How To Amend Your Soil and AVOID These BIG MISTAKES

what's going on everyone I'm just here cleaning up my garden getting ready for spring and in today's episode we're going to talk all about amending your soil we're going to talk about some steps that you can take to get your soil to what you want it to be but also we're going to talk about some mistakes that I see a lot of gardeners making as well as some different soil amendments that are available to you and what they can do for your soil with that let's get going so when it comes to mending your soil there are three different ways to amend your soil amending your soil basically means fixing and so if you're targeting a certain texture targeting a certain pH or targeting a certain level of fertility those are all going to be things you're going to be fixing within your soil essentially what we can do is we can break it down by those three categories we can look at those three categories and there are many different products available as well as things we can do to get to that Target you might want to amend your soil for a whole variety of reasons if you're growing something like blueberries you're going to want to amend your soil to have a very acidic pH and so in that case you're going to be amending the pH of your soil but you might not want to touch the different other parts like you might not want to adjust the fertility and you might not need to adjust the texture just tweak the pH a little bit you might also want to adjust the overall fertility of your soil if you're growing something like spinach lettuce or kale your leafy greens which take a ton of nitrogen you may want to make sure that you have enough nitrogen to account for that growth when other crops may not need need it as much and so in those cases you're going to be adjusting the fertility So based on the crops that you're growing or the conditions that you have and what you're looking for it's really important that you understand that because if you just let your garden be you're going to do pretty good in most cases a well- amended Garden for just overall texture and overall fertility it's going to do pretty good but if you want great that's where you have to start targeting different things and knowing how to adjust your soil to meet what you're growing so when it comes to amending your pH that's what we're going to talk about first this bed right here we're going to be growing some brasas in so it needs a little bit of lime now lime is going to make your soil slightly more alkaline this soil right here has a pH of around six how I got that was through a really simple soil test all I did was I simply took a little scoop of soil from about four different spots of the garden I mixed it up in a jar of water and I went over to my pool supply store and I picked up some pH test strips those lipus test strips I just dunked it in the water after I it settled and I was able to tell that my soil was still slightly acidic from last year so to fix that because we're going to be growing our cabbages and broccoli in here and they prefer a slightly alkaline soil what we're going to be doing is we're going to be adding dolomitic lime now you could amend with something like dolomitic lime you could also mend with something like wood ash wood ash lime they're all slightly alkaline now let's say I was growing something like potatoes here and I had a pH of six I could grow potatoes in a pH of six but knowing the pH that potatoes like they like a slightly lower pH a slightly more acidic soil of around 5 to 5.5 and because of that if you just throw them in a pH of six they're not going to only be able to not uptake all the nutrients but also you run a higher chance of them forming what's called scab and that's basically a disease that affects your potatoes so if I was growing potatoes here I would want to use something like sulfur now the thing about amending your soil is that you don't want to amend it too much we can't just dump on things like lime we can't just dump on things like uh rock dust or uh like uh wood ash because if we dump those things on we could over amend we could make the soil far too alkaline and that becomes a problem as well and so always follow the directions on your bag for a bed like this I have just found that if my soil is right around 6 .0 and I want to get closer to a 7 to a 7.5 for growing my brasas I'm going to apply about two cups about every 10 square ft or so and that gets me to that sweet spot typically what's really nice is you have a window that window you know I'm not going to go higher than 7.5 so I'm not going to need more than that and in most cases a 6.5 to a 7.5 it's such a small window that moving the pH one point doesn't take all that much and so it's not like it's going to be a massive jump and if you were to apply less it's not like it's going to be the end of the world it will change the pH it will alter the pH which will be a benefit and some benefit is better than not not amending at all so that is this bed right here we got this bed ready to go for some brasas which I'm super pumped about and uh so now we're going to talk about the next type of amending which is amending for fertility so now we're going to talk about fertility this is probably the most common form of amending you're going to be doing and when it comes to fertility it's really based on the type of crops you're growing so if I was using this bed as an example I know that brasas use a lot of nitrogen and generally if I've let this bed go from the previous season I haven't done a ton of amending to it it more than likely could use a little bit of nitrogen nitrogen usually is lost through the soil first because a lot of your water soluble nitrogen will leave the soil through a process called leeching that's just where rain and snow melt they take with it the nitrogen and they carry it out of the soil so if we're going to be amending just for just nitrogen you could use something like elf Alpha pellets that works out really great and ultimately you're going to cover your soil with that and they're going to break down elf Alpha pellets have been fermented and compressed into a pellet so there's very little weed seeds there's a ton of nitrogen and that's basically all there is now you can also use something like blood meal blood meal is going to give you the nitrogen but not as much things like phosphorus or potass potassium so it's really focusing on the nitrogen now you could also use something like an all-purpose fertilizer like Trifecta right now I'd only use something like an all-purpose fertilizer when I'm ready to plant and that's because this is very concentrated and you're going to lose a lot of that benefit through the next month or two before you're actually getting plants in the ground so I would hold off on a mending with a very heavy fertilizer but if you're just doing a gentle amending for for fertility something like these Al Alpha pellets can be awesome you can also apply something like worm castings which is very gentle so 1 0 0 that means it's got 1% available nitrogen 0% phosphorus and 0% potassium and so it's going to be very very gentle but it will do some amending which is going to overall fix the soil make it slightly more high in nitrogen which is going to be great for growing our brasas now the next form of fertility is going to be trace minerals now trace minerals are really important to your garden if you're not amending your trace minerals over time your plants are going to suck and the crazy thing is they're not going to suffer in a way that they would if they were missing something like nitrogen which is the leaves turn very yellow or phosphorus where the leaves might turn more red or potassium where the leaves might kind of brown around the edges and get kind of burnt looking they're going to look a whole lot worse because micronutrient deficiencies are not something you could really identify very quickly and it's generally something that's more chronic it's something that really just kind of plagues the plant the whole life and they always kind of leg behind and so trace minerals are found in every bit of soil that we work with the unfortunate reality though is that most modern soils are depleted of a lot of trace minerals because we've only focused on the main three macronutrients nitrogen phosphorus potassium and the problem with doing that is because there's such an emphasis on those three main nutrients often times your trace minerals get neglected you see if you have something like a tree that has deep roots that go deep down into the soil it's able to tap into those trace minerals and bring them back up in the form of you know leaves and then the leaves drop to the ground and those trace minerals are then brought back to the surface of the soil but if you're in a standard American track home and all you have is grass around you could be using compost you could be using your own compost from your own compost pile and it's still going to be depleted in a lot of those trace minerals because those trace minerals are just not as abundant on the surface as they are had you had something like leaves you know or if you're to use kelp right or you can use something like this azomite azomite is a ground glacial Rock Dust it's ancient rock that contains over 70 different trace minerals I absolutely love using azomite it's not something that you know you need to use but it's very convenient if you want an allinone azomite is what I choose to use and it couldn't be simpler the finer you go the faster it's going to be acting because it takes some time time for it to weather and degrade and be taken up by beneficial bacteria and fungi I'll tell you what I love this pelletized simply because it's low dust it's very safe to use you're not having to wear a dust mask if you use this pelletized every single year and you use a little bit I only use about 2 lbs per 50 square ft it builds up in the soil because one thing that someone will tell you that I don't really prefer is that you need to use it all the time every time the thing is if you're using it on a regular basis and you're using a small amount of it it doesn't all go away right away trace minerals they can stay in your soil far longer than other than other minerals like your nitrogen phosphorus potassium so because those ones leave your soil much faster people say you know use a ton of it right use a ton of it those are generally the people that either are trying to sell you on it or don't know what they're talking about I find that generally it takes about 2 years for a pelletized azomite to fully break down and become plant available and so you have many seasons where that's going to be breaking down so if you make it a part of your seasonal routine in the spring and the fall to apply a little bit a little bit goes a long way and it builds up in your soil and then over time your plants are going to benefit from it so if you remember not too long ago we planted in this bed some root crops and some other early spring crops like lettuce and spinach in the parts of the bed where we're planting our root crops like carrots and radishes we want to be really careful not to over apply nutrients a lot of times people make a mistake of applying fertilizer to their whole bed or they put a lot of nitrogen down and then they wonder why their radishes form beautiful tops but very small roots or they're very forked and wiry that's because of too much nutrients and it's really important that you understand like I said what you're planting and the needs of that plant because in the case of a lot of root crops too much nitrogen can actually be a bad thing so what we did was we amended the soil generally with a lot of uh a lot of compost compost is just a very gentle fertilizer it's got a lot of food a lot of nutrients a lot of trace minerals as well from all those leaves that have bro been broken down but it's not really crazy high in anything and so we did use a little bit of Trifecta over the parts of the bed that had like our leafy greens but we left out that fertilizer in the parts that had the root crops because we don't want to overstimulate that growth and end up with small root development we want to focus more on uh those the really beautiful Roots like in carrots and radishes now the final thing we're going to talk about is a mending for texture and this is really simple if your soil is very heavy clay you're going to want to loosen that because heavy soil holds on to too much water it suffocates root development and it ends up being really bad now if you're trying to amend to make your soil drain really well and you're growing something like carrots and you want nice Deep Roots you may want to consider adding a little bit of sand or adding a little bit of perite right you can absolutely do that now generally what I always recommend for a bed in our case here where we're going to be putting our brasas this bed tends to be a little bit compacted because we haven't fully amended this soil yet for its texture and so what I would recommend is just some compost we make our own compost we'll take you over there in a second but this soil here this soil here is really really nice it's very nice the only thing that it's lacking is organic material and that organic material can have a tendency to leave your soil over time as it weathers and breaks down and it ends up kind of turning into into stuff that can get a little bit even though the color looks great it can get a little bit compacted and that's not great for root development so let's take a trip over to our compost pile we'll finish up now this is our own compost we made this from things like yard waste grass clippings leaf mulch food scraps from the kitchen it has all been broken down and this stuff looks absolutely incredible the sheer amount of worms in here is mindblowing now this was really hot as of about 6 months ago and all of that heat has since left and now the worms are just kind of doing the finish up and what this will do for your soil's texture is it will add moisture holding capabilities nutrient holding capabilities it will also add some nutrients it's a really gentle fertilizer which your plants will love but it also will help to break up your soil and keep it from compacting and I can tell you what our soil is going to be amazing once we add this into our garden but I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you all learned something new if you have any any questions post them down in the comments box down below again I know this is kind of a surface level um soil amending video but I can safely say that this is where a lot of gardeners make mistakes and if you know how to mend your soil properly you know the right things to do and what to add you can really take your garden from a pretty good Garden to an absolutely amazing Garden so I hope you guys enjoyed if you did make sure hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already and as always we'll catch you all on the next episode grow bigger bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 35,584

Keywords: vegetable gardening, organic gardening, garden, gardening, growing food, vegetables, vegetable garden, tomatoes, how to grow, simple, sustainable, urban gardening, raised bed, permaculture

Id: uPMHKE1RNC4

Length: 13min 56sec (836 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 03 2024