Soil Amendment

A fellow tomatophile from Natchez, Mississippi wrote to ask about soil amendment, which brings up a key gardening issue: it's all about the soil!

Rich, loamy earth is every gardeners delight. You know the stuff: it's dark as a devil's food cupcake; it drains like a dream; it holds it shape without being sticky; seeds love it, worms love it, your neighbors try to steal it...

Loamy soil gets this way by having just the right balance of sand, silt and clay. Its texture is ideal as it holds nutrients for young plants without suffocating their tender roots. If you’ve been blessed with this type of soil in your backyard, my advice to you would be to hold onto that plot of land, love it, nourish it, and then pass it on to your grandkids. It’s a goldmine you’re sitting on.

Sadly for many of us, (myself included!) the soil in our gardens bares little resemblance to this fantasy of cultivation. More often our soil is hard, dry, stiff, clayey, soggy, sandy, or shallow. So what do we do?

We amend it!

The best way to go about this is to mix in copious amounts of organic material into your garden beds to correct the problem. That means if your soil is hard and compact, you’ll need to loosen it up with a good tilling, then keep it loose by mixing in compost or leaf mold and, if it’s very clay-like, some sand to even out the texture and help with drainage. If your soil is very sandy, drainage is not a problem, but loss of nutrients will be. Add lots of compost to the mix to give your plants the boost they need.

Of course another solution altogether is to skip the soil amendments and head straight to the (nearly) fail-proof method of container gardening. Growing your precious tomatoes in the controlled environment of a container means as long as you choose a good potting mix and a deep enough pot, you need never worry about trivialities like texture and nutrient content. Just keep your potting soil evenly watered, add a little organic fertilizer now and again, and you’re on your way.