How To Improve Your Garden Soil

garden soil

You will find here everything you need to know about Gardener's Loam - an ideal, man-made garden soil of such quality that it cannot be directly compared with native earth or with the loams and clays of the farmer's field.

You will also find discussion of nutrients, organic matter, water and air, soil organisms, alkalinity, and acidity, and other related aspects of garden soil. Whatever your interest, prepare for a new appreciation and respect for the wonders of soil. There are more unsolved mysteries, more unexplored avenues in the study of soil than in any scientific field in existence. Even the human body is simple when compared with the loam outside your kitchen door.

Soil is not merely a mixture of inert minerals - sand, silt, and clay. It is a community of organisms that live in every pore of a soil mass. The minerals are merely the mechanical structure. Soil itself - in lawns, flower gardens, vegetable plots, shrub plantings and so on - is as alive as the gardener who tills it. A handful of loam from your garden contains more living organisms than there are human beings on the face of the earth. Soil is alive and must be treated as a living substance.

We must recognize that a garden is not a natural place in which to grow plants. It is a completely artificial environment in which we are striving for controlled, not natural, growth. We are purposely molding plants to our own end. Garden soil is merely one element in a deliberate program to make "Nature" serve us better.

As you put this information to work in your own gardening efforts, I'm sure that you, too, will see and feel the magic in your garden soil.

Where To Next?

Learn About Soil Types - Learn About Soil Fertility
About Soil pH and Acidity - How To Deal With Weeds
All About Growing Roses

Gardening is a joy, a pastime, an endeavour, a workout and regularly a frustration. But I'd never be without it.

Enjoy,

Robert