We DO have good drainage; thankful for some blessings. (And a lot of run-off, too, since our property is slightly sloped toward the east.) That rock you was just the largest of a stack of rocks about 3x3 feet and 2 feet high. Haha. But at least I'm not digging them out of clay. The only other time I did major gardening was in Wyoming for several years on the ranch. Pure wonderful clay for pot-making artists--not so much for gardens. Nevertheless, had a good, sizable garden going--not much amendment, just alfalfa plowed under. But around the house within 50 feet, could not grow ANYTHING. Couldn't get the shovel into the ground, for the most part, and didn't have time for flowers, anyway--out riding herd on the cattle. I love our good draining dirt here now!

Our clay is exactly that sort of pure red clay suitable for making flower pots. It makes me crazy. However, with tons and tons of amendments, it becomes great garden soil because it is loaded with certain minerals that plants need. The first year we couldn't get a shovel (not even a trowel) 1" down into the clay, so in the early years, improvement was very slow. Now, after almost two decades of amending that soil, I'm quite fond of it and happy with how well plants grow in it, but I'll never forget all the hard work it took to get the soil to this point.

At least you have good drainage. That helps a lot. Generally, when I am researching a flower that I don't grow and it says something like "requires well;-drained soil", I sigh and move on. Our weather varies so much that soil that might drain well in a year with 30" of rain well spaced out might not drain well at all in a year when 20" falls in one month (which has happened here, as recently as 2015) and 80" falls in one year. So, even the term 'well-drained soil' is fairly variable with some soil types.

I know from experience what grows well in our soil now but it is experience that was hard-earned from both successes and failures in many different kinds of weather in many years. That's really the only way to learn what will grow well for you---just trying the seeds or plants to see how it works out.

Agreed. A lot with flowers, especially, I think, is trial and error. If they don't work in one location, try another. That's a regular part of flower gardening for me. Plant flower, move flower. Plant shrub, move shrub. Sometimes more than once. If they don't get enough sun in one spot, move them. If there's no place to move them, cut offending tree down. (Haha! I haven't gone quite that far, but I did buy a long extension pruner to get some low lying branches on many of the trees.)

Made me tired just to think of all your years of working to get the soil to where it is now. What troopers you are! Hallelujah, eh! Well I had to order the blue pimpernel, so I'll give it a go. Been there before, haven't we all?

When I look back at how hard it was to improve this clay, I cannot believe we didn't just give up and quit. I'm stubborn though, so quitting was not in my vocabulary at the time. Being older and (hopefully) wiser now, I do things somewhat differently as a concession to the encroaching years. I largely have gotten away from using a rototiller, and only very rarely now even use my Mantis cultivator to work something into the soil. It is so much better to improve the soil from the top down in terms of not disturbing the soil structure, so in the established garden, I'm either very low till or almost entirely no-till. However, I don't think we would have gotten the soil into the great condition it is now without rototilling tons of organic matter into it over the year, and here's why.

When we dug up our tiny oak saplings out of the woodland to transplant them into the yard, I only wanted tiny trees no taller than 12-18" and I wanted to move them with a 12-18" root ball so that we were moving saplings that had below-ground root systems equal to the above-ground top growth. Because the soil in the woodland was dark brown, crumbly, rich and humusy, I assumed all the woodland soil was that way. It wasn't. After the shovel went 8 or 9" deep into the woodland soil, that soil changed to dense red clay. I was, in one sense, shocked. I had expected the woodland with its gigantic trees had naturally better soil that what we had in the grassland areas. It really didn't. It had the same soil, only that the top 8 or 9" was much improved from having decades of organic matter fall to the ground and decompose in place. It also amazed me that the trees grew so well despite that fact that a large portion of their deeper roots were in the red clay.

Based on that experience, I changed my approach to soil building and started just layering on the mulch and compost in the garden on top of the soil surface and letting it break down naturally and build the soil similar to how soil is built in the woods. It took a huge leap of faith for me to stop all the heavy digging, rototilling and cultivating of the soil, and I think it has paid off remarkably well. So, when we begin the work to move the garden eastward to make up for the shade encroaching from the west, I just want to build raised beds, fill them with hugelkultur type materials, and let the soil build and develop from there. It likely will be much slower than rototilling and working in organic matter right away, but it won't be backbreaking work and it won't be the kind of work that really disturbs the soil. I do have a lot of trouble with rodents and snakes moving into hugelkultur beds when they are new, so that will be an issue to work around.....but it isn't like the standard garden beds are entirely snake-free or vole-free either.

If money was no object and I could spend any amount I choose on gardening, I'd just buy big containers (20 gallons or larger), fill them with a quality, purchased soil-less mix and only grow in containers, eliminating the whole issue of dealing with red clay. But, we live and garden here in the real world and have a budget and it isn't one that allows for endless spending of huge amounts of money on many containers and the growing medium to fill them up. I have slowly accumulated a lot of containers over the years and I love growing plants in them, but in general I add them at a much slower rate now because the growing medium needs to be renewed in them annually, and that requires adding a lot of organic matter to a lot of containers.

With rocky soil that drains well, blue pimpernel might work well for you. You'll never know until you try. I love garden experimentation. Since I am in an area that generally is very drought prone, most of my experimentation has been to find what grows here without a lot of supplemental irrigation.

Dawn

That is a great picture. I really like rocks and don't get as many big ones as I would like. I have tons of fist size that I remover every time I rake and smooth out and area to plant. I save them all. I put # 10 cans all over my garden to put them in. The smooth pretty ones go in one place others I dump into gulleys in the driveway.

My soil in the new area is less than ideal but the trees do well there. I am going to get a soil test done for that section.

That's a cute picture, Nancy. I wish I had a few of those rocks for landscaping purposes! haha.

I read your comments, luvncannin and Hazel, to Garry. We both think you guys are very funny. I have lots of pictures of our rocks. In every photo of our yard! Having said that, I, too, love the look of largish rocks around a property. We grow good rocks, if nothing else. (By the way--we didn't build most of that terracing--the home builder did when he built the house 12-15 years ago.

We took out the arborvitae on the top tier last year, as they were right next to the house and growing by leaps and bounds--underneath them is an 8' wide swath of river rock on top of plastic. I'm going to remove all that rock this summer. Can you imagine having all these rocks that already lived here and then buying more little ROCKS! Anyone have a great idea about what I can do with the river rocks? (They ARE pretty little things.)

The terraces are so beautiful. If they were at my house, copperheads and rattlesnakes would lay on the rocks whenever it was sunny and the rocks were warm. How little are the river rocks? Are they small enough to form a gravel pathway somewhere?

Maybe kinda, Dawn, they are nearly small enough--they're pretty little white rocks, most about 1/2-1 1/2" in length and diameter. I was thinking a fake "dry creek bed" looking byway in the back yard that might also provide a path for runoff from cloudbursts. I haven't seen any copperheads or rattlers there yet, but am always very very careful when walking in those terraces, and have seen lots of garden snakes.

I'm very excited about these terraced beds and what I'll be able to grow in them! In the lower one are several creeping juniper, which I found an odd thing to have been planted there. Although these are south beds, there are oaks all the way up that avenue, and so it is very heavily dappled shade all along that 30 feet. And while it is alive, it's not thriving, which doesn't surprise me. I've toyed with the idea of trying to move a couple of them. I guess maybe it wouldn't hurt to try if they're easy enough to get out. Maybe THEY can take the full sun gravel driveway edges. Although what a shock it would be to them to be moved from heavily dappled shade to full sun. Hate to just throw stuff away though. But I will study the available sun there more, now that I'm looking forward to converting them to great beds. Maybe there's a little more sun there than I thought. I do this often. Go out several times a day, during the months, to actually see when it hits and how much. And then i make scribbly notes and try to decipher them, and then just end up crossing my fingers and putting something there, with nothing more than a vague remembrance of what I had observed. There are also a bunch of garden mums in those two beds, and with 100% neglect on my part the past 2 1/2 years, they aren't doing too badly, and they aren't terribly leggy, so some of that sun must be getting through. It'll be fun to have another 300-400 feet of beds to play with, right? I suspect someone put in some fairly decent dirt there, since they planted crocuses (which do fine), and the mums and the creeping juniper and arborvitae. . . and the soil tests some of you (and you, Dawn) have recommended. I'm thinking I need samples from there, the front yard, the back yard in 2 different places at least, and the front far yard (which gets a lot of sun but some dappled shade for relief, too--since much dirt was hauled in for several of those places. I DO think the dirt that was hauled in was all from the same place, at least. And then in the far back yard, where are raised veggie beds are, in back of that where I want to put the rock garden. . . THAT is the native soil, what little there is of it.

Nancy, Regarding snakes, it isn't the ones I see that bother me. It is the ones I don't see. Lol. I have come so close to being bitten by rattlesnakes so many times that it really isn't funny, and virtually every time it has happened, by the time I saw the snake it was drawn back and ready to strike or it was rattling at me. (Hearing that rattle near me in the garden is probably the worst thing ever about gardening, except for the year of the cougar.) The copperheads don't scare me as much---they'd much rather retreat from you if there's any way that they can.

I would love to have a dry creek bed. Well, we have several seasonal creeks that are dry for most of the year, but that's not what I'm referring to. I have a perfect place for one too, but don't know that we'll ever get around to putting in a dry creek. Our To Do list is shockingly long and the time available to do those things is much too short. Our entire property slopes from south (uphill) to north (downhill) and from the west (uphill) to the east (downhill). I have spent a lot of time building compost piles in eroded drainage gullies or swales. I never take out that compost. I just build huge piles based on logs and tree limbs dragged out of the woods, and then do the composting on top of that. I leave the compost and, over time, plants grow and help heal the gully so erosion does not continue. I could do the same thing with rocks if we had them here, but we don't, so I try to heal the eroded areas the best way I can with what native materials we have here.

I imagine some of that soil was hauled in and that's something to be happy about! I can understand why people haul in soil sometimes, but I just try to improve the soil we have. Of course, in some rocky areas there's not enough native soil to even improve. Hauling in a good soil mix brought in can be really expensive, and I'd rather not do it though it certainly is a quicker solution than improving soil slowly over time. Our soil is getting sandier over time, but not because we are hauling in sand. Rather, it is because the sand washes down onto our land from two adjacent properties that are at a higher elevation that we are. One year, the low end of my garden got 4" of sand and silt deposited in it during a very intense, heavy rainstorm. Unfortunately, a lot of weed seeds came in with that sandy soil, and that's unfortunate.

Dawn

I sure wish I'd known about hugelkultur before we built our 4 long raised beds, Dawn! AAGGHH. Oh well--I'm armed with the knowledge for the next one, eh. Your property slopes exactly the opposite of ours. And you have so much of it, you can just expand and expand to your heart's content. Still. . . good that I only have as much as we have, as I don't expect we'll get it up to snuff in this lifetime. Is a garden area ever up to snuff!