Soil - The Perfect Foundation

 In this episode, I share importance of soil in gardening and the components that make up healthy soil. I also share a "magic recipe" for creating the perfect soil mixture for raised bed gardens and containers. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Plants Grow Us Podcast. 

I'm your host and gardener, Sherry Arlene. This is where I share my gardening experiences to educate, empower and inspire beginner gardeners to plant, nurture, and harvest in kitchen gardens, those beautiful spaces created outside, front and center of our yards where we grow fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers to share the joy with family, friends, and community.

Along our journey, we discover and celebrate the ways gardening gracefully sows, and grows tiny gems in those spaces inside our heart, mind, body, and soul. I invite [00:01:00] you to unearth and nurture the places in your life that can only be fulfilled by gardening. If you are ready for a beautiful harvest, come grow with us.

In episode 2 We talked about the seed in all its glory, power, and potential. 

In this episode, we're going to talk about soil. Soil is the foundation or let's say the infrastructure for the potential of the seed to actually come to fruition. So, the soil is the home of, or the catalyst for our healthy, beautiful, bountiful plants.

Now, as we move forward, let's think about it this way. Soil is food and [00:02:00] home for our plants. It is also food for our soul. And as we talk today, you may hear me use the term dirt, but dirt is not dirty.  Healthy soil, or dirt, is a gardener's gold mine, and I promise you, as you garden more and more, you will eventually get your hands dirty, and the soothing effect will seep into your soul.

Let's make a distinction here between the relationship of seeds and soil in nature and the relationship that we as raised bed or container gardeners are attempting to replicate or duplicate inside our raised beds. Now in nature, the seeds find their own ideal growing space and either [00:03:00] it's ideal or it's not.

The soil and other conditions have been created for centuries. However, in raised beds, we prepare a defined or confined space, and it is our responsibility and our obligation to our seeds and our plants to obtain the knowledge, experience, and the experimentation that we need to provide a space that is ideal for them to thrive.

Before we talk about what I'm going to call a magic recipe for creating the perfect foundation for our plants inside our raised bed, gardens or our containers, let's talk about soil and what makes up soil or the components of soil. There is clay, sand, silt. an organic matter, and each of [00:04:00] these components are an essential part of soil and present with their own strengths and challenges inside of our raised bed gardens.

In order to understand and either adapt or amend our soil or overcome some of the challenges of the components of soil, let's look at what the role job of the soil is. The soil provides a strong structure, which gives, stability to our plants from wind, rain, and other movements so that these, elements do not cause the plant to shift and move, around.

It also provides drainage and irrigation of water to the roots of the plants. The soil provides airflow [00:05:00] and air pockets to allow the plant's roots to grow wide and deep. So, when I mentioned structure, I said that the soil provides a strong structure, but we don't need, or we don't want a solid structure because then the roots won't have the space or the opportunity to grow wide and deep enough to support a growing, thriving plant above the ground that has the strength to bear beautiful fruits, vegetables, and flowers. 

Each of these rolls are vital and necessary for our plants to survive, but I saved the best for last. The role of the soil is to provide organic matter. Or nutrients regularly and consistently to our [00:06:00] plants.

This reminds me of my grandson, Hunter, who's also my little garden helper. Thank you, Hunter. He's an excellent eater and he loves to eat on time. All the time, and I'm so proud of his Mom and Dad because they're conscientious and diligent about feeding him healthy, nutritious foods, sometimes straight from the garden.

So now that we've talked about the role of the soil, let's revisit the components of the soil and some of their challenges as well as strengths. Clay. has some structure, but it drains poorly. Sand drains quickly, but it lacks structure. Silt, which is the most fertile of the components of all soil anywhere in the [00:07:00] world, lacks structure.  Also compost or decomposed organic matter lacks structure, but it drains and absorbs water very, very nicely. 

Even though we're going to, in a second, formulate our own perfect soil mixture, I'm gonna encourage you to go outside and get your hands dirty. It's a good idea to find out what type of soil you have, where you live.

Now, if you pick up your soil and it's like a ball, you probably have clay. If you pick up your soil and it kinda seeps right through your fingers or feels kind of gritty, you probably have sand. And if it's dark and kind of crumbly with some structure, you are lucky because [00:08:00] you have silt. However, your soil is a mixture of components, so it's not going to be 100% clay or 100% sand or 100% silt, but you can get a feel for what makes up the highest percentage of your soil.

So now we've come to the place and the time that we've all been waiting for the magic recipe for the perfect soil. The magic is actually in the components as well as the proportions. So here we go. 

We are going to use one third topsoil, one third sand, and one third compost, and you've just, transformed, regular topsoil into the perfect garden soil.

But lastly, after you mixed all the components, the three components [00:09:00] together, you want to add a layer on top, two to three inches of earth worm castings. And there you have it.

Thank you to Nicole Burke of Gardenary for that recipe. I used it last year in my garden and the harvest was amazing. 

If you're ready for a beautiful bountiful harvest, come grow with me.

Thank you for joining me. Please go ahead and follow or subscribe so that you are here for the next episode of Plants Grow Us.