Taney County Missouri Soil

For those of you that live down here in southwest Missouri you might have noticed that our soil often has a reddish tinge to it. Thats largely due to the high iron content. In my area by Forsyth Missouri our soil is classified as Ocie-Gatewood which is a type of gravely, silty loam. This means its basically good for making mud pies and needs all the fresh organic matter you can possible add to make it good garden soil. I made the mistake one time of ordering a truckload of soil to be delivered to my home when I was starting a new raised bed area. The truck arrived with what appeared to be river bottom muck. Stuff that had the consistency of concrete and was about as useful. Since it was there, I went ahead and incorporated some of it into my beds but made sure to add a lot of amendments in the for of bags and bags of composted manure and sand. I think the total number of 50 pound bags for each of two four by eight foot beds was something like 12 bags of compost and 6 bags of sand. That same year I also started a compost pile of my kitchen scraps and those went into the beds the following spring. (I was always amazed at how all that material went into such a small space and seemed to disappear). Anyway, after a couple of growing seasons the soil went from ugly to sort of good as it began to take on a darker appearance and more importantly held onto water for longer periods of time.