Transforming Garden Soil: COST-SAVING Regenerative Solutions for Healthy Gardens!

Hey guys, it's Brie here at Blossom and Branch Farm and today I'm going to talk about how you can fix your native soil to make it more amenable to growing without having to buy a lot of extra amendments or build expensive raised beds. I hear this one all the time because I often talk about how consumerism has overtaken gardening. Gardening is a 133 billion dollar industry. There are a lot of vested interests out there trying to get you to buy things that you don't necessarily need. There are so many misconceptions about clay soils, sandy soils, and how oh I can't grow in that soil. Instead I have to buy in these bags of soil which honestly half the time are worse than what you actually have in the ground and it becomes this expensive earth draining proposition to start a garden because it takes all these resources and inputs and shipping soil and the manufacturer of that and the plastic bags and all this stuff and it's not needed most of the time. I absolutely understand and recognize that there are situations when raised beds are needed. For example if you live on a granite rock or if you have very contaminated soils with lead or arsenic or if you have mobility issues you totally get that but for most of us the soil that we have in the ground is totally fine for growing in. I get a lot of questions about where I am. If you're new to the channel I am in Colorado. We are zone 5-6. I have very heavy clay. When we moved into this property not only did we have clay but we had compacted clay so the farm property was about to be turned into townhomes before we were able to purchase it and it had been driven over surveyed driven huge trucks on here they'd had dumpsters here and it was very very hard pan. My first year I did buy in compost. I bought in the best compost I possibly could and I spread it so half of our field was established that way. Now the other half of the field I established those beds in a different way and the reason that I changed my process was because once I was running soils tests on the side of the field where I had amended mostly with compost I found that I had really very high phosphorus and salt levels which explained why a lot of my plants were suffering and this is very common if you're buying in bagged compost or even a lot of bagged soils is that they can be high in salt they can be high in phosphorus and this can build up in soil phosphorus tends to really accumulate it's not one that leaches quickly from soil like nitrogen. I looked at those soil tests and I said okay I need to come up with a different way a cheaper way to establish the rest of the farm so I'm going to talk you through how we do that now and how it's cheaper and how it's actually better for the soil life. So the problem that we often have and that I often hear is oh I have clay or I have sandy soil now both of those soils have the same problem which is that they're lacking in organic matter they need more organic matter clay needs more organic matter because that's going to help aerate it it's going to help create chunks and little bits and airflow for a lot of those more aerobic microbes and soil life to be able to survive if the soil is too compacted and heavy a lot of the microbial life that we want to see in the soil isn't able to survive if we can increase the organic matter level in sandy soil it helps with water and nutrient retention and if we can increase the amount of organic matter in clay soil it's going help with aeration and also just boosting that amount of organic matter which is going to make the soil spongier and less compacted. But how do we do that? So here's what I do this process for me starts in the fall and in the fall we put out a call to all of our neighbors we say hey bring all your leaves to us we will take them we take everybody's bagged leaves now we do tell people please no treated leaves from for example we have ash borer here so some people will spray their trees so we say please don't give us those leaves if you've treated your trees with anything and they bring them we keep the bags here and then I spread those leaves out over our garden beds in the fall so that does two things one is it helps out a little organic matter even over the winter as those things are getting wet and they'll start to break down on top of the soil so we get some nice organic matter there over the winter but also it's helping protect the soil it's helping to keep the moisture regulated it's helping to keep the temperatures regulated so we're not getting a lot of temperature fluctuations which can be bad for the soil life in the fall we apply those leaves now in the spring before I'm getting ready to cover crop that's when I pull back those leaves so I'm just going to rake them off I just set them to the side into the walkways now I leave it in the walkways we're going to put a little bit back on at the end and you'll see that but I leave the rest in the walkways just to break down and to serve as a weed barrier during the growing season so in a way I'm composting in place and then in the next year I can scoop it up out of the walkways and put it on the beds so in the spring we've raked back our leaves so now what I like to do is I like to go through with a broad fork now if you have clay soil this is going to be a great thing for you to do sandy soil might not benefit from broad fork quite as much because you already have pretty aerated soil but if you are going to be applying any compost a broad fork can help work it down a little bit into the soil without all of the disturbance from tillage if you really feel you need to till it is in my book okay all right it's not the end of the world if you have to till especially the first time to establish your garden if you have clay soil you'll understand sometimes you cannot get into that soil at least for the first year or two until you put a lot of organic matter on it and if you're looking to start a garden this year that's really not that feasible so if you need to till the first year I'm not opposed to that but you're going to want to apply a little organic matter first so this is where we start talking about compost if this is your first year in this garden it's probably going to be a good idea to get a soils test first so that you can establish whether you have too high of phosphorus levels and if you do you probably not want to be applying things like compost that have animal manures in them animal manure based compost are going to be the ones that have those high phosphorus levels so if you already have high phosphorus in your soil you're going to want to avoid those high animal manure based compost if you're using compost in your garden you'll want to apply it at this stage so after we've removed the leaves and we're going to put the compost down I don't use the compost anymore I find that I don't need it I also find that again it's elevating my phosphorus levels so I just don't apply it if you are going to apply it before you work your bed so apply that compost first then you can go in with a broad fork a broad fork is a great tool and even if you till you can use a broad fork too because it gets a little bit deeper into the soil so I like to do the broad fork you just stick it into the soil you pull it back until the soil just cracks not until you fully turn it over just to crack stage and then some of that compost will kind of work its way down and into the soil profile and it helps to aerate it a little bit without totally turning everything over and decimating all the aggregation in there so we're going to go through we're going to broad fork the whole thing next we're going to put down our cover crop seeds so I like to either use my broad fork I'll flip it around and then drag it across the soil or you can use a pickaxe so out here you can see I'm just using a pickaxe to draw some furrows in the ground and then I'm sprinkling my peas and oats in now because I'm hoping to get some nitrogen fixation from my peas I'm going to make sure I inoculate with rhizobia first I'm going to link the video where we show this detailed how to inoculate your seeds at the end of this video but for now what you need to know is that if you're planting a legume like peas or alfalfa or hairy vetch or fava beans that fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere puts it into the roots you need to inoculate those seeds with the correct rhizobia that's sometimes present in your soil but not always so I usually recommend inoculating you just rub it all over the seeds and then that's the rhizobia that it needs to help fixate nitrogen otherwise if you don't do that you might get the organic matter and the growth of the plant but not the nitrogen you can also throw a scoop of handmade compost in there if you have it just to help bring up the microbiome of those seeds and then we're going to sprinkle them all over where we've just created our furrows go through with the rake and rake it in just to cover and now those leaves come back into play so if you don't have leaves you could use another mulch pine needles work really well I wouldn't use wood mulches just because it's going to take too long to break down in an annual bed leaves are a great one I'm going to sprinkle my leaves that I've set aside and I'm going to sprinkle them back over after I put my cover crop seed down that's going to help keep the moisture in the soil while these seeds are germinating especially because early spring I'm usually not watering yet I usually don't have my water on until April May and right now we're still about eight weeks before our last frost so I don't have my water on yet so putting those leaves and that mulch down on top helps to keep the moisture in the soil and then we wait once we get our growth on our cover crop usually for me this means right around last frost maybe a little bit later is when we're going to come through and terminate it now this is why I like using peas and oats because we can cut them down to terminate peas we can do it pretty much at any stage oats it's best to do it if they're at milk stage so that's when we take a grain of the oats squeeze it and little bit of milky sap comes out that's what's called milk stage so if we cut it at that stage it will kill the oats if it's not at that stage yet it might regrow so if you're wanting to plant right at last frost and you're doing this cover crop in the spring then you may want to omit the oats and just do peas the peas will be easier for you to terminate if it's your first time cover cropping now if it's fall the other time I like to recommend doing this is in the fall so say you've grown some early plants like radishes peas sweet peas snapdragons things that do really really well when it's cooler but then tend to fizzle out toward the end of the season that's where you can do a late summer fall cover crop so that's when it's great because you can use something that's going to winter kill with ground freeze or with frost peas will winter kill in my zone I'm zone five six oats will kill in my zone in the winter anywhere if your ground freezes those things are going to winter kill so that's great because I can plant them in late summer let them grow and then they just die off on their own and in the spring I can go ahead and plant right into that debris the same thing in the spring if I planted my cover crop in the spring after I've gone through and cut it all down I'm just using a weed whacker to cut it right down at the root and I can plant right into that about a week after I've terminated that crop just leave all the debris right on top of the soil let it break down into organic matter it's got a pretty low c to n carbon to nitrogen ratio so it's going to break down pretty quickly and you'll be left with better organic matter that organic matter that has really reached down into the soil so those cover crops are helping to fix our clay soil and our sandy soil because it's really working the organic matter into the soil it's breaking it up using plant roots and at the same time it has an advantage over compost in that it's bringing in more soil life because the soil life really wants those plant roots it wants that rhizophagy cycle it wants the interaction with the exudates of the plant roots that's going to attract the earthworms to your soil that's going to get your healthier much faster using roots versus just using compost and we know cover cropping everybody hears this word and they panic cover cropping tends to freak people out and I get that because we hear cropping we think farming and we think I can't do that I don't have a tractor I don't have all these things you don't have to have all of that stuff we cover crop by hand I cover crop my garden beds even the areas that I don't use for production on the farm I cover crop because it's so good for the soil for looking at the soil food web the base rung of that soil food web really are the plant roots the plant roots provide root exudates they provide sugars and things to feed the microbiome the rhizosphere around the root area so the fungi the bacteria will feed off of that and in turn they feed the plants there's actually rhizophagy happening where the plant roots are actually consuming they're absorbing bacteria from the soil and converting that into nitrogen this is really cool stuff it's also why adding molasses to your soil works well because it boosts the microbial population the bacteria and that bacteria can actually be converted into nitrogen by your plants but anyway that's a whole nother discussion for a different day so what we need to know is that by having plant roots in the soil that's going to help keep our soil food web active and alive and thriving for much longer you can do this in the spring or you can do it in the fall when you are just getting into cover cropping I typically recommend sticking with one or two species and sticking with one or two species that like to be terminated the same way so when we're thinking about cover cropping we always want to think about the end point that is termination or killing the cover crop because we have to kill it before it sets seed if we let it set seed a we can get a mess on our hands and also we can lose some of the benefits of that cover crop so for example a nitrogen fixing cover crop yes it takes nitrogen from the atmosphere fixes it down into the plant roots but if we let that plant then go to seed so peas for example if we let them make peas all of that nitrogen in the roots has gone into making the peas and then we lose that nitrogen from the soil profile if we're doing it to get things like nitrogen benefits we have to terminate our cover crop before it sets seed so we always want to be thinking of that end goal when we're planting our cover crop how can we terminate it what's the recommended way to terminate this cover crop is that going to be something that I can do that I have the equipment to be able to do crimping on a home scale I'll often just grab the roots and break them in my with my hands you're just basically trying to just bend the root to at least a 90 degree angle so that the plant juices can't get up into the top of the plant now this has to be done at the right stage it has to be usually done at flowering stage so if you're going to be using crimping you have to bear that in mind now you can also use bowing or cutting I usually use a weed whacker this is a great way to do it on a home scale there's also things like tarping I don't love using plastic in the garden you guys know that so I tend to shy away from using plastic to solarize but you can do that if you get into a bind you can also till in a cover crop now of course I don't recommend doing that every year maybe once every five years at most because tilling is not great for your soil health it's not great for the aggregation it's not great for those microbes and fungi and arthropods and worms and stuff that are in your soil that we want to keep happy you do need to know going into it how you're going to kill your cover crop at the end so I like to use ones that I know will either winter kill if I'm planting it in the fall or ones that I can cut down if I'm planting it in the spring so for me those are things like peas and oats and buckwheat work really well again I'm going to tell you that if you're going to get into cover cropping I recommend you start with one or two species at a time don't get crazy with 16 different ones at once because they often have lots of different termination requirements and that can get complicated and also don't go with one that's traditionally hard to terminate so ones like rye or hairy vetch kind of are known to be a little bit trickier they can be difficult to terminate so I wouldn't use one like that or a grass if you're just getting started down this road of cover cropping so this is why I'm recommending peas and oats to you today because it's a pretty good easy to terminate mix even if you don't catch it in time and it goes to seed it's not going to create a big huge messy weedy mess in your garden bed I hope that explains your questions I know that sometimes I talk a little fast it's because I get excited about soil and I'm sorry about that if you need to go back and take some notes please do otherwise ask me any questions you have about this below and hopefully I can answer them if you like this video remember to like and subscribe and all that good stuff it really means a lot to us here at the farm and I hope that you're inspired to maybe do a little cover cropping this year and fix up that soil that you already have all right we'll see you guys around here soon at the farm