There are parts of the country, such as East Texas, where the soil is naturally fertile, and all you have to do is make sure that things are kept watered to get something to come up out of the ground. However, in other parts of the country, the soil is too porous, has been leached of nutrients, or has so much clay that the water can not move freely. However, there are some remedies that you can use to improve your soil.
If you have clay in your yard, you are wasting time unless you are planting the hardiest of plants. The water will not move, and your root systems will become stagnant, making your plants rot from within. This means that you need to change your soil in order to have any luck at all with gardening. It does not take a lot of time, and it means that you will have a lot more positive results from the time you spend in your garden.
If you do not know what kind of soil you have, dig up enough to fill a small pail and take it to your local home improvement store or nursery. Talk to a plant professional about your soil, and he will be able to tell you the type that you have and make recommendations about what you need to do to make that soil more hospitable for the sort of plants that you want to grow in your garden. Taking this step will help you ensure that you have much more luck in the long run with the things that you plant.
Your nursery professional will make specific recommendations about additives for your soil. You need to take these to heart, because these additives will add nutrients that your soil does not have. There is a reason why we make children drink milk — they need calcium for their bones. Plants can only drink water, which does not have nutrients that they need. We have to add those nutrients to the soil by amending it — so that your plants can grow and prosper.
Clay soil will not allow your plants to “breathe” beneath the ground. You’ll need to do a good deal of tilling and adding potting soil to work the clay open and make the ground more hospitable to your plants.
Depleted soil has simply had all of the nutrients leached out of it from overuse. This is why early farmers developed the practice of letting some of their land lie fallow each year, so that a year’s natural activity within the ecosystem could restore a lot of these nutrients, and the soil would work more effectively the next year. Some crops take more nutrients out of the ground than others, but if you feel that your soil has been depleted, when you take your sample into the nursery, you’ll want to ask what you need to do to boost the nutrient levels.
Soil can always be improved, which is a good thing. Use these tips to get started boosting your yard.