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The importance and quality of your soil as a gardener should not be underestimated, especially if you’re proud of your flowering plants an prize winning vegetables. The soil make-up can vary drastically from one area to another, and this can make a real difference to what you decide to grow.

Soil can be broken down into some relatively straightforward kinds, which, as a beginner in the garden or as someone who’s keen to understand the differences and how these affect plant growth, these should be understood.

Firstly we’ll look at clay soil. Clay soils are called so because they are heavy in clay content, which makes them heavy, sticky and often wetter than other soils. Poor draining soils are often found to contain heavy clay content, meaning they become water-sodden much more easily. Loosening up clay soil can be achieved by the addition of sand, otherwise it can be hard to work. Clay soils that have good drainage are heavy in nutrients, and plants will do very well.

Sandy soil is the exact opposite of clay soil being well draining and lower in plant nutrients. Sandy soil with a good organic matter content should be able to hold enough moisture and nutrients to make it very successful as a growing medium.

Avoiding chalky soil is sound advice for gardeners because these soils make for poor quality. Soil with a high alkaline chalk content usually contains many stones that often lead to dry soil and it also doesn’t let plants get the nutrients they need.

These are just some of the types of soil that one can encounter with others being peaty and silty soils. With the exception of chalky soil which can make gardening seem worthless because of the extra plant food and organic goodness required, most soil can be put to good use by gardeners.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 5:43 am and is filed under Home and Garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.