Woeful Wednesday - Hydrophobic soil

Time for another round of Woeful Wednesday!

This week's topic - my terrible hydrophobic soil. To be more precise - it has now been way too long since I did a big soil improvement effort for my citrus trees. In the photos you may just be able to see the old, broken down mulch from last time around. No doubt the manure, mulch, and other goodies have improved the soil very much, but it's definitely overdue to be reapplied.

I have heard some Perth gardening personalities say that you should apply wetting agent here FOUR times a year - who has the time?! I'd like to aim for twice a year but in reality I'd be lucky to get around to doing it once a year. Still, the established citrus trees aren't too fragile so that's good.

So what I did for this post is a little experiment. Just before 6pm I went outside with a glass of water, smoothed out a small depression next to mini-unidentified-citrus, and poured half a glass of water in. I then took a bunch of photos. Can you see the curved meniscus around the edge of the water?? To me that is the sign of impressively hydrophobic soil. Some little bits of soily stuff floated on the water, but the water definitely wasn't able to soak in to the soil the way it should.

I waited around for a few minutes hoping to get a progress shot, but the water wasn't going anywhere. I then came inside, glanced at the clock (6pm), and hopped in the shower. At 6:15pm I went back outside with the camera - still no change in the water/soil.

At 6:30pm I went out again, and hurrah! The water was no longer pooled on the surface - I had a little "wet" patch of ground. I say "wet", because.. well, it's not really. I just brushed the top of the wet patch with my finger, and took a photo - bone dry about 1mm underneath.

So.. definitely time to treat the soil with wetting agent and other goodies! The weather has cooled down lately so I may manage to get some trees done before next Wednesday.

To add a bit of positivity to today's post, I took a picture of some of the baby imperial mandarins on the tree next door to mini-unidentified-citrus. Yum! Can't wait for them to grow up...