Quality of the garden soil is essential for successful home garden. Without quality soil plant won't thrive well or won't grow at all. Here is proven 8 techniques to improve your garden soil quality.
1. Add compost to the soil
Compost provides slow releasing nutrients which increase the soil quality dramatically. Compost speed up the process of soil humus production. You can recycle almost any organic waste from kitchen scraps to saw dust. Composting will reduce the bulk of the wastes and convert that into more volatile and soluble nutrients.
2. Start using cover crops
Cover crops can feed the garden soil, build up its fertility and also improve it's structure with each passing year. Channels opened up by the decaying roots of the cover crops helps oxygen and water to enter the soil. To increase the effectiveness of the cover crops, mix crops of different families together. One simple tip: Divide your garden space into two parts. One for the food crops and another one for the cover crops. Then alternate them in the following year.
3. Increase nitrogen content by adding manure
Manure is great for soil aggregation. Use manure from homestead or small firms, they tend to have less pathogens than those of large firms. Manure is best for heavy feeding, fast growing crops. TO prevent contamination , use a 3 months gap between application and harvest. Particularly in case of root crops and leafy greens.
4. Use deep rooted plants for mining minerals
Deep rooted plants can bring up minerals from the deep subsoil. These are fantastic ways to supply nutrients without purchasing any input.Plants like Comfrey or stringent nettle are good examples which you can plant in your garden. Make sure you cut them off before it starts to make the seeds, you don't need your garden to be flooded with weeds.
5. Use biological pest control methods
Using biological vectors like chickens and turkeys is a fantastic way to improve your garden soil quality.In search of food they will always scratch the top soil and will reveal the microbes. The droppings are also great for the garden as they are very rich in nitrogen.As a bonus, these will also help prevent various pest attacks.
6. Cover the soil with mulch
We talked this technique on our previous article
"Four Tips to get great harvest from a citrus/ lemon tree"
Using organic mulches to cover the soil is an obvious way to increase soil fertility. Microbes, earthworms and other organisms in the soil will convert them into the topsoil.
You can also use cardboards or newspapers apart from other well known mulches to cover the soil. Other than increasing the soil fertility mulches also help in retaining the moisture of the soil
7. Use permanent beds
We wrote an article about raised beds before
"Why Raised Garden Beds are the best"
Using permanent beds are probably the best way to maintain soil structure and restrict foot traffic to the path ways. It helps conserving moisture in the soil. Permanent beds are also helpful in preventing extreme temperature fluctuation. Use the remaining portion of the garden to grow mulch. From time to time add some finely shredded mulch to the beds for added fertility.
8. Avoid power tillage
Avoid excessive tillage. They are detrimental to the soil life and also emits greenhouse gases. Rather than using any power tillage methods try forks to loosen the soil without breaking the "crumb" structure.The manual tillers are much easier to use if your soil is in good condition. Power tillers invert and mix different layers of soil and disrupt the food web present in the soil. So before trying any power tillage methods please revisit all the strategies discussed here and see if you can find any alternative
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Image Credits: pixabay.com
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