Tag Archives: soil health

Garden Advice

6 Ways to Improve Soil Fertility

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As grocery, fertilizer, and other prices continue to rise, many backyard gardeners are digging deep to grow their own food. Whether you’ve been gardening for 20 years or planted your first plot this spring, maintaining or building healthy, fertile soil is probably a top concern. If you’re on a budget, purchasing fertilizer or other organic garden amendments can be a strain or even out of reach entirely. Thankfully, there are a few affordable or even free ways to improve soil fertility. 

Start composting. 

In a previous post, I referred to compost as black gold, and I wholeheartedly believe that good finished compost is one of the best garden amendments you can have. It adds fertility, improves soil structure, encourages beneficial fungi and bacteria, and more. Composting also helps keep unnecessary items out of landfills. 

Here are a few of the items you can compost and keep out of a landfill:

  • Vegetable Scraps
  • Stale or Moldy Bread, Crackers, Chips, etc.
  • Egg Shells
  • Grass Clippings
  • Coffee Grounds
  • Tea and Tea Bags
  • Leaves

If you want to learn more about composting from what bin or system to use, maintaining your compost, and what to put in it, visit our post, Black Gold: Making Compost.

Water with compost, comfrey, grass-clipping, or manure tea.

If your plants need a fast-acting boost, watering with a bit of one of these DIY liquid fertilizers may do the trick. It may sound a little gross and can be a bit smelly, but it’s easy to do and worth it!

All you need is compost, comfrey leaves, grass clippings, or manure, a five-gallon bucket or another similar container, water, and some material for filtering like an old pillowcase or cheesecloth. 

Get the details from our post, DIY Compost Tea.

Bag and use your grass clippings.

While I’m all for going no-mow whenever you can and using alternatives like wildflower plantings in place of lawns, I do understand that mowing some areas is nice or even necessary. Whether you’re mowing around your garden to keep the grass from creeping in, a play area for your kids, or just around your home, you can put those grass clippings to good use!

A mower with a bagger will allow you to collect and use grass clipping as mulch or ingredients in compost or liquid fertilizer. However, you may not want to bag your clippings all the time. Just like grass clipping add fertility to your garden, they help keep your yard fertile and grass looking nice as well.Cover Crops to Improve Soil Fertility

Grow cover crops. 

Cover crops aren’t a quick fix, nor are they free, but I think their benefits still outweigh their negatives. Cover crops add fertility and organic matter to the soil, help keep down weeds, provide habitat for pollinators and other beneficial insects, and prevent erosion. They’re also more affordable than buying fertilizer over the long term. 

Different cover crop species come with different benefits, and you may want to do a bit of research before selecting one. 

Some cover crops like buckwheat are “winter-kill,” meaning they die back with frost. Some no-till gardeners use these as mulch for the following spring. Just rake the dead plant material back to seed or transplant your crops.

Clover and other cover crops in the legume family are nitrogen-fixers meaning that they take nitrogen from the air and add it to the soil as they grow. You can read more about how nitrogen fixation works in our post, What’s a Nitrogen Fixer?

If you have a hardpan or compacted soil, you may want to look into cover crops like Deep-Till radishes. These and other large rooted, tough cover crops will help break up compacted soil and hardpan, aerate the soil, add organic matter and allow water to soak in faster.

Here are a few great cover crop options:

While many cover crops are planted in a rotation, leaving beds free of crops for a year or in seasons when beds are not in use, there is another great option, especially for no-till gardeners. You can grow a crop like white clover in the paths between permanent beds. White clover will tolerate being walked on and mowed, providing a great path and source of mulch.

Look for people getting rid of “mulch hay” or straw.

Sometimes, you can find old or “mulch” hay or straw listed for cheap or free on sites like Facebook Marketplace. Often, these are bails that have gotten wet, moldy, or are just no longer fit for animal feed or bedding, but they’re perfect for the garden! 

Use old hay or straw to create lasagna gardens, mulch around plants, add to your compost, or create hugelkultur mounds.

Talk to the farmer you’re purchasing or getting the hay from and make sure it’s not from a field that has been treated with herbicides. Some folks also don’t like using hay because it contains weed seeds. Straw is the stalks from a wheat harvest and is generally free of seeds.Woodchips for Soil Fertility

Search for free wood chips.

Wood chips are another great source of organic matter and work well as a mulch, helping keep the soil cool and moist and blocking weeds. They’re slower to break down than other mulches like grass clippings, hay, or straw but will eventually turn into good quality soil. They’re also an excellent habitat for beneficial insects.

It’s often easy to find free wood chips in the summer when power companies are cutting trees and limbs away from power lines. Contact your local company or stop and ask workers you see. Sometimes, they may even be willing to dump a whole truckload at your home for free if they’re working nearby. Occasionally, local garden or hardware stores will source wood chips from electric companies, and you can go and fill coats or a truck for cheap or free. 

Avoid using the dyed black or red wood chips that come in bags from hardware or big box stores. These aren’t organic and are generally much more expensive.

Improving your garden starts with the soil. Using these methods and amendments, you can add fertility to your soil on any budget. They’re great for your garden, good for the environment, and generally pretty simple. How do you add fertility to your organic garden?

Garden Advice

Improving Heavy Clay Soils

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Gardeners rarely begin their journey with a plot of perfect soil, but it’s something we all dream about. In the Southeast, many gardeners have to work with heavy clay soils. While clay soil is rich in minerals and many nutrients, it’s prone to compaction, doesn’t drain well in wet weather, and doesn’t hold water well during droughts. Growing certain root crops like large carrot varieties can be especially tough.

Clay soils are a great foundation to improve on. Here are a few organic methods to improve your heavy clay soil. 

Practice No-Till (or minimal-till) Agriculture

It may sound counterintuitive, but tilling can make clay soils worse. Tilling increases soil compaction and kills beneficial fungi and micro-organisms. 

Cover Crops

Cover crops add nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Great choices for improving clay soils include buckwheat, clover, and wheat. Clover has the benefit of being a nitrogen-fixing legume, meaning that through a symbiotic relationship with bacteria, it captures nitrogen from the air and adds it to the soil.

You may also want to mix in large or deep-rooted cover crops like daikon radishes, lava beans, and alfalfa. These crops help break up compacted soil and create channels for air and water as their roots decompose.

Chop & Drop

You can also use a method commonly used by permaculturalists called “chop and drop.” This method involves growing crops like comfrey, pigeon peas, moringa, sun hemp, and sorghum. These crops are chopped and dropped on the soil to decompose. Comfrey is a popular choice for this in perennial gardens and fruit tree guilds.

Broadfork

Broadforking your soil is a great way to loosen soil without disturbing the layers or structure. It helps mitigate compaction and preserve beneficial organisms and fungi in the soil. 

Create Permanent Beds

Even just walking on your garden soil can cause severe compaction. Creating permanent beds that you don’t till, step on, or use machinery will help make light, fluffy soil. 

Use Terraces or Swales

If your property has heavy clay soil and a slope, you’ll probably deal with water issues. Planting in rows or terraces that are perpendicular to the slope of the land will help slow down the water in your garden and reduce erosion issues. Swales built on contours take this further and are a great way to catch large amounts of rainwater, allowing your plants to access it slowly, even on significant slopes. 

Spread Compost

Finished compost is the quickest way to beef up the organic matter in your soil. Adding a couple of inches of compost to each bed adds nutrients, improves water retention and drainage, and lightens the soil.

Use Mulch

Mulch helps block weeds, hold moisture, and keep soil temperatures cool. It also adds a lot of organic matter to your soil as it decomposes. Any organic mulch can help improve your clay soils, including straw, leaves, grass clippings, woodchips, and hay. Keep in mind that hay tends to have a lot of weed seeds.

Grow Varieties Adapted to Heavy Clay Soils

Improving clay soils isn’t something that happens overnight, especially in large gardens. If you’re planting in a garden with heavy clay soils this year, try some varieties that are adapted to these conditions.

  • Chantey Red Core Carrots
    This blocky, broad-shouldered variety with a blunt tip is well-suited to growing in clay. It was introduced from France in the 1800s.
  • Danvers 126 Carrots
    These carrots taper to a blunt point and are especially suited to growing in clay soil. The strong tops aid harvesting.
  • Everona Large Green Tomatillo
    These plants produce large, tasty tomatillos and thrive even in heavy clay soil and drought.  Seed collected by Barbara Rosholdt from tomatillos planted by Mexican workers at the Everona sheep dairy near Unionville, VA. Introduced in 2008 by SESE.
  • McCormack’s Blue Dent
    This beautiful dent corn makes delicious light blue flour and is especially suited to the eastern U.S., clay soils, and drought-prone areas. Introduced in 1994 by SESE. Bred by Dr. Jeff McCormack from a cross between Hickory King and an unnamed heirloom blue dent.
  • Oxheart Carrots
    A good carrot choice for shallow or heavy clay soils that most carrots don’t like. Dating to 1884, this variety produces thick, sweet “oxheart”-shaped carrots, 5-6 in. long and 3-4 in. wide, weighing up to a pound!
  • Pike Muskmelon
    Bred specially for growing in unirrigated clay soil, this vigorous melon has outstanding flavor and good disease-resistant. Introduced in 1935, Aaron Pike of Pike & Young Seeds; seedstock supplied to SESE by Aaron Pike’s niece.
  • Tennessee Red Valencia Peanuts
    This pre-1930 produces rich, sweet peanuts with red skins. It’s easy to grow without hilling, even in clay soils.
  • Texas Gourdseed Corn
    Originally brought to south Texas by German farmers who migrated from Appalachia during the late 19th century, this variety withstands drought and does well in clay soil. In south Texas, this is considered to be the best choice for tortilla flour.
  • Turga Parsnip
    This Hungarian heirloom produces short, stout roots that are good for heavy clay soils.
  • Southern Peas (Cowpeas)
    These productive peas are well-adapted to poor soils and drought. We carry 16 varieties at SESE.
Garden Advice

Wildlife Friendly Garden: Fall Clean-Up

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This fall, we’ve loved seeing an increased awareness about how pollinators and other beneficial insects are affected by garden clean-up. These creatures overwinter in organic debris such as plant stems, seed pods, and leaves. Overwintering songbirds also utilize this debris for habitat and food sources. 

So do we leave our garden as is in the fall for wildlife? No, we remove some material, leave some, and add some. These autumn chores are essential for the health and productivity of next year’s garden. Here’s what we recommend to keep your garden healthy and give wildlife a helping hand:

Clean up diseased plants.

In the fall, any diseased plant material should be removed from the garden and burnt, buried away from any garden beds, or composted in a well-managed compost pile that reaches at least 140°F. 

Nightshades or members of the Solanaceae family, including peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplants, are common candidates. These plants are affected by fungal diseases such as Alternaria (early blight), late blight, verticillium wilt, and fusarium wilt, which can overwinter in dead plant material.

You should also remove plants like cucumbers and squashes that have been affected by Downey Mildew.

Don’t leave soil bare over the winter. 

If your first frost is still several weeks away, you should be sowing cover crops like clover, Austrian winter peas, or winter rye in open beds. Cover crops prevent erosion, suppress weeds, add organic matter and nutrients to the soil, and provide habitat for beneficial insects, bacteria, and fungi.

However, depending on what zone you’re in, if you haven’t sown any fall cover crops at this point, you may want to use mulch instead. A thick layer of mulch can help provide a winter habitat for beneficial insects, bacteria, and fungi. It also suppresses weeds, slowly adds organic matter as it breaks down, and protects the soil from winter weather. We talked more in-depth about mulch in a previous post, but you can use straw, hay, old leaves, or wood chips.

Leave the leaves!

We’ve been taught that our yards and gardens should look tidy, but there’s nothing wrong with leaving autumn leaves right where they fall. They’ll break down and add organic matter and nutrients to your lawn and garden.

If you have places you want to remove leaves from, such as pathways to your home, there are a couple of great uses for them. You can add them to your compost pile; they’re a great source of carbon. You can also use leaves as an excellent free mulch to protect soil or perennial and overwintering plants like garlic, fruit trees and shrubs, strawberries, rhubarb, or tulips.

Don’t cut back seed-bearing flower heads.

Dead flower stalks are some of our favorite plants to leave standing. A few great choices include sunflowers, echinacea (coneflowers), bee balm (monarda), and rudbeckia (black-eyed Susans). The stems from many species are ideal places for native bees. You might also spot songbirds using them as winter perches and searching them for any leftover seed. They also add a bit of beauty to the winter landscape. Frost-covered seed heads are a lovely morning view. 

Plant more flowers.

Depending on your zone, you may still be able to sneak in a few flower seeds and bulbs. Many native flowers are excellent choices for fall sowing because their seeds are adapted to spending the winter in the soil in our climate. Check out our post, Spring Flowers: Fall Sowing, for a list of flowers that can be fall sown. 

Do cut back pest-infested material.

Another instance where we opt to remove and burn plant material is when it is infested with pests that may overwinter in the material. An excellent example of this is asparagus stalks that were infested with asparagus beetles. After they turn brown and die back in the fall, it’s a good idea to cut them about 2 inches above the soil and burn them. 

Other November odds and ends:

  • Drain the gas from rototillers and other equipment that will sit all winter.
  • Bring in terracotta pots that can crack during freeze and thaws.
  • Drain and store hoses and sprinklers. 
  • Clean and oil garden tools before storing them. This also helps fungal diseases from being transmitted to other garden beds.

As organic gardeners, we strive to work with nature. Following these simple ideas can limit time spent on clean-up, help build healthy soil, and increase the number of birds and beneficial insects in and around our gardens.