What Kind of Soil Is Soft & Smooth Like Baby Powder?

Productive garden soil is a combination of silt and other elements.

Soil as soft and smooth as baby powder sounds ideal, but your plants will suffer if your entire garden is made up of such soil, which is silt. Silt is characterized by particles about 0.002 to 0.05 millimeters across, many times smaller than a grain of sand. Dry silt has a smooth, soft texture that has been compared to the texture of flour and talcum powder. Silt is ground quartz and rock minerals. It can supply a small amount of nutrients to plants, but it also can stay wet, be too fine to dig and erode quickly.

Soil Texture

Healthy soil is a mixture of sand, small particles of silt and even smaller clay particles, ensuring good drainage and adequate nutrients. When all three are present in roughly equal amounts, the soil is called loam. Soil usually also includes non-mineral elements, such as air, water and organic matter -- decomposing plants and beneficial soil organisms. The smaller the particles in your soil, the less air and more water the soil holds. An ideal soil is 45 percent mineral -- with equal portions of silt, sand and clay, 5 percent organic matter and the rest equal parts water and air. Add organic material and coarse sand to improve silty soil.

About the Author

Patricia Hamilton Reed has written professionally since 1987. Reed was editor of the "Grand Ledge Independent" weekly newspaper and a Capitol Hill reporter for the national newsletter "Corporate & Foundation Grants Alert." She has a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from Michigan State University, is an avid gardener and volunteers at her local botanical garden.