A headfirst dive into shit!

Otherwise known as 'let's discuss your soil health and manure applications'

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers and members of The Wild Garden club.

• It’s a simple guide to soil improvement (only 3 ingredients!) and it’s specifically meant for gardens that are dry, hot and sandy - like mine.

• If your soil could do with a little loving’ and you’d like access to my full archives of garden guides, newsletters, recipes and videos, please consider becoming a paying member of Lo fi Life, or upgrading your subscription and becoming a member of my Wild Garden club (you can do this is your Substack settings). You’ll be helping me devote more time to bringing you the tastiest recipes and best gardening advice I can! :)

• Finally, if you are a member of my Wild Garden club, stay tuned for a video guide to soil improvement heading your way this Thursday. In it, I show you exactly how I go about fixing some of my crappiest, sandiest soil.

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Your garden is only ever as good as the soil it grows in.

Good soil is fundamental to a healthy garden. And putting your effort into soil improvement is the best way to ensure you will have a successful garden. Like, a lot of effort. Like way more effort than you probably think.

In some parts of the world this isn't necessary, I admit. On the side of some Italian volcano the soil is rich, crumbling and full of goodness. In the remaining untouched jungles of the world, the soil is soft, fragrant and full of organic matter. And, to be fair, no matter where you are, if you are growing plants that are native to your area you may not have to be as rigorous about soil improvement.

But most veggies, herbs, trees and flowers will do a lot better if you make healthy soil a primary goal in your garden. Basically - and I'm not exaggerating - you need to get obsessed with your soil. Trust me.

To begin your journey of stinky soil improvement, let’s break things down into the two aspects of your soil that you want to get right: its nutrient contents and its structure. We’ll start with structure first.

Improving soil structure

Soil structure is all about the particles that make up your soil, their relative sizes, and how they contribute to the soils texture, workability, heaviness and how easily it drains.

Broadly speaking, it can help to think about soil structure in terms of two extremes - extremely sandy soil and extremely clay-based soil. There are actually a lot of different kinds of soils (loamy soil, silty soil etc), but for the purposes of getting started on improving your soil, thinking in terms of sand versus clay will work.

Clay-based soil

Heavy clay soil is made of fine clay particles. These are good at capturing water and holding onto nutrients, meaning clay-based soil is often richer than sandy soil. On the flip side, these small particles mean that clay soil often doesn't drain easily - it can get muddy, dense and stodgy (not to mention very heavy) when wet. In summer, it can harden and be very difficult to dig.

Plants with delicate roots can struggle to thrive in clay soil, because their roots aren't strong enough to push deeply down into the soil.

You can check if you have clay soil by heading outside and grabbing a fistful of damp soil. If you can roll it into a ball and it holds it shape even when crushed, it likely contains a large amount of clay.

Sandy soil

Sandy soil is made of bigger particles of sand. Their large size means water can drain easily through sandy soil. In some cases, this is a plus, because the soil is unlikely to get waterlogged over winter (waterlogged soils can cause plants' roots to rot, so free-draining soil is often a good thing). But it also means that in summer a sandy garden bed will dry out very quickly. A dry, sandy garden bed can eventually become hydrophobic, where any water you try to give the soil will simply pool on the surface, or trickle off, without being absorbed. This is why one of the biggest challenges for a gardener with a sandy garden is getting the soil to hold onto water.

The big particles in sandy soil also mean that nutrients can wash easily through the soil, which is one reason why I don't recommend liquid fertilizers for gardens with sandy soil - when you water the garden, or when it rains, the liquid fertilizer will simply wash away and little will remain in the soil to feed your plants. Sandy soils tend to be less nutrient-dense than other soils, so you will need to amend them with manures and composts more often to ensure your plants are getting enough food.

While clay-based soil will hold its form well, sandy soil does not (you might notice that in a dry and sandy garden, the holes you try to dig will cave in right away).

You can check if you have sandy soil by grabbing a fistful of dry soil. If it runs straight through your hands like sand through an hourglass, you likely have highly sandy soil.

Goldilocks (aka ‘friable’) soil

If sandy soil and heavy clay soil lie at two extremes of a spectrum, what we want to achieve is soil somewhere in the middle. We want some sand in our soil (to help it drain easily and to prevent it from getting too dense and heavy), but we also want some clay in our soil (to help the soil absorb and retain water and nutrients).

The ideal soil contains enough clay that it can be squeezed into a ball with your fist, but is also light enough that it will crumble apart when you try to squish it. This kind of soil structure is called 'friable soil'; it has a crumbly texture, almost like shortbread dough, and it's what all gardeners want.