What is healthy soil? It is a combination of sand, silt, clay and about 5 per cent humus, the black stuff. Ideally, you should have 16 to 20 inches of soil in your garden in order to maximize your yield.
In order to get the 20 inches, start with double digging. This is a process of digging a trench two shovels deep, placing the top soil in the bottom of the trench and the bottom on the top, all the while mixing layers of compost as you fill the trench. This provides a loose mixture of soil that plant roots can easily penetrate. Plant roots need oxygen as well as water. Loose soil contains more oxygen.
The compost is partly humus, decomposed bodies and waste of the underground web of life, and food for the living members, the fungi, bacteria, viruses, worms, beetles, and other organisms. More humus is created as they eat, poop, and die.
Humus works with the plant roots, providing minerals and water. Plants need nutrients, water, and air. A soil with lots of compost holds moisture, has pores of oxygen, and generally has all the nutrients needed for healthy plant growth. Without these three components, plants may become stressed and unhealthy. Healthy soil produces tasty, healthy vegetables that are good for your health.
Humus helps to make minerals in the soil more available to the plants. The surfaces of humus particles carry an electrical negative charge. Most of the plant nutrients in the soil, such as calcium, sodium, magnesium, potassium, and other trace minerals have a positive charge, and are therefore attracted to the humus particles. Plant roots are surrounded by hydrogen ions, a result of the root’s respiration. The roots exchange some of the positively charged hydrogen ions for the positively charged nutrient ions stuck on the humus, and get the nutrients needed to incorporate the minerals and produce the vitamins characteristic of the specific vegetable. Phosphorous, sulphur, and nitrogen are not positively charged, and are absorbed by the plants in other ways.
Humus also improves soil structure, creating a crumbly and loose structure that lets water and air through. If you only use commercial fertilizer, the soil eventually becomes compacted, the underground web of life is slowly killed off, and many of the trace elements needed for optimum plant growth become depleted. As a result, your produce will be smaller and of an inferior quality.
You can maintain your healthy soil in a number of ways. First, use raised beds. This eliminates the need to walk on your garden; you only walk in the path between the raised beds. Practice no-till gardening; do not spade or rototill your garden. Only when the soil seems to have naturally compacted, use a “broad fork” to loosen up the soil. The broad fork has four prongs that you insert into the soil, and twist to loosen the soil, with minimum damage to the underground web of life.
Finally, maintain the health of your soil by adding compost yearly, which contains many of the trace elements previously used up by the plants. Also, rotate your crops so that the specific trace elements needed by specific vegetables are not depleted by the same crop, year after year.
Healthy soil containing lots of compost holds more water than soil without compost; therefore less water is needed as they grow. And, healthy plants need less water in order to bring up the necessary nutrients they need to grow. Healthy plants are also less likely to be harmed by garden pests.
Another way to have healthy soil is to avoid systemic pesticides, pesticides that kill beneficial insects and the underground web of life. Only use organic pesticides sparingly on a specific pest if you can’t remove it by hand. And keep in mind that a plant can lose up to 40% of its foliage without affecting its produce. Think of pruning tomato plants; you trim leaves in order to increase their production.
This is how to grow healthy vegetables.
