Soil Care: What The Soil Is Made Of

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Ten golden rules

The relationship of gardeners and vegetable growers with the soil is currently not in favor of the latter. Most often, the consumer approach to their site prevails - to take everything and give nothing.

Fertilizers are almost never introduced into the soil; there are almost no noticeable efforts to create, restore and improve its fertility on the part of humans. The yield of vegetables, fruits and berries under such conditions is low, its quality is low.

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Consider only ten of the most common mistakes, and show you how to avoid them. We hope that these rules will help gardeners and vegetable growers save their energy, time and money.

The first mistake

Measures to create fertile soil are not carried out, care of soil fertility is considered not the main task of agriculture. This approach immediately contains a large group of errors.

The most valuable thing in any farm is soil. Soil is a national wealth. But only fertile soil allows you to get complete food for humans and animal feed. In addition, it is much easier to cultivate fertile soil, especially by hand, than barren soil.

The natural fertility of the soddy-podzolic soils of the Northwestern region of Russia is very low - there is little organic matter and humus, the content of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium available to plants is low, the amount of trace elements is at the most critical level, the acidity is very high, the physical properties are unfavorable for the cultivation of many vegetables and fruits. - berry crops. And now, under the influence of unfavorable natural and climatic factors and especially irrational human activity, soil degradation is taking place.

Creation of fertile soil requires knowledge, skills, and certain material and financial costs. However, all difficulties are easily surmountable, there would be a desire, and the costs will pay off in the first year.

Let's consider all areas of this work in more detail.

Soil is a home for plants, a kitchen, and a pantry. In addition, the soil is a complex economic and residential complex for various soil living organisms, where there is waste disposal, and funeral teams, and factories for the production of new products, and chemical plants, where everything is processed to form the simplest compounds of a humic nature and nutrients for plants.

The first rule for gardeners and gardeners: pay more attention to the soil, put it first, create fertile soil, and then it will take care of the harvest and free up your time and energy for a pleasant summer vacation. There are a number of methods, systems and technologies that can be used to do this. Let's consider all this in detail.

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What is fertility?

Soil fertility is the ability of the soil to provide plants with all the conditions and substances necessary for their development; it is the ability to provide plants with beneficial microorganisms, carbon dioxide, optimal physicochemical and acid-base properties, all nutrients, water and oxygen. Therefore, it is necessary to work to increase soil fertility in all these areas simultaneously.

For a better understanding, we will consider them separately - each in the order of mention and, accordingly, in importance and in its meaning.

The first duty of a fertile soil is to provide plants with beneficial microorganisms. It is known that the soil consists of a mineral and organic phase (soil skeleton), soil air (air phase), soil solution (liquid phase) and a living phase (soil living organisms that live in the soil). Each of these phases in soddy-podzolic soil does not fully meet the requirements of plants and needs to be improved accordingly.

It is necessary to start improving the soil from the living phase, as the most dynamic and most vulnerable. Each square meter of soil up to 25 cm deep is home to an average of 10 kilograms of various living things. This is significantly more than the entire population of the earth. In terms of weight, this is much more than the harvest that a gardener and vegetable grower receives from each square meter in his country house.

It turns out that the living phase of the soil is more important than the entire grown crop of plants, therefore, you need to take care of the living phase of the soil first of all, since it not only exists in the soil, but lives and works, feeds and requires a lot of energy and nutrients. According to the state of the living phase, it is determined: is the soil alive or dead? This billion-dollar army of living organisms living in the soil, on the one hand, works for plants, it determines and changes all the properties of the soil and creates real fertility, and on the other hand, it requires a lot of food and energy for itself, for its normal life.

Providing them with both food and energy in sufficient quantities is the most important task of the gardener and vegetable grower. If the gardener does not take good care of the soil, the living phase of the soil always dies first, and the most useful organisms die faster than others.

Both useful and dangerous organisms live in the soil. It is important to maintain them in the right ratio, that is, you need to take more care of the life of beneficial soil inhabitants. If the gardener does not care about the preservation of useful microflora in a working state, then harmful organisms come to replace it.

Plants in this case are affected by diseases and pests and also die. Fertile soil is always rich in microorganisms useful for plants, and in infertile soil there is always a lack of them, most often there is a lack of rhizosphere, plants living in the root zone, living freely in the row spacings, and nodule bacteria found in root nodules in symbiosis with plants.

All organisms living in the soil require a lot of energy and food for themselves. They do not use solar energy, but extract it from organic matter. If the soil is low in organic matter and nutrients, then these organisms become competitors for cultivated plants and take away their food and water.

Therefore, the first task is to provide a good source of energy for the living phase of the soil, then provide enough water and food. This is easily done by applying organic fertilizers to the soil. The best of them is fresh or semi-rotten manure, which contains a lot of organic matter as a source of energy and minerals as a food source.

Consequently, organic fertilizers are obligatory fertilizers that allow ensuring the normal vital activity of the living phase of the soil and creating its high fertility. In addition, with organic fertilizers, plants receive an additional set of beneficial microorganisms..

Read the next part. Soil care: air, mineral and organic components →

Gennady Vasyaev, associate professor,

chief specialist of the

North-West regional scientific center of the Russian Agricultural Academy

Olga Vasyaeva, amateur gardener