When asked how to grow good vegetables, many gardeners and farmers will say “it starts with good soil.” Soil is the foundation of your garden, it’s what feeds & aerates your plants. Good soil is not just dirt, it is is a microcosm filled with microorganisms (hundreds of millions per gram!) that transform organic matter into food your plants can digest. Only with good soil will your plants thrive.
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Amending Your Soil With Nutrients
Make Your Own Compost
By composting you are recreating nature’s processes of recycling and renewing. We’ll go into more detail about composting at a later time, but I want to mention this: if you are afraid of composting or “don’t have time” to compost, just create a pile in the backyard. Make sure it’s somewhat layered, so it’s not a big chunk of grass clippings. ………..
Bring In Compost and/or Manure
If you’re just starting your garden, your garden is rather large, or you just haven’t got around to composting, you may have to bring in compost. We bring in a compost and aged manure mix, to get a more or less good mixture of nitrogen and carbon. Make sure to use aged manure – it is high in nitrogen, so it will burn your plants if it is new.
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Other Deficiencies
If your plants are not looking happy (yellow leaves, stunted growth, purple veins, or sickly in general) and you know it isn’t due to water, sun, nor compost, you may have a deficiency in other areas. You can send a soil sample to a lab to find out exactly what is wrong, or you can talk with your neighbors and local master gardeners to see if there are particular known deficiencies in your area.
Calcium and magnesium: Unfortunately, in the Pacific Northwest we’re particularly vulnerable to these deficiencies for a number of reasons. …………
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Amending Your Soil With Worms and Microbes
Most healthy soil should have loads of beneficial microbes, worms, bacteria, beetles, mites, and fungi. Together these things break down organic matter and turn it into plant nutrients, aerate the soil, fend off diseases, and often work with the plants in a symbiotic feeding and fending-off relationship.
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Using Inoculant
Inoculant is rhizobium, a type of soil bacteria. Legumes (beans, peas, etc) and rhizobium bacteria live in a symbiotic relationship which allows legumes to fix nitrogen (ie, add nitrogen back into the soil – a great thing for gardeners!). Because each legume needs a different kind of inoculant, most soils don’t have the particular rhizobium necessary to make your beans thrive. So you have to buy it – it’s available at most good seed shops. Make sure to get the right inoculant for whatever you’re planting.
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Article source: One Green Generation
Image source: The Herbangardener