We're back in the world of soil my friends and this time we're not talking about

sandy soil we're not talking about clay soil we are talking about silty soil, probably the one that most of us know the least about.

Because I don't know about you, but here in California, we deal with more clay and in places like my friend James

Prigioni's garden over in New Jersey he's dealing with a lot of sand so what about

silt what is silty soil before we get into it, what is soil itself? Well, it is a mixture of a bunch of different things.

Mineral particles, organic matter, organisms, gas, water. It's sort of nothing and everything at the same time, if that makes sense.

Then you've got, of course, your sand, silt, and clay, textural styles of soil, and

those depend on the size of the solid mineral particles.

So silty particles are between sand and clay both in size and their physical properties.

That's what to remember. They're sort of the middle ground. Soil texture will determine

how easily your soil can be worked, how well the soil retains air and water, and how quickly

water will either flow through it or be held on by it. So very nerdy here but

silt particles must be between 0.002 and 0.05 millimeter. They will be smaller than sand again and larger than clay. So how do we improve

silty soil? Well what is silty soil again? It has to be made up of 80% or more of silty sized particles.

That's what makes up silty soil.

So it's pretty rare.

Honestly, it's pretty rare. It's more likely to have a mixture of silt sand and clay or more

sand or more clay, but again it can happen specifically if you're near some

sort of river, things like that, that's where

silty soil really tends to show up naturally.

Surprise, surprise, pure silt is eroded mineral particles and doesn't have organic matter in it.

So if you're going to improve it, you would need to add that which is not there and that would

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