Soil

Soil is a living organism, not an inert holding tank for roots. A single teaspoon of healthy soil holds more microorganisms than there are people on the planet, bacteria, fungi, protozoa, all of it working. Treat it with respect and it will provide for you in return.

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• Structure matters more than you think. Sandy soil drains fast and holds almost nothing.  Clay holds everything and drains almost never. Most garden soil sits somewhere in between, called loam, and it's the sweet spot everyone's chasing. You don't fix structure overnight, you fix it over seasons, by adding organic matter every chance you get.

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• pH decides what your plants can actually access.   pH measures how acidic or alkaline your soil is, on a scale of 0 to 14. Seven is neutral. Below 7 is acidic, above 7 is alkaline or sometimes called basic.  You can dump all the fertilizer you want into the ground, if your pH is wrong, the plant can't take it up because each nutrient becomes available to the plant when soil is at a favourable pH. Most vegetables want something close to neutral, roughly 6 to 7.   Get a cheap soil test before guessing.​

  • Peas:  like alkaline soil, around 7.0 to 7.5

  • Potatoes like acidic soil.  They are much more prone to disease in neutral or alkaline soil

  • Brassicas or Cole Cropes (cabbage, broccoli, kale):  6.5 to 7.0, since low pH increases clubroot risk

  • Sweet potatoes: acidic like regular potatoes but less extreme, 5.5 to 6.5

  • Rhubarb: also tolerant of more acidic soil, around 5.5 to 6.8

  • Asparagus: prefers neutral to alkaline, roughly 6.5 to 7.5, unusual for a vegetable

• • ​Add pine needles,  peat moss to lower the pH

  • Add lime, ash or gypsom to raise the pH

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• Compaction is a silent killer, and not just for roots. It also crushes the air pockets that soil biology needs to breathe. Walking on garden beds, heavy rain on bare soil, tilling when it's wet, all of it presses the air out and suffocates the very organisms doing the work for you. Raised beds and permanent paths exist for a reason, so you're never standing where your plants, or their underground workforce, are trying to live.

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• Organic matter is the one thing every soil type needs more of, regardless of what you're starting with. Compost, aged manure, leaf mold, it all does the same job, feeding the biology in the soil that actually makes nutrients available to your plants in the first place. Fungi, in particular, form partnerships with plant roots, reaching further into the soil than the roots ever could alone and trading nutrients for sugars. Kill that relationship with excessive tilling or synthetic overload, and you're doing your plant's job for it, indefinitely.

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• Nature hates bare soil. Leave a patch uncovered and she'll fill it in herself, usually with whatever weed seed was already waiting in the dirt for exactly that chance. Mulch, cover crops, living plants, straw, even cardboard: doesn't matter what you use, just don't leave the ground naked. Bare soil dries out faster, erodes in the rain, loses nutrients, and invites every opportunistic weed in the neighbourhood to move in.   Cover it yourself, or she will.

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Rule of thumb: feed the soil, not just the plant. A healthy plant in dead soil is a temporary situation.

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