“The soil here isn’t very good.”

We were visiting a friend, looking at the flower garden planted just outside his small screened-in porch.

“It’s very sandy,” he continued.

Our friend is no longer mobile enough to dig in the garden and tend to his plants. We were there to refresh and reflower the space as a birthday present for him. We’d purchased a variety of drought-tolerant plants and brought shovels and four of us to help.

After deciding which plants would go where, we started digging.

“This must be the worst soil in the world,” one of us muttered, looking at what we’d turned over. “Sandy doesn’t begin to describe it.”

After a short discussion, one of us drove to a nearby big box home improvement store and returned with a 50-pound bag of topsoil, a “…dark blend of reed sedge peat and sand carefully screened and formulated for consistency to maintain moisture and microbial and nutritional balance….Easy to use right out of the bag.”

Perfect.

“OK,” said our in-house master gardener, “dig the holes about two to three inches wider and deeper than you need to accommodate the root balls. Put some of this topsoil on the bottom. Then, throw in some fertilizer, drop in the root ball, and fill in the space around it with the topsoil. Once we get all of these planted, we’ll give ‘em a hearty drink and then water each day for the next few days.”

Dig and fill. Dig and fill. Dig and fill. Dig and fill. Dig and fill.

“Why does this make a difference?” I asked, scooping two pounds of topsoil from the bag to fill in around the next root ball. “We’re putting 50 pounds of topsoil into a 5,000-pound sand pit, no offense to our friend.”

“Yeah, we aren’t replacing all of this …,” replied our leader, motioning toward the 5,000-pound sand pit, “and, if we just dropped new plants into the sand pit without surrounding support, they’d die in a week. This topsoil (isn’t it beautiful, it’s so dark!) enables them to take root and establish themselves here. After that, with a little water, they’ll be just fine.”

Nick Miller is President of Clarity Advantage based in Concord, MA. He assists banks and credit unions to generate more and more profitable relationships, faster, with business clients, their owners, and their employees through better sales strategies and execution. Additional articles on Clarity’s web site.