The Foundation of Great Gardening: Choosing the Right Soil
Unlock the secrets to successful gardening by choosing the right soil. Explore tips and insights on selecting the best soil to provide a strong foundation for your plants and ensure a thriving garden.
Gardening is a learned skill that requires not only understanding the plants you want to grow but also understanding your garden as a whole from planting to harvest or blooming. This starts with the soil you choose, and believe it or not, not all soil is created equally.
If you believe that dirt is dirt, then learning more about what goes into soil is going to be beneficial to you. Learn what goes into the foundation of great gardening for both sustainability and property decor and what makes soil the right soil for where (and what) you’re planting. This way, you’ll have better chances of having a beautiful and fruitful garden year after year, even if you aren’t one to consider yourself as having a green thumb.
What Goes Into Soil?
Essentially, what you want to learn here is what goes into quality soil so you select the best soil in general for your vegetable and decorative garden needs. Top soil is often the most basic soil you can find and is what you often see in bare areas out in nature. Other types of soil have been given some human assistance to customize soil blends for easier planting and gardening. Understanding what goes into the soil can help you make future purchasing selections. Here are some of the things to consider as you search ‘soil delivery near me’ options online.
A Combination Of Ingredients
Soil is comprised of surprisingly few ingredients to make it a valuable and nutritional base in which plants can grow: clay, sand, and silt comprise soil as a whole. How the ingredients are dispersed in the soil you choose largely determines how absorbent and dense soil can be for plant growth. Soil can also contain other ingredients, such as fertilizers and additional plant nutrition, to help plants grow from seedlings or seeds.
Texture And Moisture Content
Some soil contains small pieces of bark and other filament to make the soil complete and better able to support roots as plants grow. While this isn’t true for all types of soil, if you’re buying a fertilizer and soil combination, you want to make sure you buy soil with some texture to it. This prevents soil from entirely muddying when wet and helps keep soil intact so it doesn’t blow away in the wind if it’s not watered daily or several times a day.
Healthy Drainage
Soil found in nature has natural drainage to it. This keeps soil from remaining wet too long, which would be catastrophic for young plants. Healthy drainage in the soil you can buy for your garden is ideal, and you’ll often find that lava or other types of rock are included in small bits and pieces in the soil to help with drainage for your future plants. This type of soil used as topsoil is especially useful if you live in an area where soil is naturally hard-packed. You’ll learn more about the best type of soil to create a foundation of great gardening for your home below.
Choosing The Right Soil
What type of soil should you choose for your home gardening needs? Surprisingly, you may need to choose more than one type of soil, which can be confusing until you know just what to look for. Here are some tips.
Choose Soil Based On Your Project
Choosing soil based on your project is a wise idea, and can help you target specific gardening concerns while offering a solid foundation for your future plants to thrive in. For example, if you’re planting a garden on a raised bed, you’ll want to choose soil that is loosely packed and has plenty of loose filler in it to allow moisture to escape without damaging tender roots. If you’re choosing soil to plant shrubbery and other hardier plants, you can select topsoil that you can easily mix with your land’s native soil.
If you have a vegetable garden or are planting fruit-bearing bushes, you want soil with a fertilizer in it that can balance out the pH of your soil so you don’t burn plants with too acidic soil (such as blueberries) or keep more acidic plants from dying due to an unsavory environment.
Choose Soil Based On Versatility
If you are planting a garden in multiple areas of your yard and drainage isn’t a big issue, then get a versatile topsoil that you can easily mix in with dirt and soil you already have. You can select soil based on how clay-packed or loamy your soil already is (your landscaper or soil specialist can help you here) and use the soil purchase to simply amp up the growing capabilities of the earth you have.
Need a type of soil with more nutrition? Consider a fertilizer and soil blend for your garden. This way, if you’re starting a garden from scratch in a barren area of your yard, you have a great foundation to start with.
Getting Started Planting
It’s wise to buy more soil than you think you need since you can store leftover soil in a dry and cool location, such as your garage, for future use. You can have your soil delivered to your location to make accessing several pounds of soil at a time easier. When in doubt, allow your soil specialist to assist you. Happy gardening!