Soils in Our Environment

Soils in Our Environment, by Duane T. Gardiner and Raymond W. Miller, is a great book for learning about soil. This book is for soil nerds only, probably not the typical gardener. But if you are up for it, you can learn a lot about soil from this book. We used it as the text for the Soil Management class taught by Dr. Ed Brennan at Merritt College.

The first half of the book covers soil composition; physical, water, and chemical properties; organisms; soil formation and morphology; and soil taxonomy. That gives you a good background for understanding other topics like nutrition, fertility, erosion, and irrigation. The book describes how to read soil surveys to better understand your specific soil, and provides specialty topics like soilless culture, salt-affected soils, and soil compaction (a favorite topic). The Appendices provide information about the many graphics, references for measuring soil volume and moistness, a refresher on the periodic table (handy, since it had been decades since high school chemistry), and a glossary of term.

The book is well written and nicely illustrated with photos, charts, illustrations, and graphs. Turns out, all that science is pretty interesting, and really useful for finding out more about practical gardening things, like how to deal with clay soil, acidic soil, erosion, and so forth. I recommend this book as a reference.