• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Growing Organic Food in Your Backyard

Grow Better Food!
  • Home
  • Start Here
  • Seed Starting
  • Hoop House
    • Grow Tomatoes in a Hoop House
    • Grow Cucumbers in a Hoop House
    • How to Grow Carrots in Winter
    • Winter Sowing Made Better
  • Sponsor
  • Search
  • Subscribe

How to Improve Your Soil

by Bill Brikiatis

Updated: November 22, 2020

It’s easier than you think to improve your soil. In fact, no matter what’s wrong with your soil, you can improve it with this five-step plan. That’s right, the same five-steps will fix any soil problem you have.

If only everything was this straight forward.

Well there are a couple of exceptions to this rule. If you have a mineral deficiency or the wrong pH, this plan probably won’t help. I say probably because it depends on the specifics. It may still work.

But for just about anything else, this will work.

Five Steps to improve your soil

1. Top dress with compost. You can never put too much compost on your soil. This is especially true if you’ve made the compost yourself.

The best compost comes from a well diversified portfolio of organic plant materials and manure. In the fall, I also apply a layer of shellfish compost and let it continue to compost in my garden over the winter.

Related: How to Compost Faster

Improve Your Soil
Top dressing with compost is probably the best thing you can do to improve your soil.

2. Cover your soil with mulch. Rain will pound bare soil into a powder. Powdery soil does not hold the proper nutrients. It may even form a brick-like texture that roots can’t penetrate.

Mulch is the secret to protecting your soil from the pummeling and, depending on what you use for mulch, it may also add nutrients to the soil.

You shouldn’t grow plants in the same plant family in the same location year after year.

— Suburban Hobby Farmer

3. Plant cover crops. I plant cover crops each fall to add organic matter to the soil.

White clover is what prefer because it also adds nitrogen. But I’ll plant winter rye if it’s too cold to grow clover in the fall. The only problem with rye is that if there isn’t enough snow during the winter to smother it, you may have difficulty turning it (and killing it) because the root system will be so thick.

Make sure you turn your cover crop the right way. If you dig too deep it will upset the natural soil structure.

Although, this isn’t all bad. Turning deeply enough to raise the subsoil may bring minerals to the top layer of soil.

Most people would agree that, with cover crop, you should only slice off the very top two or three inches of top soil and turn it under. This keeps the natural soil structure in place with the most organic matter on top, where it belongs.

Related: Why Grow Cover Crop in Your Vegetable Garden, and Which Ones?

4. Rotate your plant families. Most experts suggest that you shouldn’t grow plants in the same plant family in the same location year after year. In fact, you should wait for three years, or even longer if possible, to plant that family in that location again.

This is called crop rotation. The reason you rotate crops is to help prevent nutrient depletion of the soil.

Crop rotation works because it varies the nutrients being removed by the plants. It also helps to reduce pest problems.

The problem with this is most backyard gardeners don’t have the room needed to not grow the same plant family in a location for three years.

Related: Growveg is the most popular garden planning software. Read my review

Instead, I make it a rule not to plant the same crop in the same location for two years in a row. This is about as much as I can manage given the space I have to garden.

5. Rest the soil. I rest one of my raised beds every year. I only grow cover crops in it. But even though I don’t plant a vegetable, I still top dress with compost.

Each year I’m tempted to use the resting bed because there’s never enough room to grow all the varieties I want to, but I don’t. It’s a worthwhile investment in my future harvest.

Gardening Tips

How to Improve Soil

All the ways I know to improve your soil.

To summarize: If you want to improve your soil, do the following:

  1. Top dress with compost
  2. Mulch the soil
  3. Plant cover crops
  4. Rotate your plant families
  5. Rest the soil

If you do, there’s a very good chance that you’ll have increasingly better soil year after year.

Related articles you might enjoy:

  1. What’s the Best Materials for Making Raised Beds?
  2. Top Five Vegetable Gardening Books
  3. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings

Suburban Hobby Farmer is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Pin
Share
Tweet

Filed Under: 1. Beginner -- Easy to Complete, Compost Tagged With: Planning, soil

Primary Sidebar

Meet the Blogger

Bill Brikiatis

Hello! I’m Bill Brikiatis. I started this website in 2010 to help you get better at growing organic food in your backyard.

I’ve been growing fruits and vegetables for nearly all my life. And I'm over 60.

That’s not to say that I don’t make mistakes. I make plenty, then I write about them so both you and I get better at growing great things to eat.

You can read more about me and Suburban Hobby Farmer on my about page.

Most Popular on SHF

  1. How to Get Free Seeds from the U.S. Government. It's Easy If You Know How
  2. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets in the Vegetable Garden
  3. Which Seed Starting Mix is Best? I Tested Them
  4. What Are the Benefits of Pruning Tomato Plants?
  5. I've Used a Rain Barrel Downspout Diverter for 10 years. Here's What I Know.
  6. Grow Millions of Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  7. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the One I Bought.
  8. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  9. Can you plant potatoes in the fall? Absolutely!
  10. What are the Best Potting Benches for Vegetable Growers?

Search This Site for Articles

Growing Tomatoes

Growing Tomatoes

Learn Everything I Know About Growing Tomatoes

Extending the Growing Season

  1. A Hoop House is a Tomato Growing Machine
  2. Coldframe Kits Make It Easy to Extend the Growing Season
  3. Grow a Million Cucumbers in a Hoop House
  4. I Shopped for Hoop House Kits. A Review of the Three I Considered
  5. Growing Salad Greens in Winter. Here's How to Do It
  6. Better Tomatoes with Walls O Water
  7. How to Grow Carrots in Winter
  8. Winter Sowing Made Better

Improving Soil

  1. How to Use Chicken Manure Pellets
  2. Three Important Soil Building Techniques
  3. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  4. What is "Deep Litter" in a Chicken Coop?
  5. Why Grow Cover Crop and Which Ones?
  6. Mulching Raised Garden Beds
  7. Five Gardening Ideas from Building Soils Naturally
  8. Should You Use Neptune's Harvest Liquid Fertilizer?
  9. How to Use Aquarium Fish Water to Fertilize Plants
  10. Using Chop & Drop to Improve Your Soil
  11. How to Improve Your Soil
  12. What is OMRI? Why Should Organic Gardners Care?
  13. Winter Ground Covers for Vegetable Gardens

Collecting Water with Rain Barrels & Downspout Diverters

  1. My Automatic Downspout Diverter
  2. Rain Barrel Downspout Diverters
  3. Fixing an Overflowing Rain Barrel
  4. Oatey Mystic Rainwater Collection System / Downspout Diverter

Composting Articles

  1. Do Tumbling Compost Bins Work?
  2. How to Compost Faster
  3. Worm Composting Not So Easy
  4. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  5. Worm Composting Not So Easy, Part II
  6. Free, 77-page Worm Composting Guide
  7. Grasscycling and Composting Grass Clippings
  8. The Best Worm Food
  9. Making Compost in a Chicken Coop

Footer

My Recommendations

  • Start Here
  • Subscribe
  • Things I Like

SHF Info

  • Advertising Info
  • Affiliate Policy
  • Article Sponsorship
  • Privacy

Blogger

  • About
  • Contact

© Suburban Hobby Farmer 2020