Soil Methods

So our topic of this week is once again about soil. This time though, we decided to take time to do actual research on what "healthy" soil should contain as a record for the future.

Hopefully it is not this complicated...

So in order to prepare healthy soil, one must know what healthy soil is. Plants apparently thrive in soil that have a pH of between 6.5-6.8 and also have specific nutrients (the most important being nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and the others being calcium, magnesium and sulfur with boron, copper, iron manganese, zinc, and cobalt also having a role in plant health).

Good gardening soil also allows the plants to "breathe" by being porous as well as provides proper drainage. Three main components of soil that influence these traits is sand, silt, and clay where healthy soil is a mix of the three (too much sand means rapid drainage, too much air, and poor nutrition: too much silt means slow drainage, too little air, but better nutrition: too much clay means slow drainage, too little air, and poor nutrition).

From what I could tell from stuff online, the best method for maintaining the previous qualities of soil is to use a large amount of organic compost (refer to previous post) since it will introduce a plethora of nutrients that normal fertilizers or whatnot won't think to add. Other options of introducing nutrients include using mulch to cover the soil as well as cover plants. Cover plants are planted in the fall at the end of the harvesting season or even in the summer after the summer plants finish producing and they protect against weeds and provide structure in the form of roots to maintain soil. Then, when new plants are ready to be planted, the soil is turned over with the cover plants in it and it decomposes to organic matter to further enrich the soil. Typical cover plants include alfalfa, and rye (the most common), legumes such as cowpeas, soybeans, annual sweetclover or velvet beans (can be grown in the summer), clovers, vetches, medics, and field peas (can be grown in the winter) and non-legumes such as sorghum-sudangrass, millet, forage sorghum, or buckwheat (provide biomass and smother weeds). Legumes are important for nitrogen fixation and turn over the soil before the plants start producing seeds or else they're become invasive (like weeds).