Verrrrry nice!
Looks like plenty of well rotted plant material went into that soil over the years!
I think you and your hosta are going to like it there....

Julie

When I first moved to Minnesota from the dry desert of Utah, I could NOT believe the beautiful dirt. Welcome to the gardening mecca of the United States. (as far as I am concerned..... LOL)

Hi Tundramom. It IS beautiful dirt, isn't it! Unfortunately, in too many places (like my previous yard, 45 miles from here) the developers scraped all that beautiful black dirt off (probably sold it for a good profit) and left or backfilled with yellow clay like I've been dealing with the past 4 years. There ought to be a law against that so far as I'm concerned! Of course, some people don't care, because they don't do any gardening other then to grow a little grass. I'm betting you won't find many of those folks in the MN forum though :-)

Oh, how I envy you. We've got about 6" of that stuff on top of what I can only describe as beach sand. No rocks, no gravel... grade A, tan colored beach sand. Water drains through my soil much like the strainer you use to drain your pasta noodles!

This was great in '99 when we had double the normal rainfall for the summer... but let's put it this way: I accidentally left the sprinkler on all night once on a rather small area.. and guess what? Not a single puddle. I figured it wasn't so bad.. because I probably just recycled that water right back down to the water table while giving the grass a nice, good watering.

But, I'll say this: It's better than clay. My plants love me as long as I give them water if it gets dry.

Here's a picture of what I get to deal with. The top is our soil from 6-18" down as far as I can dig. The darker stuff is the top soil (6-18" on some parts of the land, almost absent in other parts).

Ouch! That is awful! I can picture it growing good stuff... if you can keep the water on full time. Too bad you and I couldn't have mixed that half and half with my clay from the old place, added some good stuff like compost, manure, etc, and had some good usable soil!

I will just have to accept heavily amending the soil where I want stuff to grow well.

One plus to this stuff is that roots tend to go deep rather than out and up. Of course as far as delicate shrubs/perennials are concerned, watering every other day in August can get to be a bit much.