9 Proven Ways to Boost Your Soil Health

I'm going to ruin gardening for you in the next 30 seconds. You see this lush garden bed behind me? Once I pull that garlic out, I'm depleting my soil's bank account. And over the years, if I keep doing that, it's just going to get worse and worse over time leading to harvests that are nothing to write home about. Eventually you'll start running into a situation where you've basically overdrafted that soil bank account and you need to add tons of amendments just to keep up with even a mediocre harvest. To help you avoid this, Jacques and I are going to give you nine of our best soil health tips to turn your dead dirt back into living soil. So going back to the soil bank account analogy, if you think about it, most gardeners are making withdrawals all the time and not enough deposits. And when I say withdrawals, I don't just mean harvest, which would of course remove organic matter directly from the soil because it's being used to create that plant that you just harvested. But I'm talking about watering, which would leach out nutrients and minerals or potentially even soil compaction or just poor soil quality, which means that the network of delicate balanced organisms in the soil that really make dirt into soil aren't thriving. So these tips are going to slot into three major categories where soil health can go awry, which would be low or no organic matter and ways to combat that, differences in soil pH or nutrient imbalances, and then soil texture and quality, things like compaction or too loose soil. And with that said, let's get into the most obvious tips. And of course we are talking about compost, the most magical fundamental part of every vegetable garden. Without compost, it's hard to imagine a successful garden. Now right over here, what we have is our active pile. So what you're seeing is a mix of different greens. These are just things harvested from the garden, maybe scraps mixed in with a bunch of browns. Now if you don't know the basics of compost, it's just taking living or just recently living material and mixing it with dead material like straw, wood chips, dried leaves, whatever you have on hand. And when you combine those together, the microbes that consume those will create so much heat that it literally breaks everything down from looking like this, a pile of random trash into a finished compost, which is essentially impossible to identify what went into this. It is just looking like rich black dirt, but instead it is beautiful compost. Now this is loaded with life. It is full of microbes. It's full of organic matter, which is very important to soil health because organic matter is broken down in your soil to turn into food that your plants will consume to grow lush and beautiful. But how do we make the best use of this compost? Well, let me show you exactly how we like to use it. You can make it as complicated as you want, but really the easiest most successful way to apply compost in your garden is to simply take it and just dump it across your garden beds. After that, you want to spread it to be about an inch to two inches at the most, any more than that. And you're probably not going to get the most return in that same year. And now what's going to happen is you're thinking, why would I put it on top? How's that going to help my plant roots? Well, over time, as you water, as the worms are working their way through the soil, they're going to start mixing that compost into that upper layer of soil. And it's going to become a beautiful, rich, organic loaded soil. That's going to just feed your plants on their own. Now you might be wondering if it's okay to simply leave your compost on the surface. And yes, it totally is. But there is something else you could add that will really unlock the true potential of your compost. And that little secret to boost your compost's effectiveness is some kind of mulch. Now it's not only applicable when you have compost on top of a garden bed or a raised bed, or even a container. Mulch is really a soil protective layer. When you think about natural ecosystems, especially forest floors, but really almost any type of ecosystem, there's something covering bare soil. Bare soil is effectively dead soil. When you look at desert ecosystems, that soil is not really doing much until that monsoon season comes through. And of course you get that nice bloom. But mulch in a garden locks in moisture. It keeps heat off of the soil. So it keeps the soil a little bit cooler than it might otherwise be. And if you're using a natural organic mulch like our straw right here or anything that you've got around your own property, just like the compost, it will eventually make its way down into the soil. That's why we personally, I personally love a straw mulch because it's light colored as well, which means that it will reflect even more light off of the surface of the soil, keeping it even cooler, which is really great for things like lettuce or squash or any of these shallow rooted crops that not only will suffer if the plant dries out, but also will wilt if the roots get too hot. So I love straw for that. And speaking to that compost tip earlier, if you put an inch or two of straw on top of an inch or two of compost, you've now created a sandwich layer with which that compost can break down and be protected even quicker. All that life within the compost, which is why you're kind of introducing it to the soil in the first place, gets down into that soil in a more effective way. In gardening one of the most classic ways to set up your garden every year is to till it. You get a rotor tiller, you run down your garden, make nice little rows, plant into that beautiful fluffy soil. And a lot of people thought it's required. It's something you just have to do to have a successful garden. Now, right here, I've got myself a manual tiller. If I were to try to till this whole space and really mix up all the soil, I'd be here until the end of time. Now, here's the thing. Over the years, we've really learned that not only do not have to till at all, but it's actually more beneficial to not till on a regular basis. Now, why is that? Well, it has to do with what's living in the soil. So if I take a look at this chunk of soil, I just ripped out of the earth. Well, what could have been in here is a huge network of mycorrhizal fungal tunnels. And that fungal network that lives in your soil helps break stuff down, feeds your plants, and even brings water to them. Not only that, but there's a precious layer by layer city of microbes that live in different areas. And by turning that soil, you're killing everything that was once living in there. Now the active exchange of elements, minerals, nutrients, and water is killed and you're basically starting from scratch. So instead of tilling your soil, definitely not every year, you should just try applying compost like we just showed you. Doing just that is enough. And over time you might think that the soil will be like all hard and not fluffy and beautiful, but it is, it is absolutely a valid way to garden. And it's also easier. You don't have to physically break up the soil every year. And all you do is apply compost, plant your garden, and you're off to the races. Now, if you live in a climate where you have tons of trees that shed their leaves in the fall, what's underneath this tree is a tip that will really help you out. What I have here is what's known as a leaf mold generator, or a leaf bin. So what you'll do is every fall when you have tons of leaves or maybe you don't and you have neighbors who have them and they're going to put them on the street and bag them and send them to who knows where, steal those leaves and put them in some kind of container. Right here, we just have chicken wire that's snapped together in a little cylinder and you'll stack these leaves. Now, every season, just keep doing this. And after a year or two, you can start taking some of the bottom layer of leaves and applying it to beds much like you would compost or even mulch. Now, this method's great because first of all, it's extremely low cost. You can do this with something free lying around the house and of course the leaves that drop on the ground. But for the soil, why is it so important? Well, it gives you something that some of these other inputs don't quite get at. What happens here is the leaves, as they break down become very fungally dominant. There's really two sort of basic life forms that are in the soil that you really want to cultivate. Your fungal life and your bacterial life. And sometimes in garden systems, it's easier to get that bacterial life going, harder to get that fungal life going. And this will help you add a little bit more of that fungal life. Now, there's a couple of things that people can do wrong when it comes to leaf mold. One is actually not letting it get to that fungally sort of dominated state where it is truly leaf mold and not just like old leaves. So you do have to wait some time. If you find that it's taking you a little bit longer than you'd like, you can throw the leaves through a little bit of a shredder or just take some shears and chop them up a lot. That extra surface area from the more chopped up bits will help this become true leaf mold a little bit sooner. And then another thing you want to avoid when applying this leaf mold is not putting it into large clumps in the soil. That's going to create weird sort of matted pockets. But if you do it right, this almost acts as like a sponge type effect in your soil. So it could be good to put maybe at the bottom of containers or mixing into raised beds and gives that soil a little bit more water retention and the ability to release that water back into the soil. And of course, into plant roots. And then naturally it will also break down into some amount of organic matter for the plants to consume over the years to come. Okay, real talk for a second. All the methods that we've shown you so far work and the methods that we're about to show you work as well, but they all work better when you're starting with quality inputs in the first place. And that's where Fox Farm comes in who are the official soil partners here at Epic Gardening. We've been using Fox Farm for many years here at Epic, both myself in my gardens and Jacques in his gardens, as well as other members of the team. But Fox Farm themselves have been making soil since the eighties up in Humboldt County with a philosophy that mirrors the exact topics we're talking about in this video. Living soil, not dead dirt. So whether you're starting seeds, filling containers or raised beds or feeding established plants, they have products that will work for you that are super high quality. For instance, their Ocean Forest or their Happy Frog. We use these all the time for filling up our raised beds and our containers. For seed starting, which requires a bit of a finer mixture, we have tons of success with their Light Warrior or their Coco Loco mix. And then there are a whole host of fertilizer blends that are customized for specific plant profiles. So you're feeding them what they actually need. So if you want to give your garden the best soil foundation to use all of these tips we're giving you with, then check out foxfarm.com. They have a great store locator. You can find the closest store to you and pick up your favorite products and use them in your garden and have a certified Epic Harvest. And now let's get on to our next soil building method. For as long as humans have existed and have been growing food, they have relied on one major deposit that you could put right into your bank account. And that is poop. More specifically, manure. Manure from animals. Now right here, we've got a whole bunch of chicken poop loaded up. And the great thing about manure is that especially, and that's important, especially once it's broken down, it is full of organic matter, nitrogen, and all sorts of beneficial life that will boost your soil and your plant's health. But you have to make sure it's aged. You have to make sure you compost it. It's something like this chicken poop. We're going to let it sit for at least six months before we use it. That kills the pathogens, stabilizes all the nutrients. And when you add that to your garden, you're going to have some crazy yields. But if you don't have access to poop, there is something else you could do. For those of us at home who don't have mounds of poop to access, there is something else that many people rely on, and that is fertilizer. Now here at Epic Gardening, we do prefer organic fertilizer because it's made out of ingredients that break down in the soil and feed your plant over time. Things like kelp, alfalfa, bone meal, all of those once added to the soil will slowly break down and become available nutrients. Now that is where the NPK is that you see on the front of the bag. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. That is what is the macronutrients that make plants grow. So the way you apply it is very simple. You just sprinkle it on your surface just like this, and then you could work it into the soil. You don't really want to leave it on the surface because when it's in the soil, like I said, the soil microbes will break it down and actually make it available to your plants. Just by doing something as simple as this at the beginning of the season, especially will really make a huge difference on the size and vigor of your plants, especially on things like perennials, such as fruit trees. Now there is another option, which is the liquid. Now liquids are more available. So when you mix them up with water and apply them to your plants, they're actually able to use them almost immediately. So you want to use them more sparingly. They're kind of like a spot treatment or a little stimulus check for your bank account. Now if you've ever been on a hike through a beautiful forest and you stepped a little bit off the beaten path, you know that feeling that you start to get underneath your shoes or your boots. It's that kind of sponginess, that lightness. And that's what you're really trying to cultivate in the garden beds where you're growing all of your produce or your flowers or your herbs, which means that you should have dedicated pathways in your garden and dedicated growing space. And you should really try your best. It's not a hard and fast rule not to clump all over a garden bed. Now these are pretty well established at this point, great soil quality, great soil texture. So if I was to come in and stand, I'm not compacting this all that much. But earlier on when you're designing new beds and establishing new spaces, stepping on them, especially when they're nice and fluffy, just really just started, maybe they're a little bit wet from a rain or a watering session, can crush that soil layer together, which means there's not a lot of air pockets in the soil, both for microbial and bacterial life to develop, fungal life, or for the plant roots to get much needed oxygen. Because much like us, plants need oxygen from the soil via little pockets in the soil. If you have it too compressed, it's really not a good idea. So what we like to do is we have defined bed areas and then we'll run pathways down, which of course you can apply some of our other soil building tips to. We've done mulch layers with a more hardwood bark style mulch here, which protects the pathway, actually does build the soil underneath the pathway. And as we redefine the pathway every season, we can scrape out some of that fresh built soil and continue to build these beds. So it's kind of a combo technique. But if you want to go for aesthetics, of course, you could use stepping stones or little choppy planks of wood, whatever it is, but just do your best to avoid compacting in a bed. Out here in my front yard raised bed, I want to get into a topic that I think is confusing, especially for a lot of beginner gardeners, and definitely for myself. I've been both a believer and a skeptic of this technique. And I've come back around to being, I would say, a, if it makes sense, believer. And I'm talking about crop rotation. When you hear that, you think about farmers, you know, making corn in this area, then leaving it fallow and then putting wheat there. That's maybe the industrial scale approach. But here in the home gardener's raised bed system or in-ground system or even containers, what you want to think about is preserving your soil health by moving families of crops around that tend to suffer from specific pests or diseases. So if you think about a tomato in here, which can really suffer from something called root-knot nematode, maybe I might try it a second season and see what happens. But these days I know that certain pests and certain diseases will proliferate if I give them that same food that they want. They want that tomato this season. So I'm not putting it in this bed. I'm going to move it over here. Or if it's maybe an airborne disease, I might even move it into a completely different area of the garden. And this is something that it's counterintuitive because it doesn't necessarily build soil health, but it does protect it. There is actually one very important thing that you should know about before you start adding things to your garden, because you don't want to be a blind feeder. That is when you're adding amendments to your garden without even knowing what it needs in the first place. So how do you avoid that? Well, you want to get yourself a soil test, especially at the beginning of your gardening journey. Or if you're in a new space, you want to know what you're working with. Maybe your soil has so much phosphorus that by adding more fertilizer with phosphorus, you're actually causing a problem in your garden, or your pH might be too low or high, and you simply cannot grow the plants that you want. So knowing what you have to start with is absolutely critical. Now, how do you go about doing a real soil test? Well, there are a lot of options out there. There are at home kits where you get a little liquid thing, you shake your soil in there and some sort of color indicator will tell you generally at least where you are in terms of the ballpark number for different nutrients. But you don't want to just take soil from the surface because remember we're usually adding things like fertilizer compost right to the surface. And all it's going to tell you is what's in your compost. Instead go down to at least two inches, collect the soil from two to four inches deep and don't just do it from a single spot because right here it could just be a single area that happens to have different nutrition from literally right here. So what is the best way to deal with that? Well, instead of sending off multiple hundreds of dollars of soil tests, just grab a couple of different samples from the same bed. So maybe I'll take a scoop from here, scoop from here, a scoop from that side, blend those all together and treat that as a single sample. And that'll give me a good representation of what I know I need. Now a lot of soil tests will also tell you things like the organic matter percentage, which is a fantastic way to track your soil health over time. As long as that number keeps going up, your soil health is generally improving. And the other thing they'll often do is tell you exactly what kind of nutrients you need. Maybe your garden only needs potassium. So it'll say go ahead and add potassium at this number over the size of your garden. And that way you're not just blindly feeding, which is also expensive, but can also cause issues when you overfeed a certain nutrient and oversupply your garden. And if you want some options on where to do soil tests, look up your local university extension office. And most universities will have a lab that does soil testing. And it's generally around 40 bucks. And it gives you a really good peace of mind at the beginning of your gardening journey. One of the most simple rules to protecting and building up your soil health is to never leave your soil bare. Now, how do you do that if you can't or don't want to garden year round? Well, you could actually plant something called a cover crop. And just as the name suggests, a cover crop is something that you grow to cover and protect your soil because when you leave your soil unexposed, especially in the off season, it gets rained on a washes away nutrients. It might wash away your entire bed or the wind could literally blow all your top soil away by having plants actively growing in it. The roots are anchoring it. They're feeding the soil life beneath it. And the best part is that at the end of its growth, you could do something called a chop and drop. This is where you're literally just taking the plant that was already growing there, cutting it up into a bunch of little pieces and dropping it right on the surface of your bed where it'll break down, return some of those nutrients that it picked up out of the soil and literally turn into mulch. But you don't even have to just do it to a cover crop. You could literally chop and drop whatever it is that was already growing in your bed. So let's say this was all full of cauliflower. We harvested the main head and now we've got all these plants. You could cut them all up, scatter them right on the surface. And now those nutrients that the cauliflower plant actually pulled, instead of having to put them into your compost bin and manage that, you could just scatter it right onto the surface of your bed and return some of those nutrients. And that is what is so beautiful about cover crops. They protect your soil in the first place by simply existing. But then when you chop and drop them, you're returning and actually building a more nutrient dense organic loaded soil that will feed your plants in the long run. We actually have an entire video on cover cropping in the garden that you could check out right over here. Good luck in the garden and keep on going.