Cullen: Proper soil preparation equals success in the garden!
As the soil warms up and the early spears of your perennial hosta begin to jab their way out of the soil, there is an overwhelming temptation to grab a shovel and start digging holes in the garden. This is a type of spring fever that the psychologists do not talk about.
Truth is, every gardener gets these early spring urges and I would be the first to encourage you to satisfy them. But keep one thing in mind: The success that you enjoy in your garden will be the result of one thing above all others — proper soil preparation.
It is May and it is no coincidence that this is Compost Week across Canada. The Compost Council of Canada is right in there. The executive director, Susan Antler, is right up to her elbows in it. In fact, you can help celebrate the 15th anniversary of Compost Week by attending a Compost Garden Party at the Mustard Seed Community Garden, 791 Queen St. East, Toronto. This event takes place on Sunday, May 2 at 1:30 p.m. and everyone is welcome. Visit www.compost.org for more details.
Why not just plant in the soil that you have?
I don’t mean to rain on your digging parade, but let me ask you this: would you build a house without first putting in a solid foundation? A great garden is made only when there is a solid foundation at its roots, pure and simple.
What is not so simple is how you create a growing environment at the root zone of your garden that will induce the good plant health that your gardening dreams were made of.
Step 1: Know Your Soil
Go ahead and dig your hole. Use a sharp spade or shovel and the job is infinitely easier than if you use a dull one. I use a bastard file from the hardware store to do this job and I sharpen my digging tools every time I use them. It takes about one minute and makes digging a joy.
As you dig, observe: Do you have clay? Sand? Old, tired soil? Does your shovel move through the soil easily, or does it take all of your weight and some wiggling to get the blade to slice down through the soil? If you have not added lots of organic matter over recent years, chances are you will discover heavy, clay-based soil that is not conducive to good growing.
Clay: If you have been blessed with heavy clay, welcome to the club. Most soil in southern Ontario was dumped here by the glaciers when they receded. They left behind a limestone-based soil that is, for the most part, alkaline and heavy.
You have a choice: either dig your new garden out to a level about 30 centimetres (12 inches) deep or amend the existing soil with lots of sharp sand (sometimes called play sand for sandboxes) and organic matter in the form of compost. A mix of about 1/3 sand to 2/3 compost is a good start. I spread the triple mix five-centimetres (two-inches) deep each spring and let the earth worms pull it down. You may choose to turn the triple mix over with a garden fork or spade.
If you have to use a pick axe to dig your garden, get rid of the stuff as there is very little that you can do to revive its quality. This requires the use of a large metal dump bin to dispose of the clay material.
If you can dig your existing soil with a sharp shovel or spade and not put your back out doing it, you can add the good stuff (sand/compost) to it to bring it up to standard.
Sand: Few readers will have this problem — but it is a difficult one. If you live in, say, Ballantrae, Wasaga or the lower Beach of Toronto, chances are good that you live on what was once the shore of an ancient lake and your soil is substantially sand. I recommend that you add generous quantities of compost (no sand, obviously) and by that I mean at least five-centimetres (two-inches) deep of the stuff. Just like preparing clay-based soil for planting, you will dig it in or wait for the worms to pull it under.
Above all, when planting in sand, choose plant material that is tolerant of drought conditions. Study “xeriscaping,” the art of gardening in the absence of water. Professional advice is useful under these circumstances. An experienced garden designer can help you immensely in choosing the right plants for this environment.
I might add that growing a lawn on sandy soil can be a great frustration. For more answers go to www.markcullen.com.
Compost: I have been a great fan of backyard composting for over 25 years. When our firstborn came into this world, I thought that it would be a good idea to start taking care of the environment in my own backyard. It seemed the right thing to do for the little kid that was crawling across the grass.
What is compost?
The raw material that you have left over after meal preparation (but not meat) can be very useful in your composter. So can much of the waste that you produce in your yard (but not woody sticks or evergreen boughs).
Take the leftover salad, carrot tops, potato peels, fallen leaves, grass clippings, spent tulip and daffodil leaves and put them into a compost bin or compost tumbler and away you go. Mother Nature has a wonderful way of breaking all of this stuff down while you simply wait — or more to the point — while you divert your attention away from the composter to the barbecue or planting your vegetable garden. In several weeks, or two to three months of warm weather, you will be surprised at how much progress your compost has made.
Step 2: The Benefit
The second rule of successful gardening (after proper soil prep) is “Feed the soil.” Every organic gardener lives and breathes these words. Thanks to the Ontario government, we are all organic gardeners of a sort as the majority of garden chemicals are now off the retail shelves.
When you add finished compost to the surface of your soil, you are adding the equivalent of a high octane fuel. You are providing a charge of organic matter that will attract earth worms, protozoa, beneficial bacteria, microbes and much more. All of these things add up to a sophisticated living colony that we are not meant to completely understand — and we don’t! But what we do know is that the addition of this fuel for your soil will help you to produce a nice friable soil that is . . . wait for it . . . chocolate cake.
Your goal is to produce soil that is the consistency of chocolate cake — light, easy to cut through, full of air pockets for oxygen and a joy to work with. Remember to add lots of sharp sand for porosity.
Get this right and your plants will explode out of the soil this spring. They will flower and fruit with joy and exuberance.
Get it wrong and the experience of gardening is not a lot of fun. You will be thinking of all the reasons why you should give golf one more try or saving up to buy a sail boat.
Finally — and there is no “finally” on this subject as your feeding of the soil goes on for as long as you have an interest in succeeding in your garden. Remember that there is no such thing as a failure in the garden, only composting opportunities.
No comments:
Post a Comment