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Soil Amendments 101

© Tracy Nagy

It is already May in Michigan and I am finally looking at my garden and planning on what to do next. My tomatoes and pepper seeds are in my greenhouse, and at the end of the month I will need to move them outside to their permanent home. But before I do that, I need to add more nutrients to replenish those, which the last season's plantings have depleted. Where to start though?

For any gardener, a good place to start is with a soil test. And you can do this the first year, and every year to evaluate the progress that you are making on building your soil. What you are looking at is what is the soil texture and type of your garden. Is your soil mostly sand, or is it clay? Does it drain well, or not at all? The better the texture, the easier it will be for your plants to acquire nutrients from the soil. The easiest kind of soil test is to look at the texture of the soil. To do this dig about one to two inches down, when your soil is not too wet but crumbles easily, and get a good handful of earth. Wet it down with a little bit of water, and run it through your fingers. What does it feel like? Does it feel gritty and dry? If it does then you have a sandy soil texture. This means that your soil will dry out quicker than most, and will drain too quickly to efficiently move nutrients to your plants. If the soil feels slippery and rubbery when wet or moist, then it may indicate that your soil is high in clay and will not have good drainage but keep water locked away from the plants. And last but not least, if your soil feels smooth, like moist talcum powder, then it is silty soil, and though it is the least problematic of the three, it does need its small share of organic amendments to help it keep the proper texture. (Source 1)

Another soil test that you may want to do is to test for the ph of your soil. This means testing if the soil is acidic or alkaline in nature. "The proper ph level in your soil is directly related to the health of your plants."(Source 2) You can buy kits to test for this, but the most accurate tests will be those done by testing labs, as listed below, or through your county extension service. The county extension service will do a thorough testing of all areas in your garden so you can get a complete picture of your whole garden plot, and not just one patch of your garden, that you might get by testing it yourself.