What's in your Soil?

Can you smell it?  That wonderful smell of deep rich crumbly black soil?    What you're smelling is a living organism.  It is not an inert holding tank for roots. A single teaspoon of healthy soil holds more microorganisms than there are people on the planet.  It is a symbiosis of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, all working together. Treat it with respect and it will provide for you in return.

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Test Your Soil

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• Texture matters more than you think. Sandy soil drains fast and holds almost no water, no nutrients and drains faser than the plant can absorb it.  Clay holds everything including nutrients and drains slowly if at all suffocating the life out of roots and other soil life.   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.  So test your soil.  Even if you just do the squeeze test, determine what kind of soil you have and plant accordingly.  Plants will not change their requirements because your soil doesn't meet their needs

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• For a more thorough method of determining what type of soil you have, grab a shovel and a mason jar, and read the following article.  Everything you need to know is there, and it's dead easy!

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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.

  • Use 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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• Bare soil is a mistake. Wind, rain, and sun strip it fast, and weeds are just nature's way of covering ground you left uncovered. Mulch it, cover crop it, or plant it, just don't leave it bare and expect it to still be good soil next spring.

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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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