Building Good Garden Soil
Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Organic Gardening on July 6, 2009
If you buy your gardening soil from a garden center, as potting soil in the bag, or from another source, you don’t really need to know much about it to make it grow things. It’s likely already in great shape for doing so.
Even so, a few years of gardening in it will change that soil. If your gardening methods aren’t sustainable, the soil will break down.
Most people, especially if you’re gardening on a budget, don’t have the money to buy truckloads of good garden soil or several square yards of potting soil to put onto a garden bed. Others of us just refuse to pay good money for something that’s so easy to make yourself.
Once you see how easy it is to reconstitute almost any kind of dirt into good gardening soil, you’ll agree and you won’t bother wasting money on expensive dirt.
Your garden needs soil for two things: it gives the plants something to root to and it gives them a source of nutrients. Good soil delivers both water and vital nutrients to plants in a very efficient manner and the plants that grow in it will be healthy, strong, and vibrant.
Good gardening soil, however, is not just a mixture of “stuff.” Gardening soil is a whole ecosystem of organisms and basic elements all combining together to provide plants with the stuff of life. Making good soil, though, is something that anyone can do easily.
Once you’ve picked your spot for your garden (or at least, the source for the dirt for your garden), you need to know what you’ve got there to work with. Grab a shovel and dig down about two feet or so into the soil. Smooth the wall of your hole and look at the layers there. These strata will tell you what is going on with the soil.
Somewhere between three and twelve inches down, you’ll see the color change as the first strata of your soil goes from topsoil to subsoil. You can learn a lot about what’s going on by looking at that subsoil.
Healthy Soil Signs
If the subsoil is a rich red or yellow or a medium to dark brown, you have great soil with good drainage and it’s well set for gardening in. It’s likely that there is already abundant plant life on this soil, so all you’ll need to do is clean it up and start planting. If the soil has been uncultivated and is wild, it’d be a good idea to do a shallow tilling of the first several inches, let it air out a little, and then plant.
Unhealthy Signs – Bad Drainage
If your soil is not like that described above, you have issues to deal with. Almost all soil problems can be reduced to drainage, however. Bluish or grayish subsoil means that something is stopping it from draining properly and getting oxygen. This happens in clay quite often. Additionally, if plant roots in the topsoil all stop at the same level in a discernible line, the problem starts right where the roots stop.
To remedy this problem, you’ll need to resolve the drainage issues. With heavy clay soils, you should either remove the soil and start from scratch or begin breaking it up and adding sandy soil to separate and even it out. Unless the area you’re going to do this in is small, you’ll probably want to get a powerful rototiller or a tractor with heavy plows to do this.
Till up the soil until it’s well broken down at least a foot from the top. Then begin adding sandy soil and retill until the soil is smooth textured and looks even. This takes a lot of work, but it will turn the soil into something much more than it was before.
Unhealthy Signs – Underdeveloped
Another common thing you’ll see is under-developed soil. This soil will be of bland color and will look the same with no obvious subsoil line demarking the topsoil from the subsoil. Luckily, very easily fixed. Usually, this kind of soil happens because either the real topsoil was scraped away during construction or landscaping, or because the soil has been dumped there recently.
To fix this soil, all you’ll need is to ad compost and/or manure to it. Till the soil down to about six or eight inches, spread a thick layer of compost or manure (or both) over the soil and then ad a thick layer of mulch (wood chips, leaves, lawn clippings, and so forth). Then leave it. Let nature do its thing for a year and you’ll have awesome soil.
Can’t wait a year? Then forget the mulch and plow the manure/compost in thoroughly, tilling the compost into the soil as much as you can. Let it sit for a week or so and then begin planting.
Unhealthy Signs – Leaching
White or ash-gray topsoil will be followed by a layer of very light-colored soil and then a layer of heavy, dark, almost humus-like subsoil. This leaching, as it’s called, is not unusual and is almost always because the soil has recently been under a tree, bushes, or other deep-rooted, heavy cover.
It’s easy to remedy this soil, though, by just plowing it or tilling it to mix it up. That should be all that’s required.
Although I only have a mini garden, this is good info. My brother and I plan to have permission from some folks in Tioman, to let us plant some seeds for them without expecting any thing in return.
This info is definitely a blessing, Aaron! Thanks!
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Just saw this making its rounds from Raw Earth living on facebook. Very nice information!
Thanks. I suspect they found it through a similar article that I wrote for NaturalNews, which just published a couple of days ago. :)