Soil Management

Understanding soil and how best to manage it is key to a beautiful and productive garden and landscape. In this section, you’ll find information on soil management of home gardens. Topics covered include soil health, soil testing, nutritional requirements, irrigation, composting, fertilization, and pH. Find tips for container gardening and the nutritional needs of berries and fruits.

Garden Soil: Quality and Testing

When your soil is healthy, it provides plants with easy access to air, water, and nutrients. Proper soil conditions are essential throughout the life of your plants. Understanding your soil and how to manage it is vital.

The first step to creating optimum soil conditions is to gain an understanding of this valuable resource and how outside influences, such as road salt, can affect it.

Not all soils can produce plant growth in the same way, so you must determine the fertility of your soil, particularly its pH measurement. You could try to guess your soil’s quality, but the best way is to get your soil tested. Standard soil test kits are available from county offices of Penn State Extension, garden centers, or from commercial firms.

There are lots of things you can do to improve the quality of your soil. Cover crops can be used to improve soil and environmental conditions for other plants. If you’ve got a problem with soil erosion, cover crops can help when you plant them at the end of the harvest. You can use raised beds to provide a unique opportunity for soil health management. It’s also possible to give your plants the best start in life by making homemade potting media.

Garden Soil: Composting and Fertilization

Compost is something you can use to mix in with your garden soil or in potting mixes. You can purchase compost from your local garden center, but it’s much better to make your own. Composting is well-suited to agriculture, as farms produce large amounts of organic waste they can use to make it.

Home gardeners also have access to lots of materials that they can use for composting and vermicomposting. Fresh and dry leaves, plant cuttings, wood ash, sawdust, straw, and kitchen waste can be put to good use in a compost pile. If you’ve got poultry in your back yard, add their manure and soiled bedding to your compost pile or apply it as a soil amendment.

Different plants require certain nutrients so you have to consider this when you use the compost you’ve made. Over-fertilization of container-grown crops or commercial pot plants is a real risk. When you apply fertilizers, whether you’ve bought them or made them, it’s vital to check phosphorus and potassium levels.

You should also be testing and amending the soil regularly, depending on which crops you grow. For example, grapes prefer a soil pH of between 5.6 and 6.4. For stone fruits, you should try to maintain a pH of between 6.0 and 6.5. Apples, on the other hand, require nitrogen, and phosphorus, and potassium in relatively large amounts.