Optimize Your Garden Soil with These 6 Organic Choices
Introduction
Your garden soil provides the necessary nutrients, air, and water for healthy plant growth. But every garden has its blend of organic and inorganic matter. It determines what plants or shrubs will grow successfully. Creating ideal soil conditions for your garden is easy. So, let’s understand various organic choices for your garden soil.
Why Are Soil Amendments Essential?
Better soil amendment is essential, and it is a continuous process. Once you attain the basic soil structure, your soil will work itself and boost plant and shrub growth. For creating fertile soil, understanding its chemistry is beneficial to create an ideal environment for plant growth.
From region to region, soil structure varies in terms of organic material, minerals, microbes, and organisms. Soil anchors plants along with facilitating water and needed nutrients. Soil amendments help to grow better plants.
Advantages of applying amendments:
- Proper soil amendments create an ideal organic matter.
- The soil food web gets immense support from it.
- It keeps the deadly disease at bay.
- Moisture holding capacity increases.
- It promotes healthy plant growth.
- Soil structure and texture improve significantly.
- It enables soil aeration.
Determining Soil Amendments For Your Garden
For creating the optimum soil ecosystem, understanding the soil is the first step towards choosing the best-fit soil amendment course. Test your garden soil. The result will give you insights regarding soil structure, pH, organic matter, and nutrients. They will also recommend the fertilizer for the plants you want to grow in your garden. You need to test your garden soil every 4 to 5 years, as it helps to determine which garden soil amendment is required.
There Are Total 6 Types Of Garden Soil Amendments
Healthy soil is the foundation of a productive and environmentally friendly garden. With proper soil management practices, you can regulate plant growth and environmental quality. These top 6 organic soil amendments are for garden owners and farmers who want to understand the biological components of healthy soil.
Compost
Compost is one the most beneficial and popular soil amendments, which you can make yourself. You can add compost to your garden soil in spring or in autumn. It creates better mulch around various plants along with various soil organisms and worms. Compost takes a few months to decompose, but it facilitates steady soil enhancement to perennial beds.
Livestock Manure
You can avail livestock manure from gardens or farmers. It is essential to conduct thorough research before buying manure, as nutrients vary significantly between cow, sheep, chicken, and horse manure. You must ask farmers whether they use herbicides or pesticides before buying manure. You can also opt for bagged manures as they are sterilized and do not have weed seeds.
Leaf Mould
You can chop leaves and dig into the garden or leave it to rot down into leaf mold. Leaf mold significantly improves the soil texture and enhances the water-holding capacity. It also adds plenty of humus. You can also make your leaf mold compost. However, creating leaf mold compost takes time, but it significantly enriches the garden soil or mulch around plants.
Peat Moss
Peat moss is light and fluffy. It is made out of dried sphagnum. In potting mix, it is one of the key ingredients. At times it can acidify the soil since it contains very little amount of nutrients. It also repels the water; therefore, it is not an ideal solution for mulching and top-dressing. Many people consider Peat Moss a controversial amendment since it is harvested from a biodiverse habitat.
Black Earth
Black earth fertilizer is highly effective in the garden since it is rich in nutrients. It enhances the sandy soil structure and also improves nutrients and water retention. It contains a mix of manure, lime, and hummus. Before mixing it with your garden soil, ensure you test your soil and determine the best-fit soil amendment.
Kelp Meal
If you live near the ocean, gather the seaweed and add it to the compost. It is rich in nutrients and can help your garden plants to thrive. You can also chop it off and dig into the soil during the autumn. Sewead is rich in micronutrients and plant hormones, which promotes healthy growth. You can also buy kelp meals and give your garden plants a much-needed boost.
What To Buy Bagged Or Bulk Garden Soil Amendment?
You can easily determine by asking just a few questions like, how much do you need, do you find it in bulk, or are there extra charges for the delivery? It is quite affordable to buy fertilizers in bulk. However, you have to ask what it is made from. Squeeze it and have a thorough look at the fertilizer texture.
If you choose to buy the bagged organic fertilizer, you have to read the labels carefully. Bagged fertilizers are screened for various garden debris, sticks, and rocks. They are also sterilized to kill the weed seeds.
When Should You Add Soil Amendments?
During spring, you can use aged manure, kelp meal, and compost to feed the soil. You can also add amendments to your garden during summer and autumn. Adding organic fertilizers in autumn gives your soil time to break down these materials, so your plants can take needed nutrients and other advantages in the spring.
Conclusion
Nurturing your garden soil is very important. Your soil is a living ecosystem, not just dirt. Adding organic matter improves the soil structure and helps the large community of living organisms, which are linked through the nutrient cycle. Above-mentioned 6 soil amendments can significantly improve the soil structure and beautify your garden. Lawn Doctor USA provides organic soil amendments and garden soil amendments if you are in need of soil amendment services.
