3 Things Your Tired Soil DESPERATELY Needs This Winter!

What's growing on, gardeners? After a long, hot growing season, our tired, depleted garden soil is in desperate need of fresh nutrients and repair. But if you wait until spring to get to work, it is already too late. Summer crops can badly deplete our soil, but leaving our soil bare and exposed over winter makes things even worse by exposing the soil to erosion, compaction, Leaching and... Dead soil microbiology. And on today's video, I share with you three things your tired, depleted garden soil desperately needs this winter. Don't wait, do these things as soon as possible, your garden will thank you. And stay tuned until the end of the video where I will give you a full demonstration on how to repair and fix your soil for the next growing season. For any of the soil amendments that I'll use, I'll place direct links down in the video description for your convenience if you have trouble finding them. Step number one is to add raw soil amendments to our garden soil. Contrary to popular belief, spring is not the best time of year to amend our soil with raw soil amendments. We want to do this as early as possible in the process, like mid to late fall, at worst case, early winter. That's because raw soil amendments take a long time to break down. If we wait until planting is imminent, a few weeks before we're going to start sowing our crops, enough time to break down and leach their nutrients into our garden soil. We want to give these things ideally three to six months to break down, so the sooner we do this, the better. Now, when I say raw soil amendments, what do I mean? Well, I mean now is the time to add things like raw manure, slow-release pH corrective measures like garden lime if you need to raise pH, or elemental sulfur if you need to lower pH, gypsum for soil structure improvement and calcium supplementation, azomite rock dust if you need trace mineral supplementation, things like that. Ideally, you'd want to put these raw soil amendments on top of your garden soil and bury them under the next two layers that I'm going to feature in this video because they will help facilitate their breakdown and prevent them from being washed away and really make your soil healthy for next year. If you're fairly new to soil amendments, you may be thinking to yourself, wow, that's a lot of different products. This sounds very complicated and very expensive. Don't feel like you have to add all of these amendments at once. What you can do is you can get your soil tested and then find out exactly what your soil is deficient in. Then pick one or two of the amendments that addresses your specific deficiencies. I'll link to an inexpensive soil test kit down in the video description that you can mail away your soil to a real laboratory. for analysis. That way you can hone in on the exact things that you need to correct. But before you amend your garden soil, heed this warning. Do not use expensive fertilizers like organic all-purpose fertilizers and bone meal at this stage. That is because these are the most expensive fertilizers out there. Organic all-purpose fertilizers and bone meal have been specifically pelleted or granulated so they break down as quickly as possible from the soil microbiology. If you apply these to your soil now, they're going to break down rapidly and then you risk them washing out and leaching out of your garden beds. Basically, you are just throwing away your money. You're buying the most expensive stuff out there and you'll probably lose those nutrients if you're doing this three to six months in advance. We want to use the very inexpensive soil amendments that take a long time to break down, like elemental sulfur and gypsum and rock dust and things like that. Those things will sit in our soil. And decompose very, very slowly so there will be less washout, less leaching, and they cost a fraction per pound compared to these much more expensive items. These are things that we want to apply directly into our planting holes and amend at planting time when we can get the most efficient use out of the most expensive products. Step number two is to add fresh compost to our soil. We want to do this as early in the process as possible. We want the compost to sit in our soil and break down for as long as possible to refeed that soil That is because nutrients are not the only thing that we need to add to our garden soil. That's what those soil amendments were for, adding nutrients We also have to add fresh organic matter to our soil because it's the organic matter that feeds our soil microbiome. Our soil microbiome is composed of billions and trillions of fungi and bacteria that help the decomposition process and also aerate our soil and break down all those nutrients to feed our plants. Well, you can't just add nutrients to the soil. You also have to refresh the microbiome and add in new bacterial and fungal cultures that have been beaten down and stressed out all summer from the really, really hot weather. And compost is the best way to do this If you're looking for the most cost-effective way to get compost while also getting the highest quality compost possible, I strongly recommend that you order your compost from a local mulch yard Go to Google Maps and search for mulch yards local to you. Skim through and start reading the reviews and find one that makes their own compost on site. After that, I recommend you actually drive there and put eyes on that compost pile. Talk to the manager that works on site or talk to the owner These are often always small businesses where you can actually talk to a real human being and ask them how the compost is made. Then you can order it by the truckload to your yard for delivery. And you'll pay a fraction of what you would pay if you went to a big box store and you purchased it yourself truck bed at a time You'll get a volume discount Then you can simply wheelbarrow it to all of your garden beds And apply three to four inches or as much as you need to all of your garden soil. And if you over order like I always do, I like to top dress all of my fruit trees in late fall early winter with the excess compost. So I always make sure to add a few extra yards to my order. This is the cheapest way to amend all of your garden soil and all of your fruit trees and landscaping and a cost effective matter. And it's a good way to get some fresh air and exercise during the low humidity, nice time of the year to be outside. But before you purchase any compost, heed this warning A critical mistake many gardeners make is they wait until spring is imminent to amend their garden soil with compost. And while doing this is better than nothing, what most gardeners fail to realize is that when we purchase compost, it is rarely finished. If you go to the store and you buy bagged compost, or even if you order local compost from a local mulch yard, that compost that you're getting is only going to be partially broken down. It might take a few months in the The cool weather in order for that compost to finish fully decomposing That is why we want to do this as early in the process as possible. Install that compost in mid to late fall, at latest early winter so it has time to sit on top of our raised garden beds for at least three to four months in order to break down fully and feed our soil. And step number three is to add an erosion block. This may be the most important thing that we do for our garden soil to protect it over the winter yet it's the thing that most people fail to do. If you're like me and you actively grow in many of your garden beds throughout the winter, the plants themselves act as soil protection. That is because the leaves of the plants themselves shade and protect that soil from the harmful effects of the sun. The roots of the plants actively growing in the soil, actually hold the soil in place and prevent erosion And as a bonus, those roots actually colonize billions of fungi and bacteria, the beneficial ones that are good for your soil. So those plants are actively maintaining that soil microbiome, preventing erosion and blocking the harmful effects of the sun. But most of us do not grow in our entire gardens over the course of the winter. We only use some of our beds. Many of us rest our gardens entirely and don't grow in any of the soil. And leaving that garden soil unprotected can have devastating effects. Winter rains and snow wash out unprotected soil, depleting it even more unless we protect it Cover your soil with some type of natural mulch like shredded falling leaves, which are abundant this time of year. Another fine mulch. Like rotting wheat straw or shredded bark mulches or some kind of physical barrier like tarps or burlap or a clear tarp to prevent that erosion. If you're looking to turn over a garden bed or garden soil within a relatively short period of time, like two months or so, waterproof tarps are a great way to do that. You'll place your soil amendments, kitchen scraps and compost and other organic matter. Then you'll cover it with a waterproof tarp and you'll hold it down with some bricks or something like that. And that tarp will block the erosion from the rain, it'll block UV damage from the sun, and as it warms during the day, it'll help build up that heat so any unfinished compost or kitchen scraps or soil amendments break down at a little bit of a faster pace. So that's going to be my goal here. This bed will be planted in in probably about a month. That's why you see that tarp. And that tarp will also block weeds and things like that from germinating. So when you're When I pull it, it'll be nice, enriched, re-nutrified soil free of weeds to plant in. But if you're not growing in your garden soil all winter long, a tarp is not the best option. A tarp is a band-aid solution, a means to an end, something where you need to turn over your garden soil as quickly as possible. If you are looking to have your garden bed sit for three to six months, the best thing to do will be to amend your garden soil like I've taught you throughout the course of this video. it with a natural mulch or a cover that breathes something natural like burlap because that way all the rain will get in the snow will get in which by the way contains all sorts of trace minerals and you'll be hydrating your soil it's just healthier overall so if you'll be doing this process in November and December and you won't be planting in it until March or April I strongly recommend you skip the tarp and you go with a natural mulch or a burlap cover but heed this This warning a natural. Natural mulch is one of the best things that you can use to protect your soil, but make sure you choose a natural mulch that will be easy to garden in later. For example, large wood chips or pine bark nuggets are awesome to place around fruit trees and landscaping, but they're really difficult to deal with in your garden later. Those big chunks of wood or bark, well, you have to move them out of the way when it comes to direct sow any seeds or transplants later and then you're kind of disturbing the soil layer, which isn't a really good thing to do. I hate pulling away mulch because that mulch, well, it's alive. It traps in fungi that interweaves themselves and you don't really want to break up and disturb that. So that's why I recommend for your vegetable garden, you use mulches like shredded leaves, old rotting straw, or a fine natural triple shredded hardwood bark because they decompose quickly and are very soft and easy to deal with later when it comes time to So seeds or transplants. Now I will show you how I'm going to get my soil ready for the next planting and we're going to start with the soil amendment process. Now this is fairly new garden soil and it doesn't need a lot of amending so all I'm going to use at this point is azomite which is a natural rock dust from a volcanic ash deposit in Utah that contains So I'm just going to take my hands and I'm going to sprinkle generously the azomite rock dust directly on top of the old garden soil. So the goal will be to lock this in with the compost and mulch layers, that way it won't wash out. So it will be exposed to the rains, it will be exposed to any snow if we get it, and... It will just slowly decompose over the course of the winter and it'll be ready for planting in come spring. And here is the generous amendment of azomite. Now if you have chickens or horses or any other access to raw manure, now is the perfect time to add that raw manure since you'll want it to decompose over months. This is the perfect time to add garden lime if you need to make your soil more alkaline or sulfur if you need to lower your soil pH. This is a good time to add gypsum if you want to improve its structure or add more calcium, things like that. Now that all of my soil amendments have been placed on top of my garden soil, I want to bury the amendments in compost. Here I have some cow manure compost, which is mostly broken down but still could use a little bit more time. I'm going to place a layer about two to four inches thick on top of my garden soil. Then I'm going to rake it out as evenly as possible. So that's going to add in the organic matter. The compost is going to finish breaking down over the course of the And it's going to prevent any of those soil amendments from washing out. out in the rain or snow. And here is the raised garden bed now that it's been topped off with several inches of compost and leveled. Now, unlike that raised garden bed right there, which I intend to plant in in probably about a month or so that has the tarp on it, this one I'm probably going to save until March when I do some type of spring planting of either warm season crops or maybe late cool season crops. So for that reason, ideally, I'm going to mulch this with a very fine double or triple shredded Hardwood bark mulch about three to four inches deep. But I ran out, so temporarily I'm going to cover it with some natural cardboard in order to protect the compost. So I'm going to lay that cardboard across, and I'm going to hose it down to keep it wet so it conforms to the layer of soil and it protects it. And now the entire raised garden bed has been covered in natural cardboard, and it has conformed to the soil because I wet it down. If you don't have natural cardboard boxes that you can break down, another great resource is natural contractor's paper. I have a roll somewhere, but I couldn't. Couldn't find it or I would have used that. Now the nice thing about covering the soil with natural cardboard or contractor's paper is you can just mulch directly on top of it and that mulch will keep the paper moist and it will help facilitate its breakdown. Worms love natural cardboard and natural contractor's paper. So this weekend I'm going to go to Lowe's or Home Depot and I'm gonna buy three or four very large bags of double or triple shredded natural hardwood bark mulch and I'm going to dump that Right on top of this and then with the rain and the snow of the winter that's all going to decompose and I'm going to have lovely soil to plant in next spring. And that right there is the three-step, three-layer system that your tired, depleted garden soil desperately needs this fall and winter. By applying soil amendments, compost for organic matter and microbiome support, and some type of armor over your soil in order to block erosion and lock in all of those nutrients, you will be rewarded with the most gorgeous garden soil you could ever ask for next spring or late winter. The key to making the system really work is to follow through as As early in the year as possible, we really want to get this done by late fall at the latest because the longer we let these different layers sit down on top of our soil and break down and decompose in the rain and keep everything nice and hydrated, the better. So everybody, I really hope you enjoyed this video and you found it helpful. If you did, please make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the notification bell so you're notified when I release more videos like these. I place direct links down in the video description to all of the different Thank you all so much for watching and hope to see all of you again on the next video. Dale's watching TV. We're watching. Pumping iron! Maybe Dale's into bodybuilding. What do you think, buddy? You got that big, strong neck. He doesn't even lift. He's got these big, strong arms. And he doesn't even lift. He has this big, strong nose. But he was born with that. I'm sorry, buddy. I interrupted your movie. And when we're done, we'll do some bench presses, okay? Love this boy.