Amending your garden soil

One of the main goals of having an early garden is to make sure that nothing will stunt or set back the growth of your plants. One often overlooked area is garden soil.

In doing research for this year’s garden I found a whole host of soil amendment recipes. Every gardener in every location has a different soil amendment schedule for each type of garden crop. None of them seem to be consistent either. When one person said “add a tablespoon of epsom salt to peppers when planting” you could be sure to find an equivalent article from someone who had crop troubles because of that exact same amendment. Maybe you’ll find a scientific study that compares soil amendment recipes and gives you some relief.

I found all kinds of materials used in garden soil amendment as well. My main interest this year is tomatoes and peppers so I focused on them. I found that most gardeners seem to plant a deeper, wider hole and only amend the soil in that hole, forgetting that the plants roots should grow out from there. Amending the planting hole is a ritual of mine, but making sure the entire garden soil is balanced is very important.

Some materials found in garden soil amendment include compost, manure, peat moss, kelp or seaweed extracts, lime, sulfur, gypsum, Epsom salt, coffee grounds, egg shells, manure from most animals (fresh or composted), bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, cottonseed meal and every other type of ground up item. Many recipes you find on the Internet are nothing more than folklore instead of being based on plants needs and what your soil lacks. Adding amendments to soil simply because someone else had ’good luck’ with them is at best a waste of energy and at worst a disaster. You can burn crops or wind up with plants that bear no fruit. More is not better. In fact, too much of some nutrients can cause toxicity. Adding amendments blindly is like playing roulette with your garden. Will you get a bumper crop or will you have no fruits to share with your friends and family? Fortunately there is a simple answer.

The bottom line in amending soil for the home gardener is you need to have a soil test done. Have it done now by your extension service. In my area it is shipped off to the agriculture department at the University where they not only analyze the garden soil test sample, but they make valuable suggestions on which soil amendments and how much to add per thousand square feet for different types of vegetables. That is much more accurate than a simple soil test kit from the garden center.

There you have it. Get a garden soil test done and take the guess work out of amending soil. No more worries about whether your plants have enough of the nutrients they need. You will know for sure and you’ll have a fantastic crop because of it.