Why is soil organic matter so important in home gardens?
Home gardening often focuses on plant selection, watering and care, but there is one key factor that should not be overlooked: the soil. The composition of the soil, especially its organic matter content, has a profound effect on the health and yield of your plants. If we really want to be successful in our gardens, it is essential that we understand and care for our soil, as it is the basis for the life and growth of our plants. In this post, we will talk about why soil organic matter is so important and how it affects the health of our gardens.
We had the opportunity to test soil samples from home gardens at several Danuba Graden events. Using our handheld soil scanner, we can determine the following parameters in 8-10 minutes with an accuracy of about 85%: pH, organic matter content, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium content, available nitrogen content, cation exchange capacity, soil temperature and soil moisture.
Since Danuba Garden also scans soil in the field and tests soil samples in the laboratory, we have a pretty good picture of the organic matter content of Hungary's soils, among other things. In intensively farmed fields, this value varies between 0.5 and 3%, but the average is below 2%. Unfortunately, in the case of the domestic soils we examined, this - one would think much more - showed about the same value: between 1.8 and 2.2% of organic matter. Only very occasionally did we find values higher than this. What could be the reason for this?
Home garden - soil improvement
Unfortunately, as in the case of arable land, the practice has spread in home gardens over the past decades of removing the remains of vegetable plants, leaves, branches and twigs in the autumn, digging up the garden, spreading a little fertiliser, or perhaps every few years we bring in some stable manure from the "neighbour", then in the spring we rototill, smooth it out and start sowing. Sound familiar?
What we have achieved over many decades with this method is that the organic matter content of our soils has been terribly reduced, the plants are suffering, we cannot stop watering and fighting plant protection. Only in healthy soil can we successfully grow healthy plants. Just as the stomach is the starting point for the functioning of the human body, so the soil and its organic matter content is the basis for plant production.
Soil organic matter content
How does the organic matter content of the soil affect certain soil properties?
- Physical effect: the organic matter content affects the stability of soil aggregates, water infiltration, water holding capacity, air-water partitioning ratio, reduces crustal growth, improves pore distribution.
- Chemical effect: by increasing the organic matter content, the cation exchange capacity is increased, thus increasing the dynamics of nutrients, which speeds up the mobilisation of nutrients and makes them available to plants.
- Biological impact: soil organic matter provides not only habitat for micro-organisms and larger organisms, but also food. The higher the organic matter content, the greater the number and diversity of soil-dwelling organisms. This not only makes nutrients more absorbable, but also makes plants more resistant to soil-borne infections.
Overall, soil organic matter content plays a key role in increasing soil resilience, i.e. the soil is better able to tolerate external negative impacts such as drought, temperature extremes, compaction, pesticide exposure (Alfred Grand, Austria and Vincent Michel, Switzerland)
Improving soil condition simply
Summarizing cottage gardens too we should put much more focus on improving soil conditions! What can we do to do this?
- Let's do a soil test! This can be done in a lab or with one of these handheld scanners, but even the jar test we showed you in our last newsletter can be very informative.
- While it looks nice to have a weed-free, well-cleaned garden, we are actually removing organic matter from our soils by removing plant debris. In nature, it all goes back into the soil in a beautiful cycle, and we should mimic this in our home gardens. It is therefore recommended to leave plant remains in place or to "decompose" them in a composter with the help of micro-organisms. From Ino Bact N Cell contained in the preparation Bacillus amyloliquefaciensbacteria can be a big help.
Ino Bact N Cell
- In autumn, you can plant your garden with cover crops. Why is this good? By using cover crops, we cover the soil (like leaves in the forest), which prevents it from drying out, protects it from erosion (soil degradation) and nutrient leaching. The Danuba Garden 10 M mulch seed mix contains a high proportion of buttercups, which fix nitrogen from the soil, and a lower proportion of mycorrhizal fungi, which proliferate and provide additional benefits to the subsequent crop. The roots of different species in the mix, of different sizes and shapes, also loosen the soil. If left 'on foot' for the winter, cover crops protect and cover, if mown they enrich our soil with additional organic matter.
10 Vegetable Mulch Mix with Micorrhizal Fungi
- Avoid or minimise soil disturbance, digging, hoeing! Tilling destroys the wormholes, breaks the mushroom threads and destroys the soil structure.
- In addition to leaving plant residues and using cover crops, it is also worth supplementing organic matter from other sources: composted or granulated cattle or chicken manure from garden centres and farm shops, or spraying humic acid on the soil. This can be helped by using Blackjak. A BlackjakThe humic, ulvic and fulvic acids in the water absorb water and nutrients like a sponge. And where there's organic matter, there'll be rich soil life.
Blackjak
- Use mycorrhizal fungi when planting! The fungus, which lives in symbiosis (mutually beneficial coexistence) with the root of the plant, not only multiplies the root's capacity to absorb water and nutrients, but also produces a protein called glomalin. This glomalin protein clumps soil particles together, helping to create a friable soil structure. In the Danuba Garden range Mikomax offers a mycorrhizal fungus.
MikoMax Garden
