Brick City: Treat Your Soil Right!
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Collapse ▲Spring has certainly arrived in Lee County. Daffodils are blooming and fresh growth is emerging on the trees. The winds of March are blowing like a lion (isn’t “in like a lion and out like a lamb”?) and they may be reinvigorating you to get back out in your garden or yard. Whether you want to address your turf issues, grow some vegetables or revitalize your azaleas, the first step should be to work on your soil. Let’s talk about a couple things you can do to prepare a good foundation for your garden, whatever your goals are!
Learn to Love What You Have
Lee County is home to almost every soil type we have in NC, it seems. We are on the border between the Piedmont, Sandhills and Coastal Plain, so you have just as much chance of having clay as sand. The first step to garden efficiency is finding peace and understanding with the soil type that you have. We have folks coming into the office all of the time complaining about the soil they have. The folks who have sand want clay, and the folks who have clay want sand. This isn’t a case of “the grass is greener on the other side” though! You can look up your soil type on the USDA’s Web Soil Survey and you should submit a soil sample through the NCDA&CS State Soil Lab!
DO NOT Do These Things to “Fix” Your Soil
We cannot stress how important it is for you TO NOT “dig out” your soil and replace it with “topsoil”. First of all, there is no legal definition of “topsoil”, so someone offering it can just be giving you leftover soil from somewhere else. What is the soil made of? What kind of weed seed bank does it have? Was it used as a place to dump animal waste? You don’t know and the person you are getting it from may not either. It breaks our hearts to hear of folks introducing new weeds to their gardens because of contaminated soil! Second of all, to truly “replace” the soil you have, you would need to dig several feet down and out and replace with the new “soil”; and even this would not really accomplish what you may be hoping.
If you have CLAY
Clay has many underappreciated benefits. It has a high cation exchange capacity and 
can contain many nutrients naturally. This combination means your soil has natural nutrition already available to your plants and the capacity to hold on to the fertilizer you add for longer. Yes, clay can be hard to dig in and it can become water-logged, but there is a fairly easy solution! Incorporate organic matter into your soil! That’s it! For new vegetable beds, this can mean incorporating 6-8 inches of compost into the soil with a tiller. For flower and tree garden beds, incorporate about 2-4 inches into the soil. If you have established beds, just mulch with 2-3 inches of fresh mulch or compost every 12-18 months. The compost or mulch will work its way down into the soil naturally!
If you have SAND
Sand also has some underappreciated benefits. It is easy to dig into and it is well-draining. It can be easily turned into an agreeable garden foundation with, you guessed it, organic matter! You can follow the same guidelines for clay from above, with the slight caveat that you may need to mulch more frequently, potentially every 8-12 months, as the compost or mulch can work its way into the soil profile easier. You will also still need to water and fertilize more frequently until the organic matter acts as the water and nutrient bank!
Soil Testing Support in Lee County
Hopefully we have inspired you to embrace the soil type that you have and to work to incorporate more organic matter, whether that is compost and/or mulch, into your garden! Our gardens’ foundations are in the soil that we have, and there are so many more benefits to that soil than maybe you were aware of!
If you need additional support, soil testing is available to all residents in North Carolina! This service is available year-round, but becomes free from April 1 to around Thanksgiving! You can stop by the Extension Office in Lee County at 2420 Tramway Road, Sanford, NC 27332, and pick up free sample boxes and forms, and we can help you interpret your results!
We hope to see some beautiful gardens again in 2025 and that they are all on a solid foundation of healthy soil!