You love the flowers and shrubs in your garden but you know nothing about garden soil. In fact, you don’t want to touch the dirty stuff. Then gardening may not be your true calling.
Soil is dirty but it is crucial to creating a beautiful garden. Improving your garden soil is half the battle won as it affects the way your plants or crops grow and look.
Some symptoms of poor soil structure include crusts, hard soil layers below the surface, standing water, and erosion. When soils are cold, wet or crusty, seedlings are slow to emerge and some may not survive. Or the plants may be short, have poor color, or shallow and malformed roots.
Ideal garden soil is loose, fertile, well-drained, contains organic matter, and is free of weeds and diseases. Such garden soils are difficult to find, but with proper preparation and management, poor quality soil can be productive too.
Drainage and Organic Matter in Garden Soil
If your garden soil is well drained, water moves quickly through it and does not shut off air movement. This is important as roots cannot live and develop without a constant supply of oxygen.
Clay soils dry slowly after a rain because spaces between the soil particles are small. Sandy soils have bigger spaces and dry out quickly.
Either soil can be improved to a rich loam by adding organic matter. Increasing organic matter of clayey soil improves the tilth in terms of drainage and workability. Adding organic matter to sandy soil increases its water-holding capacity and fertility.
Some organic matter which can be added are manure, leaves compost, sawdust, bark, peatmoss; or plant residues like corn stalks, soybeans, rye, etc. The plant residues should be free of diseases if they are to be added to the garden soil.
Alternatively you can plant cover crops, such as clovers and vetch, which prevent soil erosion and leaching of nutrients during the fall but provide organic matter and nitrogen when turned under in spring.
Even though adding organic matter improves soil fertility, manures and plant residues are not balanced fertilizers as they release some nutrients quickly and the rest over a period of time. If you are using manures, take note that the amount of fertilizing nutrients vary due to straw, age, exposure to elements, and degree of composting.
Overuse of manures can add too much salt to the soil such that plant growth is harmed. Hence, be careful not to over-fertilize (200 pounds per 1,000 sq feet of garden space is ok) when applying chicken litter to garden soil.
