I finally got a new pair of work boots. My old ones leaked. Like most of my plants, I don’t like having wet feet.

 

That’s the challenge with much of our Northeast Ohio soil. The heavy clay is slow to drain. When I notice a plant failing in my garden, I check to see how it was planted. I will occasionally have a juniper turn brown or a cotoneaster bite the dust. More often than not, its roots are sitting in too much moisture. It sometimes even makes a suction noise when I pull it out of the ground.

 

So unless you want to fill your garden with plants that like wet conditions (willows, hydrangeas, sedges…) the solution is to plant your specimen correctly in the first place. You can send some of your soil away to be tested.   But to know if you have heavy clay, just dig a hole and then pour a bucket of water into the hole. If it is slow to drain, then you know that most of your plants are not going to be happy sitting in that hole after a rain. It is like putting plants in a clay pot that has no drainage hole. So make sure you dig a hole much larger and deeper than the root ball of your new plant. Then pour in some sandy soil that will drain away excess water. Then your plant can go in the hole along with the rest of the fill dirt. Plants like Rhododendrons that are especially adverse to wet soils can even be planted high with rich but well draining soils piled up around the rootball to avoid wet feet.

 

Clay can be so damp, cool and slow to drain that many gardeners in this region switch to raised bed and container gardening so that they can optimize the growing medium for their plants.

 

So if you have clay soil and the instructions for your new plant say it likes “well-drained soil,” be sure to take the necessary steps to avoid wet feet.