Gardening In Terrible Soil and How to Fix It

I love gardening! It’s something so straight forward and healthy. Growing your own produce allows you to know what exactly goes into the food that you eat. Not to mention the hours of lifting, bending, stretching… I feel like I’ve been on every machine in a gym after a morning gardening.

If you are new to gardening start by checking out our 7 Tips to Start a Garden Post.

Soil Types

One thing I’ve learned to be able to get the best and healthiest plants is to know what kind of soil you have. A simple soil testing kit can help determine what’s going on in your dirt. You can pick up one of these kits at your local garden supply store or online here. You don’t need anything expensive or super sophisticated just something that offers a broad range of soil tests. These kits I have tests PH, as well as the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash levels.

All of these are good things to know the level of so as to be able to feed your plants in the correct way and give them exactly what they need.

Buy a soil testing kit and follow the instructions on the package to administer the tests correctly. Grab some soil from different areas of your yard or garden so you have a good base of samples to test.

Depending on the specific test you choose your results will be different from the ones that I did. After a couple of minutes your sample should change colors to indicate what your levels are. But follow the instructions carefully. One of the ones I did said not to agitate it and I did and it exploded! The lid flew off and soil went everywhere! Who knew that there was so much force in such a tiny bottle?!

Amendment & Fertilizing

Once you know what type your soil is read our post on soil amending and fertilizing to help boost your plants productivity. The soil in Utah is severely alkaline and nutrient deficient as well as being clay based. We are working with less than ideal circumstances for gardening most plants but luckily for us there are some plants that don’t need much in the way of nutrients and water, Lavender for example.

But those difficulties aside we are able to do well with our plants if we understand what we need to add to our soil to help the plant get exactly what it needs. Do you have perfect soil? Or do you have to find ways to add to its nutrients? Let us know what things you’ve found that help boost your garden.Happy Gardening! Do the things you love with the people you love!

How to Amend Your Soil

There are a few amazing things that we use to amend our alkaline and dense soil. The first thing that I add is Peat Moss. It adds lightness and nutrients. Another additive we use is Organic Gypsum which lightens clay soils. In the past we have added great big loads of sand, paper, and leaves to our soil in the Fall and tilled it in in the Spring be we do not add bunches of sand every year. We do add Bio-Tone Plant Starter every year as well as a good all round fertilizer one with lots of Nitrogen.

Hopefully this helps you when starting your garden in difficult soils. I’ve owned gardens from Coast to Coast and some in between and I have to say that Southern Utah has the most difficult soil I’ve encountered. Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona have similar soils to that of Southern Utah so I don’t envy what you’re working with. Luckily there are amazing products to help even the worst soil problems.

What are your soil challenges? What amendments do you use?