How to Create Healthy Soil for easy vegetables to grow – Fertile SoiL
This is the most important part of your garden. It is essential that you understand how to enhance your soil quality so that year after year you will continue to get great tasting vegetables from your plot. You’ll need to understand some basic practices so let’s get started.
Humus occurs naturally under the right circumstances. Basically, Humus is decomposed plant tissue. It is a product of composted vegetable matter, or if you like, your mature compost. The importance of chemically stable humus is believed to be the fertility that is provides to soils in both a physical and chemical sense. Many believe having healthy soil with ample amounts of humus allow for the soil to suppress disease. Humus allows soil organisms to feed and reproduce and is often described as the life force of the soil. The cellulose in humus acts like a sponge and holds moisture in the garden soil, making it available for growing plants, creating better drought tolerance. It has a water-holding capacity of up to five times its own weight. It helps prevent water-soluble nutrients from being leached from the soil via watering or rainfall by binding itself to the nutrients, but at the same time making them available to plant roots. It helps bring about a loose, crumbly structure in heavy clay soils, while allowing free drainage during excessive rain; and provides cohesion in sandy soils.
So you see that humus is really the best way to overcome whatever problems you may have with your soil. Humus is also necessary to maintain healthy levels of essential soil organisms, fungi, bacteria and earthworms.
It is important to make your own humus (compost) for your garden.
Sandy soils
When you have sandy soil valuable nutrients that are in the soil or that you may add to the soil will drain off rapidly when watering or after a rainfall. If you are in an area where you have sandy soil then you will need to use ample compost so that your soil will retain the vital nutrients. Sandy soils leech nutrients so you will need to use large amounts of compost so that your soil will retain water thus passing on the nutrients from your compost to your plants. Always mulch well to reduce evaporation. By introducing about 4 inches of mulch can reduce the evaporation rate by 70%.
Some sandy soils won’t retain any moisture for easy vegetables to grow and the water or rain will just run across the surface. If this is the case add as much compost as possible and mix in quite often. Remember the goal is to change the soil over time. You can also try organic soil wetting agents like vegetable soaps, plant and seaweed extracts and microbial wetting agents. Always be sure what you’re using is organic.
