The Soil
The chances are that you will not find a spot
of ideal garden soil
ready for use anywhere upon your place. But all
except the very worst
of soils can be brought up to a very high degree
of productiveness--
especially such small areas as home vegetable
gardens require. Large
tracts of soil that are almost pure sand, and
others so heavy and mucky
that for centuries they lay uncultivated, have
frequently been brought,
in the course of only a few years, to where they
yield annually
tremendous crops on a commercial basis. So do
not be discouraged about
your soil. Proper treatment of it is much more
important, and a garden patch
of average run-down,--or "never-brought-up"
soil--will produce
much more for the energetic and careful gardener
than the richest spot
will grow under average methods of cultivation.
The ideal garden soil is a "rich, sandy
loam." And the fact cannot be
overemphasized that such soils usually are made,
not found. Let us
analyze that description a bit, for right here
we come to the first of
the four all-important factors of
gardening--food. The others are
cultivation, moisture and temperature. "Rich" in
the gardener's
vocabulary means full of plant food; more than
that--and this is a
point of vital importance--it means full of
plant food ready to be used
at once, all prepared and spread out on the
garden table, or rather
where growing things can at once make use of it;
or what we term,
in one word, "available" plant food. Practically
no soils in long inhabited
communities remain naturally rich enough to
produce big
crops. They are made rich, or kept rich, in two
ways; first, by
cultivation, which helps to change the raw plant
food stored in the
soil into available forms; and second, by
fertilizing or adding plant food
to the soil from outside sources.
"Sandy" in the sense here used, means a soil
containing enough
particles of sand so that water will pass
through it without leaving it
pasty and sticky a few days after a rain;
"light" enough, as it is
called, so that a handful, under ordinary
conditions, will crumble and
fall apart readily after being pressed in the
hand. It is not necessary
that the soil be sandy in appearance, but it
should be friable.
"Loam: a rich, friable soil," says Webster.
That hardly covers it, but
it does describe it. It is soil in which the
sand and clay are in
proper proportions, so that neither greatly
predominate, and usually
dark in color, from cultivation and enrichment.
Such a soil, even to
the untrained eye, just naturally looks as if it
would grow things. It
is remarkable how quickly the whole physical
appearance of a piece of
well cultivated ground will change. One instance
came about last fall
in one of my gardens, where a strip had
contained onions for two years,
and a little piece jutting off from the middle
of this had been prepared for
them for just one season. The rest had not
received any extra
fertilizing or cultivation. When the garden was
plowed up in the fall,
all three sections were as distinctly noticeable
as though they were
separated by a fence. And I know that next
springs crop of carrots,
before it is plowed under, will show the lines
of demarcation just
as plainly.
This, then, will give you an idea of a good
garden soil. Perhaps in
yours there will be too much sand, or too much
clay. That will be a
disadvantage, but one which energy and
perseverance will soon overcome
to a great extent--by the methods you will be
learning soon. |
