IN THE GARDEN
Starting your plants off on the right root
Good soil best thing for your garden.
Feed the soil, not the plant. If there were ten commandments for gardening, this would be the first three. The flowers and foliage get all the glory, but the quiet unassuming roots do all the hard work in the dark, so make it easy for them.
Start with the right location. Find a location that meets the long-term space and light requirements of your plant. If the soil isn’t great, that’s the one thing that you can do something about. The soil can be worked and fed, or replaced if necessary.
Soil Structure: Soil provides structure for the roots to lodge in so that the stalk of the plant can stand upright. Clay gives soil the capacity to hold water, sand allows for drainage and decaying materials gives a fine texture that provides necessary air spaces while also holding moisture. It’s the balance that you want, too much of any of these makes for unhappy roots.
Watch how water behaves on the soil. Does water pool and take a long time to drain away? There may be too much traffic, too much clay or a low spot with nowhere to drain. Is there so much sand that it just doesn’t hold water at all?
Work in lots of plant material such as grass clippings, leaves or seaweed every year to improve soil structure for the plant roots. Contouring the soil surface can improve drainage, or reduce erosion, or help the soil to warm in the sun. If you just can’t get a shovel through it because of clay, rock or gravel, you can consider importing some soil.
Soil chemistry and biology: The real action in the soil is the veritable party of critters (the ‘soil biology’ - bacteria, fungus, worms, insects and much, much more) breaking down animal and plant debris into minerals that the plant roots can absorb for nourishment. These minerals make up the soil chemistry. The chemistry, in turn, determines how well the soil biology does its job. Lots of decaying materials and a favourable chemistry will feed the roots well.
Natural materials, such as plant matter, manure, and bone meal, are great fertilizers especially together because they have a really broad range of nutrients that are released ‘slow and steady’ as they decay, avoiding boom-and-bust growth.
Soil tests from the Department of Agriculture gauge your soil’s richness and acidity. You can make soil more acidic (blueberries love this) by adding a lot of peat moss, or ‘sweeten’ the soil gradually (for honeysuckle) with bone meal or lime.
Getting started: Starting from turf, dig down a shovel’s depth and turn over the whole sod. If you do it in early spring, the buried grass won’t regrow much. You can also just cover sod before it starts to grow with a quarter-inch layer of newspaper and a few inches of soil or mulch. No digging ... just wait - after a few months, you’re ready to plant.
I like to get out and turn over a garden bed a few weeks early, and again at planting time to help set back the weed seeds. Tilling creates a satisfying neat look, but it also completely disrupts the soil biology, which will take a little while to re-establish, so I do it sparingly.
Building up your soil health is a long-term project that makes for healthy plants, and if you grow veggies, it makes for healthy food. This is as good a time as any to start.