So today I started gardening. As a big-city person with zero experience, I decided to begin with a sunflower patch. Google tells me that sunflowers are easy to grow plus I’d love to be able to look out of my study window and see sunflowers. There is no plant that symbolizes Ukraine more than a sunflower.
The first stage of gardening is, of course, shopping. I’ve got to tell you, folks, I rocked that part. I bought a shovel, gardening gloves, granular plant food that the sunflower website recommended, and a thingy that breaks up clumps of dirt.
The next stage, however, was not as easy. I started digging up a plot for my sunflower seedlings. Whoever suggested that digging is easy is an idiot. I sweated more in 20 minutes of digging than I do in an hour of spinning.
The soil here is very weird. Back in Ukraine it was soft and black. And here it’s brown and feels like clay. I have no idea how anything is supposed to grow in this weird clay – like soil.
The result of superhuman efforts was a tiny little patch that now houses two sunflower seedlings. I will continue tomorrow in the hopes that practice makes perfect.
Clarissa's Blog 
Sounds like your brown clay-like soil is the kind of soil that forms in a forest region, and your lovely black Ukrainian soil is more of a steppe or prairie soil; don’t worry, the brown clay-like soil is hard work to dig in, but it’s still good growing soil (the clay actually provides some nutrients and helps water stay around for the plants) and as long as your sunflowers have plenty of sunlight and aren’t shaded by trees too much they should grow well.
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Thank you, this is very reassuring. My husband just freaked me out by asking whether I bought any good soil to put on top of this clay-like thing. But it never occurred to me to seek it out.
There will be tons of sunlight for the sunflowers in this spot. And I made a little fence to keep out the animals.
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Just plant some spearmint and peppermint to attract the local stray cats …
They’ll keep the other animals out of your sunflower patch.
[likes helping out the stoner cats in the neighbourhood when I can] 🙂
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There actually is a cat that runs around at night. Freaks me out every time.
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Personally, one of my biggest gardening problems has been local cats digging up what I planted.
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I created a little fence to keep the animals out.
I have to keep digging today and I’m already not looking forward to it.
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I’ll second Jones, Mint is a great plant for the beginning gardener. It grows like crazy and having tons of fresh mint is a great excuse to make mojitos on hot summer nights.
As far as the brown clay soil is concerned, you can get peat or compost to mix into the clay soil to make it less dense. Sunflowers are pretty simple, but other plants definitely do better if you add some additional material to the soil before you plant them.
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Sunflowers are N.Am natives, so I wouldn’t worry too much about them not doing well on non-Ukrainian soil. Maybe add some fertilizer. Oh and make sure you keep the area weeded and plant them in a different area next year, they take out a lot of nutrients from the soil.
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Some housing developers are more fastidious than others about preserving and replacing topsoil when they dig foundations. It’s something hardcore gardener a worry about when they buy a house.
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What Good Enough Professor said. Developers literally strip mine topsoil, as it is valuable. Where there’s a business there’s a business model.
Your best revenge is probably the “lasagna” method of composting. First year work in about a 50 lb. bag each of rock phosphate (if you can get it) and greensand. For the next 10 years or so pile on alternate layers of lawn clippings and tree leaves each fall. That’s what Josie and I do. Another thing I’ve been meaning to look into is “Hugelkultur,” but haven’t yet gotten a round tuit.
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Hello, Clarissa, This is Josie. Lori told me about your top soil crisis, so I thought I had to explain a few things to you about the home construction business. I will give more details on layer composting later. But I can explain why your home has no top soil. And I found out about this from my father when he brought the home in which we now live. Our home was almost the very first house built in our area. So the building was still going on. During this process my father noticed huge mounds of top soil, and peat around the area. Think they were going to spread it out over the graded land? Ha! LOL!! NOT A CHANCE! THEY WERE PACKAGING UP THE TOP SOIL THEY HAD TAKEN (STOLEN) FROM OUR NEIGHBORHOOD PROPERTIES!!!! THEY WERE BAGGING IT UP FOR SALE AT HOME WARE SHOPS!!! Just to make more profit!!! LOL! They steal it from you so they can sell it back to you!!! LOL! The SOBs!!!
The good news is that soil is simply a mixture of broken down organic matter and broken down rock matter. You already have the rock. Now all you need to do is add organic matter, aka compost! Especially deciduous leaves and grass! The bad news is that you need TONS OF IT to make good soil! Potting soil is about 70% organic matter by weight. And organic matter is far less dense than sand or clay. So if you desire that grade of soil, then you will need to use way more leaves than the volume of the sand/clay you want to make into soil. That’s what I”ve been doing for decades now. On the other hand, ANY amount of organic matter will help tremendously. Lori basically summarized the basic procedure in a rough outline. I could provide more details about it later. But there’s much information these days online.
What we do is basically called “Sheet Composting” also called “layer composting”. And it’s less obnoxious to the neighbors than some other methods. But this takes time. For this year, buy a lot of peat moss and limestone. You need the limestone because peat moss has no rock matter and hasn’t decomposed fully yet, so it is QUITE acid, low in calcium and magnesium. Phosphate rock and greensand is also helpful. These provide phosphate and potassium in a slow release form. One application can last 10 yrs! By contrast, chemical fertilizers are highly soluble and 99% ends up in your storm sewer runoff to pollute the lake/river water by a process called eutrophication. With our method compost releases the rock fertilizer by natural, slow decay! Thus avoiding the polluting waste! Peat moss is freeze dried permafrost and is completely organic matter. So you don’t have to pay for hauling the sand/clay that you already have lots of. Top soil also has sand, so you are paying for things you already have on hand! Hope this helps. Sincerely Josie
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Thank you very much, Josie. This is eye-opening. My problem is that I’m just making a get small sunflower patch for now. Are there any small-scale solutions for this problem?
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Yes there is. The peat moss I spoke of is sphagnum peat moss. It is dinosaur day mosses and tropical type plants that got frozen in the permafrost when the climate changed. Work as much as you can into the area you intend to plant. One way to do this (if you don’t want to prepare the entire garden bed) is to dig a hole about 12 – 18 inches wide per plant. Then mix in the sphagnum and lime. Use agricultural lime. Not hydrated or quicklime. These are burned in a furnace to make them extremely alkaline. They use these caustic limes for cement making and in various manufacturing processes. By the way, they are so strong that they will help digest old tree and shrub stumps! So they will burn both your plants and your peat! Agricultural lime is calcium & magnesium carbonate-much more mild. These will stabilize the ph without hurting your sunflowers. Then I would mix in the top 3 inches or so, a good long acting fertilizer. Organic ones are excellent because they release more slowly and have other things like beneficial microbes, and natural compounds made by plants and these beneficial micro flora that plants have evolved to use. But if a synthetic, long acting fertilizer is used, it will work. Just bury it deep enough so that it doesn’t run off the garden and into the drainage sewer like I previously mentioned. All land is graded so that water runs off it. So water (and plant fertilizer) can run quite a way as a result. 100 ft or more is NOT unusual! And some organic fertilizers like manure, urine, fish meal etc, can also flow into storm drains like synthetic! Besides, over fertilization is just as harmful to plants as it can burn the roots! So try to make sure you don’t just broadcast it on the surface. Try to work it in the upper few inches. By the way, compost needs nitrogen to decompose and getting the right ratio of nitrogen to carbon is the key to making environmentally safe, NON SMELLY compost. 20-30% carbon to 1% nitrogen makes good compost. And the nitrogen is incorporated into nitrate that plants prefer! So properly made compost is the perfect fertilizer. See if your city has a composting program for yard waste. If it has, you can save yourself some money and just bring home enough of it to mix 50/50 with an equal volume of soil. Adequate soil can be had even if the organic to rock ratio is 20-30% organic and the rest rock matter. My 70% goal is me trying to seek theoretical perfection. That’s sort of a hobby of mine! Not recommended unless you are willing to invest a lot of time and calories into the labor! But the rewards have been worth it! So don’t knock it!
By the way, sunflowers aren’t that particular concerning needing rich soil, so you might very well be successful with just a little organic enrichment. However, everything does better the richer the soil.
By the way, if you just enrich the holes you plant in each year, after a few years you’ll have enriched the whole thing! What’s the proverb, ah “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. And it’s true for gardening as well. Sound organic management can be done a variety of ways, and the benefits are cumulative over the years! So just start work on a small space first. Then if you want to expand, you have something to build off of. I wish you the best of luck on all your gardening endeavors!
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Sorry, but Sphagnum moss is NOT “dinosaur day mosses and tropical type plants that got frozen in the permafrost when the climate changed” – it’s a native plant of the northern regions which grows in some kinds of wetlands, and which has been very aggressively and destructively harvested from much of the temperate zone. Please try and avoid it for the sake of the few wetlands that survive! (Sphagnum mires are usually good carbon sinks too).
“Dinosaur day tropical mosses” sound like coal measures, since those ARE mostly peat bogs from when the dinosaurs were around which have been lithified, and the “frozen in the permafrost” bit is probably because to the north there are great expanses of wonderful mossy permafrost wetlands – which with climate change are likely to start to thaw. But these are now much MORE extensive than they were a few thousand years ago, we being in the abnormal warm bit of the climate pattern of the last two million years or so…
Sorry, I’m very fond of bogs and bog mosses…
To be honest, you only need to add Sphagnum peat as your organic if you have very acid-loving plants, and your sunflowers are not that, so any good organic matter like leaf mold or peat-free compost or a bag of growing mixture (loam, we’d call it, but I’m not sure what it’s sold as in the US) from your local garden centre will do nicely if you feel your soil does need feeding (post pictures of the holes, then we can all discuss them too!!!).
If you get mint, can I suggest you confine its roots in some way, in a large flower pot sunk into the ground or something? Because it grows like topsy, and it’s glorious stuff, but boy is it weedy – once it gets going, you will find it everywhere! But think of the lovely mint tea and mojitos and julips you can make with your very own freshly picked leaves come summer!
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