Every previous season of growing drains your garden soil of nutrients. Chemical fertilizers will only improve one aspect of good soil conditions. To have healthy soil you need organic materials that will hold water and allow the roots to spread easily while growing.
There are a few different methods of adding organic materials to you garden. The least expensive is mulching. This is where you pile up last seasons leftover plants and rotten tomatoes and vegetables and let it break down over winter. We use this method because it is an easy way to empty out the garden at the end of the season.
Some people also use animal waste but you have to be careful when you do this. If you see a local horse farm offering free manure you have to understand that there is a very strict process to turn it into something usable in your flower or vegetable garden.
The manure must be stacked and allowed to decompose which will raise its temperature to about 160F in the sun for at least 3 days and the pile will need to be turned a few times.
The heating process will kill bad bacteria found in the animal waste and make it usable in your garden. If you skip this step you are basically just filling your yard full of horse sh#@. You will be walking around in it and your kids will be playing in it and if you grow vegetables with it you risk getting very very sick.
If you only have a little garden out back or a row of flowers in front of your house drive to the garden center and get a bag that has gone through processing and don’t risk getting sick.
Adding peat moss is another great way to add organic material to your garden. Peat Moss is a spongy type plant that is harvested from wet swampy bogs. It is chopped into blocks and packaged for distribution. Once it has dried it has a very light consistency. It breaks up into an almost powder and is easily combined into your soil.
Here we have a 50 pound bag or block of Peat Moss that we will add to our garden.
Our raised garden has a base of 4 inches of high quality top soil called mushroom soil but has seen 2 years of good growth and now needs a little conditioning.
First we layout the planting areas using the handle end of our hoe.
We break open the bag of Peat Moss and start to evenly distribute it around the garden with a plastic plant bucket.
Once we know that we have even distribution and none of our planting beds will do without we can begin tilling the peat moss into the ground with a garden hoe.
Because the whole garden is 4 inches deep we will also dig out the pathways between planting areas and add that soil to the top of our beds.
This would be an excellent time to also add Pelletized Lime and Chemical Fertilizer. We added our chemical products a couple weeks back and this final step of adding Peat Moss will be all that is needed before we begin our planting.
Q: How much peat moss should you use?
A: This depends on your soil quality and the money you have to spend. I like to add about an inch on top of 4 inches of soil that needs to be prepared so thats a 1 to 4 ratio but anything is better then nothing. Adding too much realy won’t hurt your soil but there is no need to go over a 25% mixture even if you have pretty heavy clay conditions.
Q: Does Peat Moss replace the need for Chemical Fertalizers?
A: To some extent it does as it will release nitrogen into the plant over time but if you want a high yeild garden like most of us do you will still need to use a bi-weekly application of a liquid fertalizer like Mirical Grow.
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