What are some tips for Making Better Garden Soil?

After 50+ years of experimentation growing most of my food, I can assure you that, with one small exception, you’ve gotten some excellent advice so far. Therefore, I’ll just tell you what I’ve found success with during those 50 years (and some of this has been cut and pasted from an earlier answer of mine to a similar question).

The answer to your question, of course, is “add as much organic matter as possible,” because organic matter lies at the heart of good garden soil. That’s what fuels soil life. The more organic matter you add, the more abundant your soil life will be and the more favorable the conditions for the growth of anything planted there. The remains of plants and animals in that organic matter will form the food supply for an entire symphony of living creatures, including archaea, bacteria, actinomycetes, fungi, algae, and protozoa, as well as a great variety of larger fauna including springtails, mites, nematodes, earthworms, ants, and even insects that spend all or part of their life underground. That’s the organic ecosystem in a nutshell — what was once alive will nourish new life.

Vital Gardening Investment

So that does involve making a lot of compost. But the thing I think most people fail to realize is how much time they have to spend just making and adding compost to their garden. Even I didn’t realize the extent of the time commitment required; I thought I was doing great most of my life since I was spending 50 percent of my gardening time just making compost. Then I read a comment that Barbara Damrosch made (she’s married to Eliot Coleman) and realized that, according to her, even I could stand some improvement. She claimed that a serious organic gardener should be spending 75 percent of his time in the garden just making compost.

Now, just think about that for a moment — or, better still, try it for a month and you’ll develop a whole new appreciation for the value of compost. And no matter how much time you finally decide you can spend making compost, you need to utilize every method available to dramatically increase the organic matter in your soil. The first thing you need to do, then, is to work out a multi-step approach to composting your own kitchen and garden “waste.” So here’s one approach to consider.

Efficient Home Composting Process

First, you need to get some sort of small compost container that can sit on your countertop and be as convenient as your trash can. We use two of these plastic things (I think they’re Hefty freezer containers): We line the one that gets all the mushy peelings with “Select-a-Size” paper towels (clipped to the sides with tiny “bull” clips). The paper towels hold some of the moisture and prevent things from getting too funky, smelly, and moldy in there. (The paper towels also get added to the compost pile and decompose nicely.)When those two containers are full, they get dumped outside into a round 30-gal.

Plastic trash can that’s half-full of straw. When that’s full, I take it down and dump it on a “holding pile” I periodically add a layer of straw that sits right next to my covered compost pile. This keeps me from having to uncover the compost pile more frequently than I’d want to.

When I first started composting, I used a four-pile method: one that I was building (adding to continuously), one that I had recently finished building, one that was in a more advanced state of decomposition (and being turned occasionally with a hay fork), and one that was finished compost that I was using:

As both my garden and the piles grew in size, I moved them over to a spot under the shade of a maple tree. The shade was nice to work in but it turned out to be a big mistake. A maple tree is shallow-rooted so it sent thousands of feeder roots up into my compost piles to enjoy all those nutrients:

Three-Pile Composting System

So I moved everything out into a clearing and continued to refine my method until a three-pile system emerged — a current pile (one that I was spending the entire, present gardening season building), a previous year’s pile (one that I had built the previous season and was turning during the current one with my Troy-Bilt rototiller about once a month), and a finished pile (one that had been built two seasons before, turned with the rototiller the previous season, and was now finished compost that I was able to spread on my garden): Notice that straw at the bottom of the middle pile above? That’s the straw I mentioned a while back that I use to add dry, carbonaceous matter to the pile of wet, green, kitchen, and garden wastes.

For a few years at one point in my life, I would also pick up cage clean-outs from a rabbit shelter (House Rabbit Society) that had over 200 rabbits and add that to my regular vegetable garden compost. In those years, I was making some serious compost!