Soil Preparation

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Plants are like children. In order for them to delight you with their abundant and long flowering, it is necessary to create comfortable conditions for their growth. Since the main nutrients of plants are taken from the soil, it is necessary to approach the issue of soil preparation, having at least basic knowledge about it. Then you can provide your pets with the most favorable conditions for development, growth, flowering and fruiting

Living substance

The soil is not just the ground under our feet, along which we make paths, not caring about its well-being and comfort. It is a living agglomerate with its own special rhythm of life, interconnections, in which plant roots, fungal mycelium, a large number of small insects and relatively large burrowing rodents coexist. The mineral composition of the soil determines the possibility of its use for planting certain ornamental, vegetable or fruit and berry crops.

The crucial moment

Preparing the soil for beds, flower beds, planting trees is one of the most crucial moments. The further life of plants, their decorative qualities, the level of productivity, the life expectancy of flower beds and plantings depends on how correctly you do this.

Soil for perennials

Perennial plants of flower beds and gardens live for many years in one place. For abundant flowering and fruitful fruiting, it is necessary to provide them with nutrients, taking into account their tastes and the specifics of biology.

For tall perennial plants, the depth of cultivation of the prepared soil is much greater than for low-growing perennials that migrated to our gardens from mountainous and steppe areas.

Deep digging of the soil requires a good filling of it with organic and mineral fertilizers, while undersized plants do not require a lot of nutrients and moisture.

For plants living in the wild under the canopy of trees, under the protection of branchy branches and fallen leaves, the prepared dug soil for planting them must be covered with peat and leafy soil with a layer of at least 10 centimeters.

Digging land for a flower garden

Digging the ground under the flower garden is distinguished by its depth, which reaches 50 centimeters, that is, it is equal to the height of two bayonets of a shovel. Digging is best done in the fall, without turning over the layers of the earth and without breaking earth lumps for their better freezing in winter. Such an autumn digging will help partially rid the soil of pests and weeds that will freeze over the winter.

In the spring, the soil is brought to a condition by adding wet clay to sandy soils, and diluting heavy clay soils with peat and sand.

Determination of soil acidity

Since plants are very sensitive to soil acidity and most of them prefer neutral or slightly acidic soils, the acidity of the soil prepared for planting is checked in the spring.

To do this, you can use a litmus test, which, as it turned out, is not so easy to buy. Pharmacies do not sell it, they offer it on the Internet either in bulk or at a fairly high price. But you can go the other way by preparing such a piece of paper yourself.

We buy 10 purgen tablets (phenolphthalein) in the pharmacy and, after grinding them to a powder state, stir them in warm water, filling the glass to half. Cut the filter paper or blotter paper into strips 2 centimeters wide and 10 centimeters long. We lower the strips into a glass with a solution and then dry them. Our litmus test is ready.

We go to the garden, dig holes up to 20 centimeters deep and take soil from them. After mixing it with distilled or rain water and putting our indicator in, we squeeze the mixture in a fist.

Then we remember what we were taught at school. A pink piece of paper will tell us that the soil in the garden is slightly alkaline, bright red will indicate alkaline, and the invariability of the color of the piece of paper will indicate sour.