How to Keep Your Garden Healthy

Tending a garden can be one of the simple joys of homeownership. If you're planning on gardening this spring, taking the time to learn a little more about your soil could help you have a healthier garden that saves you time and money in the long-run.

Knowing your soil's make up will help you select suitable plants for your garden. It's also a first step in determining whether you need to modify its composition to help greenery thrive. Your soil's condition, or texture, is its relative proportion of sand, silt and clay. Sandy soils drain easily but can be drought-prone and infertile. Clay soils tend to be more fertile, but are poorly drained. Loam, usually the most desirable soil texture, retains moisture, has better drainage and is fertile, crumbly and easy to work with.

The most accurate way to determine texture and other soil conditions such as fertility and pH is through a chemical analysis, for example by sending soil samples to a soil testing laboratory. To help you determine your soil conditions outside a lab, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) offers the following tips:

• To determine your soil's texture, dry and crush a small amount by rubbing it with your forefinger in the palm of your hand. Then rub some between your thumb and fingers. The grainier the soil feels, the higher its sand content is likely to be. To test for clay content, squeeze some moist soil in your hand and then pass it from hand to hand. The more it holds together, the higher the percentage of clay.
• Other important soil qualities to determine include its structure and porosity, which is the volume of air between the soil particles. Compacted soils are harder to work with. You can spot them by looking for bare patches of soil where plants won't grow or where there are plants that tolerate compaction, like plantains, quack grass and dandelions. Also, dig into your soil and if your shovel penetrates easily and it crumbles apart readily in your hands, it has good structure and porosity.

With this basic information on your soil's properties, you can select plants that are best suited to your soil and your site's other conditions such as sun and shade. This is usually more ecologically sound and less costly than trying to redesign your soil for plants that aren't suited to those conditions.

Although picking the right plants for your soil will minimize the need to amend it, there may still be some situations where you may need to change your soil's make up. If your garden has a high clay content, for example, work in some organic matter such as well-rotted manure, compost, grass clippings or leaves. Amending your soil will be a much easier task once you know what your soil conditions are.

Source:CMHC