THIS WEEK'S TIP FROM GARDEN GURU SUE BOTH

Super Soil - The Value of Healthy Soil!

Just as a durable house needs a strong foundation, healthy plants require soil that can provide their roots with nutrients, water, and air. Few gardeners are blessed with perfect soil, and even if they were, keeping soil healthy and able to support plants is an ongoing process. Building and maintaining healthy soil is the single most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your garden and landscape plants.

 

Building soil means providing soil life – microbes, worms, fungi – with the materials and environment they need to do their jobs. Taking from the soil without giving anything back breaks the natural cycle. Harvesting crops and raking fallen leaves removes organic material that’s ordinarily destined for the soil on which it falls. If the organic material isn’t replenished, soil health declines. Substituting synthetic chemical fertilizers for naturally occurring nutrients may feed plants, but it starves the soil.

 

  • In the wild, soil life is sustained and nutrients are recycled through natural processes. Microorganisms, earthworms, and other decomposers feed on organic matter and transform the nutrients it contains into forms that plants can use. The process is a slow, steady, ongoing one: Plants grow, die, and decompose; the cycle continues. Feed microorganisms and other soil life: Beneficial bacteria, protozoa, fungi, beneficial nematodes, and other soil microbes consume organic matter (and one another) and excrete that matter in a form plants can use for growth. Earthworms, beetles, and other creatures also eat organic matter and tunnel through the soil, creating beneficial air spaces and excreting nutrients.
  • Improve the soil structure: Organic matter helps sandy soils stick together better and hold water and nutrients. It also helps open spaces between small, sticky clay particles so that clay soil drains better and contains more oxygen.
  • Increase reserve of soil nutrients: Soil microbes store nutrients in their bodies; they release those nutrients as they die or are consumed by other microbes. The more microbes the soil contains, the more nutrients it can store.

Healthy soil equals healthy plants equals happy gardeners!

Join us this week Friday for our FREE online workshop on Super Soil, with Garden Guru Sue Both. This week’s prize will be sponsored by Protek.

Please use the following login details to join us at 11am sharp over Zoom:

Meeting ID:| 818 9681 1553 Passcode: 332187

or use the following direct link : https://bit.ly/2VRNfhw