Long story short - I moved from a country where there’s an abundance of black soil to a country with a dry climate and not much black soil. Not only that, I moved from an apartment to a house with plenty of land. I believe strongly that growing my own produce is the way to go, but sadly I lack a lot of skill.
What I want to do is to plant a few plants, bushes and trees to get started with gardening, but I’m not sure whether the types that I want to plant will take well to the soil.
So the first logical step in my mind is to figure out what kind of a soil I’ve got and what it’s well suited for and can I make it work for some things that it might not be ideal for.
That’s why I was super hyped when I found this community, but it looks like people here are mostly posting articles and the discussions are more on the specialist/scientific side, so I hope my question doesn’t stick out as unwanted.
I don’t know much about gardening, and this is something that just came to mind, so take this as the half formed idea that it is.
I wonder how well using the soil from a raised planter would be at making the garden soil better. For example, if you used raised planters for a year or two, then mixed the soil from them into the soil in the garden. Maybe doing a section of the garden at a time and completing it over a number of years. Any compost you make would help too.
I know that obviously putting nutrients into the soil is going to be good for growing plants, but I don’t know how helpful it would be if you could only do part of the garden at a time.
Hm, wouldn’t it make more sense to mix the regular garden soil with the soil in the raised beds? My thinking is - if plants take the nutrients from the soil and a raised bed is essentially a closed system then dumping that soil into the garden would create less fertile patches.
But this is from one person who doesn’t know much about gardening to another 😅