Home Garden Tips - Soil Preparation
Soil Preparation for your Garden
If you're getting ready to go on a new garden venture, you need to prepare your soil to ideally house your plants.
Whether outdoor or in a container, good soil is fundamental to the health of your plants.
Water, nitrogen and phosphorus content, alkalinity and acidity, and much more is determined by the nature of the soil
used to house and feed your plants. Keeping all those at the right level is paramount. In container gardening, all that is up to you. In
an outdoor garden, nature helps but you may have to give some assistance to achieve optimal results. Lavender, for
example, likes dry, alkaline soil with good drainage. Sage can suffer root rot if the soil is kept too wet.
Soil is categorized as either sandy or clay-like. (Silt is a very
fine mixture of both sand and clay) Clay particles suspended in the soil readily absorb and retain water. Sandy soil is more 'glass-like' and produces
good spacing for air to move around, but water flows through easily.
The best thing you can do in the soil preparation process is to reach the perfect mixture of sand, silt, and clay.
Preferably there would be 40 percent sand, 40 percent silt, and 20 percent
clay. There are several tests used by experienced gardeners to tell whether the soil has a good composition. First you can
compress it in your hand. If it doesn't hold its shape and crumbles without any outside force, your sand ratio is probably a little
high. If you poke the compressed ball with your finger and it doesn't fall apart easily, your soil contains too much clay.
If you're still not sure about the content of your soil, you can separate each ingredient by using this
simple method. Put a cup or two of dirt into a jar of water. Shake the water up until the soil is suspended, then let it set until you
see it separate into 3 separate layers. The top layer is clay, the next is silt, and on the bottom is sand. You should be able to judge
the presence of each component within your dirt, and act accordingly.
After you've analyzed the content of your soil, if you decide that it is low on a certain ingredient then you should definitely do something to fix it. If dealing with too much silt or sand, it's best to add some peat moss or compost. If you've got too much clay, add a mixture of peat moss and sand. The peat moss, when moistens, helps for the new ingredient to infiltrate the mixture better. If you can't seem to manage to attain a proper mixture, just head down to your local gardening store. You should be able to find some kind of product to aid you. The water content of the soil is another important thing to consider when preparing for your garden. If your garden is at the bottom of an incline, it is most likely going to absorb too much water and drown out the plants. If this is the case, you should probably elevate your garden a few inches (4 or 5) over the rest of the ground. This will allow for more drainage and less saturation. Adding nutrients to your soil is also a vital part of the process, as most urban soils have little to no nutrients already in them naturally. One to two weeks prior to planting, you should add a good amount of fertilizer to your garden. Mix it in really well and let it sit for a while. Once you have done this, your soil will be completely ready for whatever seeds you may plant in it. Once your seeds are planted, you still want to pay attention to the soil. The first few weeks, the seeds are desperately using up all the nutrients around them to sprout into a real plant. If they run out of food, how are they supposed to grow? About a week after planting, you should add the same amount of fertilizer that you added before. After this you should continue to use fertilizer, but not as often. If you add a tiny bit every couple of weeks, that should be plenty to keep your garden thriving. Basically, the entire process of soil care can be compressed into just several steps… ensure the makeup of the soil is satisfactory, make sure you have proper drainage in your garden, add fertilizer before and after planting, then add fertilizer regularly after that. Follow these simple steps, and you'll have a plethora of healthy plants in no time. And if you need any more details on an individual step, just go to your local nursery and enquire there. Most of the employees will be more than happy to give you advice.
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