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Soil Erosion Problems and Solutions

Soil Amendments

What Does Soil Need to Stay Healthy?

The key to any beautiful yard or garden is healthy soil. Essential for providing nutrients and support, healthy soil can make or break your landscaping or gardening efforts. For some homeowners, the soil around the house isn’t ideal for growing the plants they want, which can make it almost impossible to create the yard of their dreams. Indoor or patio container gardens can struggle with the same issue. 

Luckily, there are several ways you can improve the health of your soil, whether in your yard or in a container garden. We’ve created this guide to provide information about what makes healthy soil and ways you can improve it. 

What Makes Healthy Soil

Gardeners have many opinions on what makes soil healthy. Often, soil health depends on the region, its soil type, and the plant life it supports. Some attributes of soil that are important to be aware of include:

  • Texture: Soil comes in many types, typically categorized as sand, silt, or clay. Many regions have soil that is a mix of these three types. Sand is the loosest, while clay is the most tightly packed.
  • Organic Matter: Organic matter can affect your soil in a number of ways, ranging from soil adhesion to absorption to food for the organisms that live below ground.
  • Air Retention: Ideally, soil should have about 25% air retention. This gets oxygen to the roots without allowing so much air that the plant rots.
  • Water Retention: Soil should also have about 25% water retention to allow for the formation of both large and small soil particles. This helps support plant movement and the presence of soil life.
  • Soil Life: Everything from mites to earthworms make their home in the soil, and their presence provides plants with much-needed nutrients. In addition, their movement in the ground keeps soil from getting too packed. 
  • pH Balance: pH level is one of the trickiest components to balance but is very important to your soil’s health. Some plants need more basic soil while others thrive on acidity. Being aware of and manipulating your soil’s pH balance can make a huge impact on the success of any garden or landscaping.

These factors all contribute to healthy soil. Knowing how to improve them can help plant life thrive. To tell what type of soil you have and whether you need to make any changes, fill one-third of a jar with water. Add soil, and shake the jar until everything is mixed. Leave it overnight; it should stratify into different levels as it settles, with the organic matter on top. Mark the different levels so you know your ratio of soil types. Make sure there’s organic matter on top. If not, you need to add some into your soil. 

Improving Potting Mix

Potting mix is a difficult substrate to get right. Container gardens are less flexible than yard gardens because they’re self-contained. One of the best ways to improve a potting mix is to add another substrate to enhance both the texture and the nutrients. Coir is a great organic soil additive to help your potted plants thrive. Thanks to its porous nature, coir keeps oxygen in the soil while still providing the needed nutrients. Because it’s so absorbent, it is also easy to re-wet. This helps your plants stay healthy if you’re dealing with dry conditions. 

To use coir as a potting mix, start with your favorite potting soil. Place a coir brick in a large container with plenty of water. It’s important to use a container that’s big enough: Coir expands significantly when soaking. After you’ve soaked the substrate fully, mix it in with your soil. We recommend a 40% coir to 60% soil mixture. It’s important to note that because coir is so absorbent, you have to be very careful about salt buildup. 

Another popular alternative is homemade compost. Start with a compost bin in your kitchen or outside and only add items that will compost properly. A good rule of thumb is to think of things that rot easily. Common composting items include eggshells, fruit and vegetable scraps, grass and plant clippings, coffee grounds, and shredded newspaper. 

Once these items begin to rot and mix together, simply combine them with a little soil and use the resulting compost as a nutrient-rich additive for your container garden. Add a few inches to the garden once a year, as the nutrients will seep into the soil over time.

Soil Amendment

You can improve the soil in your yard, as well. Start by determining your main soil makeup, based on the trick mentioned previously. Depending on what you find, you can figure out what additives to use to improve the overall health. It’s important to consider what sort of plants you want before you dive into soil amendment. For example, coir has a more balanced pH balance, making it good for plants such as ferns and asparagus. Peat moss is more acidic, which is perfect for acid-loving plants such as azaleas, blueberries, and camellias. 

Soil amendment also includes changing up the texture. Hard-packed clay is nearly impossible to grow many plants in, as they have a hard time pushing roots through the tight particles. Mixing in coir is a good choice in these situations, as the coconut fiber-based additive improves porosity and encourages healthy water flow. 

For sandy, loose soil, adding organic matter is key to getting a good consistency and texture. Whether you choose peat moss, coir, compost, or a store-bought blend, till it into the soil carefully and add more every year to ensure there are enough nutrients to support plant life. 

Having healthy soil can make all the difference in your garden, whether it’s in your yard or in a container. While it might take a little extra work, increasing the health of your soil will help benefit your gardening and landscaping projects in the long run. 

Soil Amendments and the Impacts of Soil Erosion

In theory, you could go into your backyard, dig up a section, and plant a tomato plant seedling. Over time, that tomato plant would grow more prominent, develop yellow blossoms, and those blossoms would become tomatoes that you can harvest. It doesn’t always work out. Your seedling may not do well because its root system cannot expand due to a soil that has a lot of clay in it. You may have blossom end rot because there is a lack of calcium in the ground. There are many different scenarios for why your garden isn’t able to grow vibrant plants.

When your soil doesn’t have everything that a plant needs to grow, you’ll need to make additions to the ground so that it will be ready. This scenario is where soil amendments come into play. Learn more about what soil amendments are and how you can make the most of them. 

What is Soil Amendment?

A soil amendment is something that you add to the dirt to make it more suitable for growing plants. Soil amendments can be used to address issues with aeration, nutrients, pH, and more. Each soil amendment has its own positives and negatives, so it’s often beneficial to determine what problem needs to be fixed before deciding on the proper amendment that you need to use. 

Soil Erosion and Amendments

Soil erosion can take away much-needed minerals, nutrients, and other characteristics that make up fertile soil. The wind and other agents of erosion remove dirt from your garden, and this removal of the topsoil can negatively impact the makeup of the land. If you believe that your garden may have been adversely affected by soil erosion, it is time to look into the use of amendments.

Testing Your Soil

After you’ve noticed that your soil isn’t performing as it should, it’s time to determine what is wrong. It can be very beneficial to test your soil to see what is missing or in overabundance. Some gardeners think that adding a lot of fertilizer amendments are always a good move, but too much can be just as big an issue as not enough in the soil. That’s often why it’s better to start out testing the dirt before making any changes with the amendments. 

There are testing kits that allow you to test your soil yourself to see what needs to be addressed, but you can also have it sent out to a lab to test. Once you’ve learned the cause behind your poor soil, you can choose what amendment you should use to fix it.  

How Much Soil Amendment Do I Need?

The question when it comes to how much soil amendment you need will depend on a few factors. The most important factor is what are you using the amendment to address. For instance, if you are looking to change the pH value of your soil because it’s too acidic, you’ll add lime. Too much lime and your soil’s pH can be just as problematic as soil that’s too acidic. Not enough lime and your soil’s pH won’t change enough. In some cases, it can be a delicate balancing act to get the right amount added. 

The instructions that come with the amendment can be essential in not going overboard with it. These instructions will typically tell you how much of the amendment you should add to a particular sized area. It will also tell you the specific way that you should apply it to get the most benefit from the amendment.   

What is the Best Soil Amendment?

There are a large variety of soil amendments that can work wonders on an underperforming garden. You can find topsoil, garden soil, coconut coir, compost, compost tea, fertilizers, peat moss, manure, mushroom compost, lime, gypsum, and more. 

The best soil amendments are the ones that will fix the issue that you’ve noticed. It can depend on the circumstances. For instance, container gardening does better with lighter soil compositions, so you may find that adding coconut coir to garden soil will give you the benefits from the coconut coir without weighing down the container.    

Organic Soil Amendments

Organic soil amendments are any amendments that you add to the soil that don’t contain any human-made chemicals in them. They are entirely natural, and for many, believed to be a safer option. Farms and gardens that are deemed organic can only use organic amendments. Some examples of organic amendments include manure, leaf mold, mulch, compost, and bat guano.   

Soil Amendments for Clay

Clay soil can be a real issue for gardeners. It often retains too much water, making proper drainage an issue, and can be too heavy for roots to grow into the soil thoroughly. This problem can usually be addressed by adding in an amendment to remove the negative impact that the clay can have on a garden.

Peat moss and coconut coir are two excellent amendments for dealing with soil that features a lot of dense clay. These amendments provide a couple of benefits. One is that they both help to add aeration to the dirt when mixed into the soil. It helps the earth have more air spaces for water to drain and roots to grow. It also can add mass to the land that allows it not to compact down easily. Another is that they help to retain moisture in the soil and slowly release it as needed for the plants growing. 

You’ll want to mix a decent amount of coconut coir or peat moss into the soil before planting your crops for the upcoming growing season. Continue adding the amendment until you get to the point where the clay is no longer an issue. You may also consider adding some additional topsoil in equal parts if you’re working in a large area with a lot of clay.

Your garden can only perform as well as the soil it is growing in. Sometimes, the plants need a helping hand to get them to where they could be with the perfect conditions. Gardeners that want the biggest blooms on their roses or a big crop of vegetables should look into adding soil amendments when needed. These additions to the soil can make a world of difference for how well a garden will grow.