What is the best soil for planting Bitterroots?
A. This seems to be the sixty four-dollar question and I don’t have an answer. Our land is very heavy clay and it amazes me to see sprouts about the size of a piece of thread come through. The clay is so hard, but Bitterroots do it all the time. In my beds, we have mixed topsoil and sand with the clay. At times we have added fertilizer. The plants and flowers are bigger in the garden beds, I can’t really see too much of a difference from the flowers in the wild. I just believe that the sprinkling of water on a daily basis helps the garden plants grow larger. The plants in the wild also grow larger when we have a rainier spring. Sometimes I add potting soil to the top of the beds in the fall. I do that because I know seeds have dropped on the soil and I want them to be covered, plus I think the potting soil may enrich the beds some. I have put plants in sand only and they grew. I put a plant in lava rock and it grew. I also put a plant in just potting soil — it came up the first year,
