Preparing the Soil

Compost, compost, compost.  No matter what kind of soil you start with, adding compost is going to improve it.  And the better soil you have, the bigger your hostas will grow and the better they will look.  Compost makes organic soil, and organic soil holds water well, and as we have said once or twice before, water is the key to growing hostas.

I'm perfectly aware that most people are going to get their plants, go out in the yard and dig a hole, plunk the plant in it and forget it.  And the great thing about hostas is that they will probably have beautiful, healthy plants year after year.  But if you want the biggest and most beautiful hostas, the kind that make your friends ask "Wow, what kind of fertilizer do you use?", then compost, compost, compost.

I found a web page from some folks at Oregon State University that explains just about everything you could want to know about organic soils.  It's much easier for me to link to it than to plagiarize it, so, assuming you have Acrobat Reader, here it is: http://eesc.orst.edu/agcomwebfile/edmat/EC1561.pdf.

If you can't read this file, just Google "Organic garden soil".  Last time I looked, 1,150,000 pages came up, so you should be able to find something.