Chris asked, >Jane, thanks for the suggestions. I can rework the mix. Can I pick >your brain further: >1. Any commercial products you like that qualify as loam? That >ingredient always stumps me and the native soil here ain't nowhere >close to loam. If you go to a garden center that offers a wide range of soil mixes (the one nearby serves "indoor gardeners," wink wink), look through the ingredients for something like "leafmold" or "forest humus." Some municipalities compost leaves and/or garden debris and sell it, too. I formerly dug and sieved topsoil from a forest on my country property, but now that I live in the city I've been composting oak leaves and buying suitable bagged mixes or products by the yard from nursery suppliers. Some of the latter will load more than one ingredient in the truck, and you can mix it after it's delivered. Some will even pre-mix it if you order enough. >2. How do you feel about Perlite as an ingredient in this situation? >Asking because I came into a big pile of it. I would NEVER put Perlite into a garden bed. It has no nutritional value and does not hold water, and it floats to the surface and blows around. Its only value is its light weight and slow breakdown, which makes it useful for container growing where the mix is irrigated almost daily and fertilized heavily, and the flats or pots have to be moved around a lot manually. If you can't get pumice, which you probably can't in quantity, I suggest using a small size of sharp, washed crushed rock, often known as "quarter-ten." Do not use "quarter minus" unless you wash out the fines first. >3. The sand I can most easily get is playground sand. I assume I >need to rinse it in case it is full of salt? I don't know what to do about seashore sand, can someone else help? "Playground sand" might be too fine and rounded, anyway. Even here around Portland, Oregon, I don't use the local sand derived from valley river deposits because it's too rounded and silty. Instead, I had several truckloads of sand from an upriver quarry brought in -- expensive transport, but well worth it. >4. Btw, I actually think the area's decomposed granite may also be a >good primary ingredient for this purpose because it contains >everything from fines to grit to irregular pea-sized bits and >retains more moisture than I expected before I tested it. I'm familiar with decomposed granite because it's the type of soil in my brother's garden in the California Coast Range. It is used for paths and other compacted applications because it hardens into an almost impervious surface when dry. Once wet, however, it opens up some unless it's been mechanically compacted. There are bulbs that grow in it naturally. When my brother and I added a compost plus sandy loam product from a nearby landscape supply company to the moistened decomp granite (it was my birthday present to him), we ended up with a pretty good planting bed in which a number of bulbs are flourishing. The other day I visited a friend's nursery and saw some healthy-looking bulbs being grown in a mixture of pumice and very well composted cow manure. The only thing I found wrong with it was that it seemed to get too dry, especially in the smaller sizes of pots exposed to heat. Another nursery where alpines and some bulbs are grown uses a lot of quarter-ten in mixes, troughs, and display beds; fortunately one of the proprietors is big and strong! A good chapter on soil ingredients appears in the Timber Press book "Rock Garden Design and Construction," which is out of print but widely obtainable. Most books on rock and alpine gardening discuss this topic at some length, but some of them, especially the older ones, go overboard on insisting on special mixtures for different kinds of plants. Most of us these days use just two or three formulae for all our plants. I hope this helps Chris and doesn't bore everybody else too much. Jane McGary Portland, Oregon, USA