What's the soil like where you live? Describe the soil and give your location.

[raccoon]

I'll start. Red clay here in upstate NC.

[dembotoz]

1. can't see no dirt it is all covered with fucking snow in wisconsin

sorry --winter is getting to me.

[raccoon]

3. I can only imagine. Well, what's it like when not covered with snow? nt

[L. Coyote]

14. Soaking wet here in Oregon.

[arcadian]

2. The same

small layer of topsoil and then red clay. Some of it kind of sandy red clay. I have to make my own soil for gardening, I could make bricks if I realy wanted to.

north central virginia

[av8rdave]

4. It's um...very dirty

Also dusty (Texas)

[raccoon]

5. What color? Is it sandy, clayey, etc.? nt

[av8rdave]

6. Don't know much about dirt, but it's fairly sandy with clay about 10 - 12" below the surface

Sorta rust color.

[raccoon]

8. C'mon, let's hear from people in other parts of the country--New England, Midwest, Northwest,

Southwest.

[RebelOne]

7. Georgia. Red clay, of course. Or soon to be red mud.

[Phentex]

15. Exactly...

it's red and can get brick hard! :banghead:

And then it rains little red rivers down the street.

[Brickbat]

9. Northeastern Minnesota. Clay with a lot of iron.

I used to live on a former dairy farm in central MN. OMG was that dirt like gold.

ETA: What with the weather and the soil, it's really hard to grow much of anything where I'm at. I have a patch of strawberries, but the garden area is going to need so much soil amendment, it'll be awhile until I can grow much of anything useful.

[Altoid_Cyclist]

10. I live in central PA.

Speaking only for our property, it's hard as a rock yellow clay. It's almost impossible to dig more than a few inches before hitting it.

I have to buy topsoil and use a lot of moss and manure in our gardens. The lawn requires a lot of aerating which is actually good exercise since this is what I use.



It's probably comical to the neighbors watching me hop around the yard, but it's better for the environment so..... let them laugh.

[XemaSab]

11. A foot and a half of silt loam

with gravelly clay underneath.

[Mopar151]

12. In NH, soil maps are a rainbow

We have huge alluvial gravel deposits, lots of shale and granite ledge. Beautiful loam, especially in the river valleys, and lots of loess. aka yellow sand.
Also, mines for some of the dammdest things - mica, talc (just accross the river in VT), Beryllium, granite quarries....
The glaciers sure made it interesting...

[Rosie1223]

13. One of our farm fields

Fishhook silt loam, 5 to 10 percent slopes, eroded 39.8 49.3%
Atlas silty clay loam, 10 to 18 percent slopes,severely eroded 8.5 10.6%
Clarksdale silt loam, 0 to 2 percent slopes 13.3 16.5%
Clarksdale silt loam, 2 to 5 percent slopes 11.4 14.1%
Rozetta silt loam, 2 to 5 percent slopes 7.4 9.2%
Rozetta silt loam, 5 to 10 percent slopes,eroded 0.1 0.1%
Ursa silt loam, 10 to 18 percent slopes, eroded 0.2 0.3%

[raccoon]

17. Where did you get all this information? nt

[Rosie1223]

20. here

http://websoilsurvey.nrcs.usda.gov/app/HomePage.htm

start wss
put in your address (or county, state)
use select tool to highlight area of interest.
click soil map.

[csziggy]

45. Thanks for posting that - it is cool! n/t

[Tikki]

16. Loamy soil....anything grows here...and grows well...

The Gold Coast California...


Tikki

[mike_c]

18. thin organic loam over gravelly, loosely consolidated alluvium....

Northern California coast range.

[Swede]

19. Rock hard and covered in snow.

Canada (:shrug:)

[Kali]

21. find your "State Soil" here

http://soils.usda.gov/gallery/state_soils/

Arisona's is called "Casa Grande" - "it consists of very deep, well-drained, saline-sodic soils on fan terraces and relict basin floors. These soils formed in alluvium derived from granite, rhyolite, andesite, quartzite, and some limestone and basalt." ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/NSSC/StateSoil_Profiles/az_soil.pdf

I don't know all the terminology but we have granitic sandy loams with some red clay??? Lots of bedrock showing (eroded old granite).

[madmom]

22. Mostly around this area it's clay but

I live on a small ridge where a lot of top soil collects so people around here say you can plant a toothpick and the next day have a tree. Nice and loamy.

[dysfunctional press]

23. excellent topsoil- black and rich....40 miles w/nw of chicago.

around the 1900's or so, this area had the highest concentration of dairy farms in the u.s.

our garden does very well in it, year after year.

[Deep13]

24. asphalt, Akron area nt

[NNadir]

25. Fairly tight clay, central west New Jersey.

[hobbit709]

26. Here in Austin, we have several different types.

In my yard there's about 6 inches of topsoil, then caliche-which you never want to dig into.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliche_(mineral)

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

27. Sandy, just west of Detroit

But right now, very rock-like, since the ground is frozen solid.

:hi:

[rcrush]

28. brown with shit in it.

[Maine-ah]

29. frozen - maine.

[mopinko]

30. in the middle of beautiful prairie loam, i am stuck with

black sand. i am within the bowl of prehistoric lake michigan, in chicago. just a tiny bit of dirt, and the rest is sand. alkaline as hell. it dries out in minutes. very hard to grow things.
all around me is the greatest soil....

[we can do it]

31. Lots of Heavy Clay Around Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio

[Ptah]

32. Mostly asphalt and concrete

They built the city here because asphalt and concrete are too hard to plow.

:hide:

[Fire Walk With Me]

33. The land here is strong.

Strong beneath my feet.

It feeds on the blood; it feeds on the heat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzwMe-3XVn4

[Pool Hall Ace]

34. I would describe it as an Ultisol with an udic moisture regime.

I'm in the Raleigh-Durham area.

[foxfeet]

35. I've got the typical, back-breaking-heavy Seattle gray clay.

We've been adding organic material (compost leaf mold) for 14 years now, so it's gotten easier to work (three blown spinal disks between me and my partner later. We now hire a gardener to help with the heavy lifting). The unamended clay is fertile, though. Raised beds help with plants that are sensitive to winter wetness, which we have in abundance. It's been in the '50s for the past few days and the earth has that wonderful spring-ish smell.

[kentauros]

36. In Houston, it's a thin layer of topsoil, the quality of which

depends on how much ChemLawn has been used by the mindless, and then dark, almost black clay. I've dug enough post-holes to know it's a pretty deep layer of clay, hell to work with and dig through. You know those cheap post-hole diggers with the wooden handles? Useless in our soil. Luckily we had a set, all heavy metal construction and must have weighed a good 20 pounds. So you simply drop it from about a foot up and the weight carries it into the clay. No struggling, comparatively :D

[sarge43]

37. Leaf loam, but lots and lots of rocks - central NH n/t

[Iggo]

38. It's mud and it's movin'.

Yay, SoCal!!!

[pokerfan]

39. aeolian glacial loess

aeolian
adj. of or caused by the wind; wind-blown.

loess
n. A buff to gray windblown deposit of fine-grained, calcareous silt or clay.

It was blown in as dust off the retreating glaciers from the last ice age, about 15Ky ago. Rich and deep, with top soil up to a hundred feet thick!

[Throd]

40. Asbestosy - El Dorado Hills, CA

[kayakjohnny]

41. Mostly sand. North central Florida barrier island.

But pockets of rich fertile black dirt in forested areas of oaks, bays and palms. Or in established neighborhoods.

Mangroves right nearby so intense rich muds and clays which tend to be wonderfully pungent during the summer heat, especially at low tides.

Most of Florida is remnant beach coastline from varying sea levels. So lots of old beach sand over a 4000 ft thick bed of porous limestone.

But plenty of nice black soil in low lying areas where moisture can't seep through the limestone or sand as quickly.

Many clay sinks where rainwater is trapped and can't percolate into the substrata, creating watering holes for animals that might otherwise have a rough go.

Florida is a bit more diverse, geologically (and certainly hydrologically) than people give credit for.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sewo7QHxr7g/ShGbjQxLMiI/AAAAAAAAAAU/4JvB5M9CdDo/s1600/florida%2Bsoil%2Bmap%2B(2).jpg

and...

[Mendocino]

42. Gray-Brown Podzolic

Fertile, low acidity, rich in organics.

NW Ohio

[denbot]

43. Sandy Loam, Manhattan Beach, CA

After all this rain, its not has absorbent, but all the poppy seeds I planted will explode shortly.

[csziggy]

44. Red clay here, too. This area is known as the Red Hills of Florida.

Clifton Paisley wrote a book with that name about the history of the area.

My farm is on a ridge that has a cap of solid red clay - so solid that it can be hard to dig holes when the ground is dry! The clay was so hard for decades many of the road remained red clay with no paving. Wonderful when dry, slick as owl shit when wet. Here is information about the red clap roads around here: http://www.talltimbers.org/lc-rhscenicroads.html

And here is what many used to look like but only a few still do:

[rurallib]

46. Iowa - "the best farmland in the world" loaded with chemicals

Where you can find organic type farms the soil is rich, black full of good nutrients.

[revolution breeze]

47. Sandy loam in swampy Louisiana n/t

[struggle4progress]

48. Red clay here in Piedmont, covered by a thin topsoil

[Petrushka]

49. Central Ohio

(from a well log & drilling report)

-0 - 19 yellow clay
19 - 60 gray clay
60 - 92 blue sandy clay
92 - 96 sand & gravel

[Blue_In_AK]

50. We have nice topsoil right here where I live,

but most of Alaska is gravel or peat bogs.

[hunter]

51. Central California Coast: wretched impenetrable adobe.

When we first moved into this house we couldn't dig a hole with a shovel or a pick, the only thing that worked was a big iron digging bar that would chip off a few one inch flakes of clay with each hit. If the adobe is wet it becomes resilient and sticky and even the digging stick won't do anything but make it tougher.

Sometimes neighbors or professional landscapers unfamiliar with the area will use a power augur to drill holes for trees. These trees don't grow, they soon die, or they blow over, unless they are a sort of tree that will happily send out roots just under the surface, the kind of tree that cracks sidewalks, driveways and streets and turns lawns into a lumpy unmowable mess.

We were never able to do anything with the existing soil so we pretty much made our own. We used a DitchWitch to dig trenches and we installed underground drains using perforated pipe, gravel, and filter cloth. We mixed the adobe pulled from the trenches with maybe twenty or thirty tons of compost at first, and much more compost throughout the years, and we are just now we are starting to get something that resembles soil.

[La Lioness Priyanka]

52. concrete.

[LeftyMom]

53. Close the Lounge, we've officially run out of thread topics.

We'll let Amerigo Vespucci restart things when some Z-list celebrity "accidentally" flashes a photographer, so it'll only be a day or two.

Also, mud.