If you’re struggling to produce high yield crops, here are 7 Ways to Improve Your Garden’s Soil!
Everyone knows that one of the most important variables in gardening is the garden soil’s quality. The soil packers well around plants and allows them to develop a thick root base, and it fertilizes them, getting you a better yield than you would with regular soil (if your plants even so much as survive). Farmers, gardeners, and all plant enthusiasts alike have spent a lot of time since early on in history to find ways to get a good yield.
Most of the time, great soil was always the key. If you’re in New York City and looking to start your own vegetable garden, soil will be where you want to start first!
7 Ways to Improve Your Garden’s Soil
In this article, we’ll be teaching you ways to improve your garden’s soil and hopefully increase the quality of crops and yield!
A Healthy Diet
Billions of organisms live in the soil, and although we can’t see them, it’s important that we keep these little critters alive because they’re the key to helping gardens thrive above ground by recycling nutrients.
Autumn is the perfect season to start incorporating a healthy diet into your soil. By that, we mean you add organic materials to the soil like fallen leaves, garden debris, and kitchen scraps.
Chop them up and add them directly to the top 2 inches of soil, then cover them with mulch. If you have the chance, adding concentrated manures is a really good idea too.
Test, Test, and Test
Soil tests are very important if you’re really into gardening. Taking one when starting a new garden or a new area for your pre-existing garden with new soil. If your garden’s health declines and you see indicators like the decrease in quality of your crops, yields, or even smaller sizes in general, you should take one too.
If a nutrient essential to good garden soil is missing, your plants and soil’s health will suffer. For the best results, we suggest that you take nutrient tests late in the summer or early in fall. Submit the soil tests to a certified laboratory.
Supply What Your Soil Needs
The next best step after testing the soil and finding out what it needs is to provide it. If you’re a seasoned gardener, your several seasons after soil building, you might be losing some of the nutrients you’ve built and added over time.
Assess what the results are from your laboratory test and see how hot you can supplement the lack of some nutrients in your garden soil. Add organic fertilizers and lime to ensure proper nutrition for the season ahead.
You can add like during fall, but if you’ve missed that window, you can add them alongside mineral fertilizers several weeks before planting during spring.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen is an essential nutrient for plants. Although the living soil will continue to recycle and retain most of the other mineral nutrients, nitrogen will often run low in supply even after years of soil building.
Before planting, ensure that you have sufficient nitrogen by adding organic fertilizers such as blood, seed, or feather meal, which are rich in nitrogen. Incorporate them in your major fertilizers.
Don’t Forget the Worms
Occasionally digging up and captivating the soil is an important factor in gardening. Sometimes cultivating the soil yourself can be taxing, and you might sometimes even forget to do it. A better and more efficient job is to have these little wriggly critters do it for you.
Worms are the backbone of good garden soil. They dramatically improve soil structure and keep up the cycle of nutrients by excreting manure castings.
So, make your garden soil more inviting to worms. You can do this by composting brown and green layers so they’ll have food, and they can thrive undisturbed.
Dry the Soil
Letting the soil dry is something that most people don’t do. But if your soil is wet, it removes all the essential air that your organisms need to live. Don’t push down the soil, making it compact, especially when wet because it takes out all the air, forcing your little critters to evacuate.
Reuse the Perennials
One last thing you can do is to add chipped yard debris and bits from trees to make a unique kind of mulch. When green, they provide valuable nitrogen as a sheet mulch layer. This type of composting mimics the way plant litter falls in nature, but it’s more systematic if you do it.
Don’t forget that your garden soil also needs some love, so try these steps now.
So if you enjoyed this post on 7 Ways to Improve Your Garden’s Soil then be sure to visit Local NYC often!
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