I’m a Soil Scientist… These 7 “Soil Health” Rules Are Wrong

Fall hands down is the time of year where there is the most rules about gardening, tips, tricks, and hacks. But there are seven out there that just go against what science actually says you should be doing. One of which just assumes your soil is doing the complete opposite of what it's actually doing during the winter months. And that first tip is to clean everything out before the fall. And this one is probably the most wrong out of any of them. Because the reality here is that this stuff has been secreting carbon all summer long. And carbon is food or fuel for microbes. If you just simply remove this, you're removing the food and fuel for microbes. Not only that, but these plants act as a massive net. A very natural form of a snow fence that will actually capture and hold on to a metric buttload of snow. Which means more moisture and healthier microbes, healthier soil, and healthier plants the following season. Now this is particularly true if you're coming out of a drought year or if you've been in a drought run similar to what we have been in here in Saskatchewan. Although it seems like it did break this year. So when it comes to annuals, actually leave everything in place to act as that snow catch, as that bug home, as that microbe food source. Behind me here is a whole swack load of perennial shade plants. And the next rule that we oftentimes encounter is cleaning up all of the material from your dead perennial plants. This also follows the same rule as the annuals where you don't necessarily want to do that. It again serves all the same purposes the annual plants do. The only exception or change in this rule would be in the spring for things to look nice, emerge properly. I would encourage you to actually remove the plants or the dead plant debris and throw it in the compost. Next one is one that I don't participate in, but it is something that my family has done for years. And that is tilling the garden in the fall. Now the reason for why we don't want to do this is because fluffy, loose soil is not soil structure. And this actually does include the gardens you see in the raised beds where you stick your hand in. It's nice, fluffy stuff. But again, it's not soil aggregation. It has no soil structure. This is great if we're trying to incorporate things, or maybe we're trying to start seeds and get really good seed to soil contact, or maybe we're growing root vegetables and we want that fluffy soil for them to penetrate into. All of these are reasons for fluffy soil. But fluffy soil is very easily eroded. It's very easily washed away. It is very easily blown away. Not only that, but it doesn't leave the root structures in place along with the moisture, the microbe habitat. You get the idea. If we remove all this, we end up with a soil system that isn't as robust in degrading the material that's currently in it and actually releasing more nutrients and happier, healthier soil structure. Now that does not mean that you should never till your soil. There are times that absolutely it makes sense, and there's other times when it doesn't. The fall is a time when it doesn't. The exception to that rule is if you have a very large and round garden and you have a lot of runoff or loss of water in the springtime slash fall winter. What you may want to do then is actually till just around the outsides of your garden, kind of like a border or a perimeter, to stop the very easy flow of moisture and rain or runoff over the top of the soil surface. That would be the only exception to this rule. The next rule actually comes down to whether or not you should leave the soil bare. So we spoke about leaving annuals and perennials in place if we have a happy, healthy garden and we're working on soil capture and ensuring that beneficial or predatory bugs are sticking around. But say you have a problem with your soil. Maybe you have nematodes. Possibly you have a pest issue. Maybe you have a disease that just is very aggressive and seems to be popping up every single year. Maybe you have weeds. All of these things are great reasons for why you would actually want your soil entirely bare. All plants removed, all mulch removed, and it completely exposed. Some of you actually may even go as far as solarizing it here in the fall and then even go farther by ensuring that there's absolutely no snow left on that soil surface. The reason being is our winters are incredibly clarifying, meaning certain weeds, certain problem pests, certain disease tend not to emerge over the winter here in Canada. So exposing that soil to the cold, while not the best thing to do for the soil health, may be your only option in the event you've got major issues with a very specific plant problem. So analyze the soil, figure out what you're dealing with, and then make that judgment call at that time. Next up is the addition of compost manures in peats or just any sort of organic material influx. Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can cause some issues. And the reason for this, and particularly things like manures and compost, is because they contain various different micro and macronutrients. And some macro and micronutrients overwinter better than others. So for example, nitrogen is very volatile. It'll be gassed off, it'll be leached very easily. But then there's some that are more stable. So phosphorus, for example, tends to be a lot more stable than nitrogen. Meaning if we add it to our soil, and then the soil goes on to erode, leach, volatilize off nitrogen gas, we now have an imbalance in nutrients. We have not enough nitrogen and too much phosphorus. And then we exasperate this issue in the spring when we add more compost or manure or fertilizer. And in turn, we have not enough nitrogen to phosphorus, potassium, micronutrient ratio that we're delivering to that plant. The idea of fall fertilization or fall soil amending is something that was passed down to us from the world of agriculture and we've adopted into gardening. So farmers who are planting things like winter wheat, for example, during the fall will generally apply a fertilizer. We also have several farmers out there that will do a fall application of fertilizer solely so they don't have to put down as much in the spring. This may be for pocketbook reasons, but it also may be for time or equipment utilization problems as well. But we don't have that here in our garden and therefore it's not necessary to apply those things here in the fall unless you have very specific reasons for it and those I've gone into in various other videos in the past. So you can hit that subscribe button if you want to learn more. Next up also has to do with nutrients and that is when you begin to see yellowing leaves, you add the nutrient to stop the yellowing of the leaves. So that is something or rule you can follow earlier in the season, generally June, July, so long as you understand that your water conditions are correct, your soil conditions seem like they're correct, and you're still ending up with yellowing. Right now our plants are going through something called senescence, which is basically the plant slowly going to sleep. So any sort of yellowing that you're seeing probably is not referencing any sort of nutrient deficiency and the addition of the fertilizer to counteract that nutrient deficiency in September or October is really not going to do you any good. The next biggest misconception is that the soil is asleep in the fall winter seasons. We often think it's similar to the lights which we see with plants, when frost hits everything seems to die off and that is the end. That is not the reality when it comes to your soil. Your soil not only is usually warmer than ambient air just because it's retained so much heat throughout the summer, it also is able to retain the moisture, the nutrients, it has all of the root biomass for fuel, not to mention if you're throwing things like snow on top, it acts as an insulator, keeps it insulated, and therefore that in turn also results in more and more microbe and soil activity. Now with that being said, if you want to know how to actually keep that soil active from the fall into the winter, you're going to want to check out this video right here because I go through all the tips and tricks to actually get your soil decomposing and making bioavailable nutrients throughout the winter months and that video is what Google says you should watch next. I will talk to you guys next time. Bye!