Building & Keeping Good Soil

Most Americans have a home landscape that contains lousy soil. It is compacted and contains very little organic matter. There is little soil life including earthworms and beneficial microbes.

ALL PLANTS LIVING IN LOUSY SOIL ARE IN STRESS 365 DAYS A YEAR! PLANTS IN STRESS ARE FAR MORE LIKELY TO BE ATTACKED BY PEST INSECTS OR SUCCOMB TO A FUNGAL DISEASE.

SOLUTION? FIX THE SOIL

We are talking about all the soil on your property. The soil under the lawn. The soil under the trees, shrubs, ground covers, and flowers. The soil under the veggie garden if you have one. If you have lousy soil it will take you 3 to 5 years of following the steps below to get to the ideal 5% organic matter and a happy soil food web.

MOST IMPORTANT STEP TO GET TO GOOD SOIL

On the left of this screen you see a group of buttons each describing a product or method that will definitely contribute to improving the quality of your soil and thus the health of the plants on your landscape. We do not suggest you should follow every method, but the more you do use the better.

In the meantime there is one step to improve the soil that absolutely critical to producing good soil. That step is to add some form of organic

material to the surface of all the soil on your property every year you live on your property.

Organic matter is the food for those soil denizens, so therefore you cannot have a well populated soil food web unless your soil has at least 5% organic matter in the top 10 or 12 inches. Less than 2% organic matter, common in most home landscapes, means there is an inadequate food to support the soil food web and that means the soil is poor. That means all the plants living in that poor soil are likely to suffer some form of stress all year long. Not a good thing.

For ten million years, Mother Nature with her forests and the prairies offered the soil food web an annual dose of organic matter in the form of autumn leaves and dead grass. Unfortunately, that ready source is not available to our lawns and gardens. We need to find a way to make organic material available to the earthworms over our entire home landscape; under the trees and shrubs, on the lawns, and in the gardens.

If you want to have a healthy soil under your turf, you need a healthy soil food web. You can feed it or you can kill it. Most people are killing it, guaranteeing their growing grass and other plants in dead soil.

More Specific Details For Different Landscape Situations

To fix soil under the lawn; click here

To fix soil under trees; click here

To fix soil under shrubs; click here

To fix soil in flower beds; click here

To build soil in vegetable garden; click here

Do you have a gardening question? Ask Nancy