Take care of your Soil and It will take care of You.

My grandmother often told me that if you take care of your soil, it will take care of you and your plants. I grew up in rural central Oklahoma. The summers are hot, dry, and humid. The soil is hard-packed clay. The storms are violent there and the winters are icy. With all that adversity, between my grandmother and great-grandmother (her mother lived at the other end of the acreage), we had acres of beautiful trees and gorgeous flowers. Now, her techniques were sometimes unorthodox and could be single-minded at times but gave wonderful and gorgeous results.

On many hot summer days my grandmother and great-grandmother would walk me through their flower beds and teach me about all the plants, even the weeds, insects, and the soil that would support those plants. Both never threw away weeds. They would carefully, and tediously, clip off seed heads and put them in a trash bag. Then the bodies of the weeds would be worked into the soil, or if there was enough of it, would be piled into thick layers of mulch. Cuttings and prunings of plants would get cut into smaller pieces and they would also be worked into the soil or applied as mulch, as long as they weren’t diseased. Amusingly, when I lived in Kansas City, MO I would do similar things with my garden and flower beds, much to the horror of my girlfriend at the time who would come over to my house to visit. I would tell her that it would help with soil health. Research, especially in the last decade, has begun to support what my grandmother taught me.

What is soil health? (1) It can be defined as how well it regulates water from precipitation and run off, how well it supports animal and plant life, how well it filters and breaks down pollutants, nutrient cycling, and the stability and structure of the soil. Precipitation can be rain, snow, and even the irrigation used in lawns and gardens and poor water retention can lead to increased flooding. The microbes and minerals in the soil can slow, stop, and break down some pollutants. Nutrient cycling is the process where carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other nutrients are stored and used in the soil. A great historic example of what happens when we lose soil stability is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Okay, soil health is important. How do we go about taking care of it and improving it? The first step is using a soil test kit. Here in Norfolk, you can pick them up at some of the libraries, your local Master Gardeners, and your local Virginia Cooperative Extension. A routine soil test will tell you the plant-available nutrients. Those nutrients include P, K, Ca, Mg, Zn, Mn, Cu, Fe, B, plus soil pH and estimated CEC. (2) These are all very important and depending on what you intend to grow you’ll need to balance these in different ways. There are also tests for soluble salts and organic matter, which are both important to our soil’s health.

Now you’ll get your results from your soil test, and they will give you recommendations on how to improve it. One addition that helps a lot of soils is increasing organic matter.(3) Working in more organic matter can help with crusting and dispersion problems, it can improve water retention, erosion, and can aid in improving soil biology. But how do we get that increased organic matter into our soils? Grass cippings and leaves are a great free amendment to our soils. I collect bags of leaves in the fall that my neighbors put out on the curbsides. Now there is a risk of potential chemicals on these leaves so be mindful of your neighbors. I thankfully live in a neighborhood that uses very few herbicides and pesticides. Your own grass clippings from your yard make wonderful soil amendments as well. Other items include straw, pine straw, pine fines, wood chips, composted manure, compost, mushroom compost, and even used coffee grounds can be worked into soil as a way to increase your organic matter.(4,5)

Cover cropping is a great way to protect and even improve our precious soil. Planting cover crops can even be done in small backyard garden plots as well. Cover crops help manage the soil by preventing erosion, increasing soil diversity, and when we cut them down, act as a green mulch to enrich our soils. This practice also reduces pests and disease outbreaks. Cover crops include grasses, forbes, and legumes. Some examples of these include annual ryes, oats, radishes, turnips, amaranth, and legumes like hairy vetch, clovers, peas, and so many other options. (6,7,8)

Planting more diversity also helps improve our soil quality. It’s pretty obvious that planting monocultures leads to disease outbreaks. Planting the same crop in the same plot every year also increases the chances of pests and diseases in our gardens, but these monocultures and planting of the same crop affect our soil quality as well. Planting the same thing year after year depletes the soil of certain nutrients. They also only exude from their roots one set of carbon-rich compounds. Soil microbes consume those carbon compounds. Research shows that the more plant diversity in an area, the more diverse compounds put into the soil, thus giving us a greater diversity to our soil microbes that help our plants.(9) Soil microbes and other organisms living in soil are often overlooked in the roles that they take on to care for our plants. But there are so many things in our soil we need to examine that helps us build our soil health.

Insects and worms help to shred up and even break down some of the organic matter. This allows the soil microbes and fungi to break it down further and release nutrients in a way that plants can use them. Beneficial nematodes also come in and eat decaying plant matter and harmful things to our plants, adding more nutrients to our soil. Insects and worms digging and burrowing in the soil allows for air to move through it as well. All these organisms help our soil stay healthy, which then helps our plants. We can attract all these things by giving them the organic matter they need and by not using pesticides which will also harm them.(10) More research has shown that fungi also plays a huge role in soil and plant health.

It is estimated that 90% of plants form beneficial relationships with fungi.(11) It’s been shown that fungi act as transport systems to deliver nutrients to the plant's roots. In exchange for these “gifts,” the plants give the fungi much-needed carbohydrates.(12) The soil fungi have mycorrhizal filaments. These filaments also produce organic compounds that help hold soil together and help the soil to be more porous.(13) These fungi can also help suppress harmful soil pathogens, and help plants endure stressors like drought. These fungi also help our trees and shrubs.(14)

All these organisms in our soil must be fed. They can be fed by incorporating organic matter into the soil and protecting the soil from soil erosion. They also need to be protected from chemicals. Using pesticides harms these beneficial elements of our soil. We should be mindful of all these things as we venture out into our yards, gardens, and communities to manage our plots and plants. We should always remember: if you take care of your soil, it will take care of you.

References

1 Soil Health | Natural Resources Conservation Service (usda.gov)

2 Virginia Tech Soil Testing Lab | Virginia Tech Soil Testing Lab | Virginia Tech (vt.edu)
3 Step 3 – How can I improve soil health? | VRO | Agriculture Victoria
4 Organic Matter and Soil Amendments | University of Maryland Extension (umd.edu)
5 Used appropriately, coffee grounds improve soil and kill slugs | OSU Extension Service
(oregonstate.edu)
6 Cover Crops and Crop Rotation | USDA
7 Cover Crops Benefit Both Commercial Farmers and Urban Gardeners | Farmers.gov
8 Cover Crops | Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education Program (ucdavis.edu)
9 Soil Health - Solution Center for Nutrient Management (ucanr.edu)
10 Living soil, healthy garden | UMN Extension
11 june-21-beneficial-fungi.pdf (okstate.edu)
12 june-21-beneficial-fungi.pdf (okstate.edu)
13 Mushrooms can mean healthy soil | OSU Extension Service (oregonstate.edu)
14 Beneficial Fungi and Tree Health | UNL Water