonally.  That eleven inches would be almost entirely in the middle of their mild winter.
 
After Bill's remarks about horns on Devonshire Cream, I observed them here this year too--without benefit of liming the soil, so the conditions may have been rather acidic.  I haven't tested the soil--been somewhat medically distracted.  I'm just going by guesswork. 
 
In my experience in the far west of the US (inland) where we had a very hot, dry summer, short spring and fall, and a long, dull overcast winter with temps averaging in the high twenties in January.  Extremes ran (over a span of forty years) minus 28 to plus 115.  The extreme cold occurs with dead quiet air and a Columbia Basin-formed continental High of considerable strength.  The extreme highs occur under the same kind of conditions--dead quiet, high cells of Continental origin.  I saw conditions of that nature only three times in over forty years.
 
Rainfall was minimal and almost entirely winter drizzle--totalling six to nine inches annually.  We had abundant irrigation water from April 15 to October 15 from the high Idaho mountains with a five acre feet per acre allotment.  That is a 60-inch rainfall equivalent, all in the dry months.  The evapo-transpirational rates were very high.  One could refrigerate with water evaporation.  I miss the sound of sprinklers in the fields and gardens....it's the sound of "Life."
 
I never ever saw an air-conditioning unit until my wife had to have one in our rebuilt home on the new acreage bought in the late sixties.  Irrigation was bringing the humidity up, so water-coolers weren't as efficient as they once had been.  They were referred to as "swamp coolers" for good reasons.  I suspect large areas of  inland and western Australia would find those kinds of coolers quite familiar.
 
Iris absolulely loved the conditions.  The soil was a combination of lacustrine (lake-floor deposits) of silts and eolian (wind driven) loess and an admixture of Cascadian lava ash from repeated explosive events over the centuries akin to Mt. St. Helens' in or about 1980.  We didn't get any of that ash--but the area had had dusting from volcanos farther south in the Cascades over the millenia.  The ash loaded the soil with micronutrients.  The lake or water deposits were in thick layers without lamination, indicating catastrophic flooding.  I'm assuming the mountain lakes that were held by ice dams all gave way about the same time around 13,000 years ago when there was an abrupt warming of the climate. 
 
Massive outflows affected Quebec, when a tremendous amount of melt water from a lake that covered a lot of inland Canada held back by ice, let go all at once.  That water went down the St. Lawrence.  In the Spokane area of eastern Washington state, a repeated similar catastrophic flow occurred as an ice dam forming a lake covering the Missoula, Montana area to a depth of a half mile let go all at once.  The lake reformed and let go several times, apparently.
 
Similarly, our area on the Idaho-Oregon border was massively affected by a series of abrupt releases of water into the Pleistocene lake covering most of northern Utah and northern Nevada, which suddenly went over the top and washed a spill way into the Snake River.  Apparently a river something on the order of seven times the flow of the Amazon ran for about six to eight weeks northward into Idaho, then down the "U-shaped" trace of the Snake River plain, then to Walla Walla and Pasco, Washington area into the Columbia.  Our area was filled then washed out by the event.  Gravel deposits twenty to thirty feet thick are found nearly five hundred feet above the present river level.
 
From Salt Lake City one can look eastward at the mountain faces and see two prominant beach-line benches about 1800 feet apart vertically.  The top one was the lake before the breakout into Idaho, the lower the level of the lake as it stabilized several weeks later.  That represented an enormous volume of water!  Cubic miles upon cubic miles!  From the air that shore-line series can be traced all over the Utah and northern Nevada areas affected.  If one wanted to read about this on the Internet, type in "Lake Bonneville" or "Snake River Plain" into a search engine.
 
Smaller but similar floods originating in the high central Idaho areas by the rupture of ice releasing torrents of water laid down the soils on top of the reworked Lake Bonneville event.
 
Since the area was the location of the Yellowstone supervolcano hotspot some twenty million years before, and most of the soils affected by that geologic history, the area was very complex in its origin.  There wasn't any bedrock--a bore hole put down near the Ore-Ida plant in Ontario, Oregon, about three miles from our home, went down over 13,000 feet without hitting anything more dense than clay.  At that depth the clay ooze was over 300 degrees F and had a substantial sulfurous content. 
 
One of the oil companies was looking for geothermal energy.  They gave up--the drilling was unable to proceed further as the ooze wouldn't allow the drilling.  It grasped the drilling tip are so tightly the equipment would break--over and over.
 
None of this geologic history was understood when I was in college there.  The evidences of all this were clearly to be seen, but no one had any idea of the sort of massive, catastrophic history of the area was even possible.  We just knew that something or somethings very strange had happened to the area.
 
In the native, arid steppe soils, the pH was acidic for the top 1/4 inch, then about 7.5 below that--pure blow sand loess where we lived.  I loved the shiny effect on hoes and shovels.
 
South of us, down on the Boise River drainage, the soils where Riverview Iris Gardens have their farm, they are growing iris in the lake-laid silts.
 
Washing irises for shipping was a delight--just turn the hose on them and they were perfectly clean.
 
I do go on and on.
 
Neil Mogensen  z 7 western NC mountains

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