Considering Winter Ground: Soil Drainage

When the ground is covered with snow (soon, I hope), it's hard to imagine that anything is taking place. But under all those piles, there is snow melt...

Soil Mender Humate
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  • Topic: Soil
  • Author: Cindy Bellinger
  • Keywords: snow, snow melt, soil, water, drainage, moisture
  • Date: November 2005

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When the ground is covered with snow (soon, I hope), it’s hard to imagine that anything is taking place. But under all those piles, there is snow melt. In a garden that’s good and not so good; it all depends on the kind of plants you have and how well the soil drains.

Except in a few cases with plants that love poor clay soil, most of our xeric plants need soil that allows water to escape. If we lived in a place of swamps and bogs and we all raised lily pads and cat tails things would be different.

Soil is made up of air, liquids and solids. In between the solid particles is air, called pore spaces. After irrigation or rain, when the soil is saturated with water, there may be little or no air in the pore space. If drainage is poor, it deprives roots of oxygen, which can irrevocably harm a plant.

There are basically four types of soil—clay, sand, silt and loam. Around Santa Fe it’s mostly clay, which retains water. Amending it with coarse sand, compost, Soil Mender® Blend Plus or Greensand are good ways to loosen tight particles of clay. You know, the ones that cling to every step giving you adobe shoes.

To Determine Drainage

  1. Dig a hole large enough to hold a one-gallon container; fill with water.
  2. Check the hole in an hour. If it’s empty, you have sandy soil. If it takes between two and four hours to drain, you have loam. If water is still there after four hours, you have clay, and this means poor drainage.

Poor drainage is the leading cause of death for garden plants. Adding organic matter greatly improves poorly draining soils.

Actions to Take

To improve drainage, ditches may be dug to draw off excess moisture. Raised beds can also be constructed using wood, stone or concrete blocks. Raised beds provide good drainage and warm up quickly in the spring. Also bermed or mounded areas can be made. Make them one to two feet high of top soil with amendments. This lets the water run off naturally.

Sometimes a more severe action is called for like changing the slope of a site or installing a drainage pipe. This will be addressed in a future article.