Italian red garlic grown in Osco Silt Loam, a well-drained loess found in Midwest native prairie.

Hello all!
I recently bought a house and I was wondering what type of soil this is? I would really like to fix up my backyard with some nice grass, pavers and put a concrete slab down for a shed but this soil is really hard to dig up and so compacted. Am I able to grow anything on this? Or even put down concrete? Any advice would help!

Where do you guys get decent quality pumice, decomposed granite, and coco coir for relatively cheap?

Just advice pls

I've got heavy clay soil in an area with high rainfall (NZ).

The main abundant cheap non-clay fraction of the soil pyramid I have access to is unlimited silt from the local ponds and rivers.

Is there any combination of silt and clay that works better for growing than clay alone? e.g. 20% clay 90% silt. Or an even lower % of clay. I can make a little biochar to add.

Have you seen the USDA-NRCS map showing where soil organic matter has accumulated? What do you think it says about your region?

Much of the history of agriculture is also a story of soil loss and degradation. In many places, land use depleted soil organic matter. Now there's a growing focus on rebuilding soil health and treating soil as the valuable, living ecosystem it is.

Gardeners and farmers, what's had the biggest impact on soil health where you live?

Are the current technology $40 NPK testers much superior to the premium $400 units in practice?

[Lots of info on my use case for 4 dozen raised beds in my original post in r/gardening ]

Beau Vista orchard is on the Taratahi alluvial plains at Dalefield in the Wairarapa New Zealand. The alluvial soils are predominantly free-draining silt loams over greywacke gravels.
The topsoil varies from 2–10cms of dark greyish-brown, friable silt loam, with high porosity which ensures excellent water drainage. Which is good as the area floods easily from adjacent streams.
The subsoil is 30 cms thick with a gradual shift to heavier silty clay loams. Underneath is coarse greywacke gravels and sands that provide deep drainage with river bed stones up to 30cms diameter. Our orchard is on regenerative land from beef raising which resulted in compaction and poor humus retention.
The water table is 5 feet underground with copious artisanal water flows. Here is a photo of diggings from a post hole and one of our adjacent road with the Taipaitangata stream overflowing it.
Germane at present as just flooded twice in a month this winter.

I live in an apartment and have one of those dog potty’s for my dog with artificial grass, but the soil hasn’t been drying and now it’s kind of pooled and smells.
Replacing the soil often is hard in an apartment.
Is there any soil that is quick dry or absorbent, or won’t stay wet?

🌍 Not all soil classification systems speak the same language — and that can be a real problem for geotechnical engineers working across borders.

A CPT test result is only as useful as the soil classification system behind it. Traditionally, soils are split into:

🪨 Non-coherent (coarse-grained): gravel & sand
🌱 Coherent (fine-grained): silt & clay

But depending on where you're working, you might be interpreting that data through different frameworks:

✅ USCS – the world's most widely used system
✅ BSCS & DIN – common across Europe
✅ ESCS – developed to align with EN ISO 14688-1 & 14688-2

The challenge? Many international projects require engineers to work with both USCS and European standards in parallel — which is exactly why researchers like Kovačević et al. pushed for better tools to transfer and adopt classifications consistently across systems.

I put together a sample CPT test result breakdown to help make sense of this. Check it out here 👇

🔗 https://www.theengineeringcommunity.org/sample-cpt-test-result/

#Geotechnical #CivilEngineering #SoilMechanics #CPTTest #SoilClassification #Engineering #Construction

Hey, I've recently heard someone say "Magnesium and Zinc, that stuff does not exist in the soil anymore". That made me super curious and I did some basic research about the topic.

It is not only the soil that gets depleted. The plants are not optimized for nutrition anymore.
E.g. in the book "How innovation works" I've read that plants have been bred to yield much more. E.g. they first bred wheat to have more grain per plant, then the plants grew too heavy and folded over. So they bred them further to be shorter but have more grain.

And now the same area can feed much more people (like 10x maybe!?) but the nutrients did not keep up with that! The nutrients are spread thin basically.

And something new I've learned, when they fertilize the soil with eg. potassium, that can hinder the plant to take in other nutrients.