Ideal garden soil

Chances are you won't find a ready-to-use ideal garden soil anywhere in your space. However, with the exception of very poor soils, all productivity can be raised to very high levels, especially on the smaller areas required by home gardens.

Large tracts of almost pure sand, and others so heavy and muddy as to lie uncultivated for centuries, have often been brought to bear enormous annual crops on a commercial basis in the course of only a few years.

So don't despair about your soil. 

garden soil

It is much more important that it be properly treated, and that a garden with average worn-out, or "never-grown" soil will yield much more to an energetic and careful gardener than the richest place growing under an average system of cultivation.

The ideal garden soil is a "rich, sandy loam". And it cannot be overemphasized that such soil is often formed, not found. Let's analyze that description a bit, because that's where we come to the first of the four most important elements of a garden meal. Others are cultivation, humidity and temperature.

In the gardening dictionary, "rich" means full of plant food; More than that, and this is an important point, it means a whole lot of plant food ready for use, all prepared and laid out on the garden table, or rather in it, where the things they grow can make use of it at once; Or what we call, in a word, "affordable" plant foods.

Virtually no soil in long-settled communities is naturally rich enough to produce large crops. They are enriched or kept rich in two ways; First, by cultivation, which helps to convert the raw plant food stored in the soil into available forms; and second, by fertilizing or adding plant food to the soil from external sources.

"Sandy" as used here means a soil containing enough grains of sand without the water being pasty and sticky after several days of rainfall; It is said to be so "light" that the fist would, under ordinary circumstances, easily fall apart when pressed in the hand. The soil does not have to be sandy in appearance, but it should be friable.

"Loam: rich, friable clay," says Webster. It barely includes it, but it describes it. A soil containing a proper proportion of sand and clay, so that neither contributes much to cultivation and prosperity, and is usually of a black color.

Such soil, even to the untrained eye, looks like things will grow naturally. It is remarkable how quickly the whole physical character of a well-cultivated piece of land will change. Last fall I observed an example in one of my fields, where a strip of one acre had been in onion for two years, and a small piece sticking out of the middle of it had only yielded it for one season.

The others did not receive any additional fertilizer or cultivation. When the fields were plowed in the rain, the three sections were clearly visible as if separated by a fence. and I know that next spring's rye crop, before it is plowed, will show the boundary lines so clearly.

Source: apk-choco.blogspot.com

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