How To ACTUALLY Fix Any Soil Type. Soil Science 101

I am qualified or I think I'm qualified to speak on this and it's a very common question. Now you can send me on Instagram or Facebook, the Facebook group is another place you could post photos of your soil and I can tell to a degree visually what's going on with that soil and where it lands on this triangle right here. If you have the garden planner, this triangle is in there and that triangle is the exact triangle that soil scientists use to determine what the heck's going on with the soil. So that is used to classify soils, that is used to determine how to reclaim a soil, that is used to determine what can grow in a soil, that is the bible, that is like the codex right there to soil. Now soil can be broken up into three groups, clay, silt and sand and the percentages of each gives you the soil type you have. Now you will be stunned to see the fact that a sand soil is a very small portion of that chart and then clay, pure clay soil on its own is it's a big chunk of it, I will admit. But it's not the whole thing, you can have different forms of clay. The times in which I've seen actual pure clay soil, pretty rare. Most of you have a variation of clay, it's usually, usually under that 40% mark of clay which is, we can do something with, we can do something with the clay that is a 50, 100, whatever percent too but it's, all of your soils are reclaimable. I've seen none of your soils where I'm like, oh yes, it's not workable, you can't do it. So one of the reasons why I advocate for figuring out what's going on with your soil and using your soil to grow is because last time I checked, last time I checked, Mother Nature's been growing in mineral soil, soil, soil for millions of years. This whole pure compost concept, very new, like a blip, not even a blip. I personally think she probably did it right the first time, I'm just gonna go with what she does. Not to mention it's cheaper just to garden with soil than it is to buy compost, so just saying. So the first thing we want to look at is structure. So we want to determine what we have and then we want to do the opposite of it. So if you have a clay soil, you want to add sand and if you have a sandy soil, you want to add clay and no, it doesn't make cement, that is not a thing. So what you're going to do is you're going to get your triangle and the way that you test what your texture is, how am I going to do this without soil because it's frozen outside and it's under snow, you're going to take your soil and you're going to put some in the palm of your hand, you're going to put a little bit of water and then you're going to roll your fingers around in it. This is probably easiest, the ribbon test is a little bit more difficult. And inside of there, you're going to feel something, it's slippery. If it's slippery, then you have higher clay content. If it's slippery with some grittiness to it, then you have some sand in there. Probably have something, maybe a loam or a sandy clay or something, loamy sand in there. And then if you have a fair number of granulars and it's kind of just spreading around your entire palm, it doesn't feel slimy with grains. It just feels kind of uniform in a sense where there's just tiny little grits. It is making a color in your hand. It's spreading on your hand. It's not clumping by any means. That's very likely a loam. Do not touch that. Leave that on its own. Like I said, you can send me photos. I will tell you right off the bat what it is. This is editing Ashley here. I couldn't find really any soil science slash fertility soil specialist doing the test. Only guy I could find was this gentleman that I was showing and he's a geologist. So he's not speaking in terms of garden and soil health and that sort of thing. So if you want a video on how to look at the structure of soil, let me know in the comments down below. I will do that once I have access to soil. I do not mind running around the countryside finding different mixes for you guys just to show you kind of what everything looks like. Leave that alone. If you put it on your hand, you rub it around and it's like very granular. It's not staining your hand brown at all. That is sand. So if you have slimy texture on the hand, then you're going to put sand in. If you've got gritty, no staining on your hand, you're going to put in clay. So the sand you're going to use, the clay you're going to use is going to be just clay. You're going to go to the soil store and you're going to ask for a clay loam or a loam to add to your sandy soil. Mix that in. You're good to go. Talk to you later. The clay people, you want to get a gritty sand. Do not use play sand. That is not what we want to use. We don't want to use something from the beach. We want to use sand. Almost gravel. Very, very, very, very tiny gravel. Coarse sand. Not the smooth stuff. And if you know what I'm talking about, you know what I'm talking about. Remember in the 90s and the 80s and the 70s as kids when we go play in the car park and it was like gritty and gross and you couldn't really make sand castles out of it. That's what you want. You don't want this bougie stuff that you find in the little plastic Fisher Price play sand areas. That is not what you want. You want the gross stuff that you busted your knees open on when you were five, six years old back in the day. I'll talk about how to incorporate that here in a little bit, but that's step one. Once you have a sand, once you have a sand, once you have a soil that is amended or you've captured the amendments, you need to do the opposite of what it is. You want to increase your organics. Now the long game for this is to use cover crops and to plant plants in it and then cut them off at the base, leaving the roots in place. That's the long way to do it. The quick way to do that is to use two forms of compost and or one of the two forms of compost. The first one being inert. The second one being active. I'm, I made those terms up. Those aren't real terms. Inert means a organic that is nearly useless when it comes to nutrients and it's just a really high carbon source. So that would be leaf mold. I've made videos on how to make leaf mold. That would be peat. That would be coconut coir. Peat is not a bad thing. I've done so many videos on this, but just like go check out the videos I've done. If you want to learn more, it's Canadian peat is got a whole story to it. It's completely regulated. It's safe to use. If anything, as a Canadian, you shouldn't be importing coconuts because I don't see coconuts outside. So just saying, but those ones can be put onto the soil service, incorporated into the soil service. I did a video on too much compost and why too much compost is a bad thing and how it can cause blossom end rot and pH issues, et cetera, and so forth. The addition of this inert compost in particular will not have that effect and that will not have that effect at all. And so therefore this can be added in excess, if you will, or to the extent of what you need to turn that soil around. Now, me personally, I've used peat repeatedly on clay soils. I've got a front bed that when I bought the house, it was like a brick. It was a, it was literally like a brick of clay. Now was it pure clay? No. It was like a loam heavy in clay. And one of the ways that I amended this was not with coarse sand. I did use peat. And so what you do in that case is you put the peat in and you mix it in with the soil and you make it homogenous. So by homogenous, I mean, you cannot tell the difference. You couldn't be like, oh, here's my clay and there's my clump of peat. No, I mix them together in harmony. They're completely smooth. And then I topped with mulch. That turned that whole bed around. I don't have issues with that bed anymore. So that is another way to do it. Now, if you don't have access to peat, but you still want to go with organics, then you could use compost. So compost is going to add nutrients. In a clay soil, you're probably not going to need this. In a sandy soil, however, compost is probably the better one to go with because sand in general has very big macro pores. These macro pores aren't great at holding onto nutrients. The fact that they're not great at holding onto nutrients means that that nutrients very often will volatilize or leach out. And my dog's snoring. That will on its own cause nutrient deficiency. So if you've got a clay soil, I would go for the peat. If you've got a sandy soil, I would go for the compost route. The thing that both of them will do is moisture retention and structure. They'll both change those two things for the better. The only difference is the compost adds the nutrients and an influx of diversity and microbes. So that's why I say use it on the sandy soil. You can use it in a clay soil. It's not going to... It's expensive. More expensive than peat. And it's just not going to benefit you that much. The last one. I don't like saying it because the internet wants to scalp me for it. But I will anyways. Because I truly believe it can fix a lot of issues. And that's tillage. Tillage. The bad. The T word. It's worse than slandering God himself. Yeah, tillage. I mentioned tillage as a tool in the toolbox in a video past. And I had someone comment from the Geek Crew. This is a Geek Crew member because they've commented on my videos many, many times. And I want to thank them for that. But they are a organic, no-till farmer's market garden. Meaning they garden on mass scale. And their motto is no-till. Low-till. No-till. And organic. They have... They chimed in on the video and they said, Listen guys, they'll tell you. You know, influencers and stuff will say, Yeah, no-till. No-dig. It's fine. They even realized that at times it is necessary and it is needed. And if they didn't do it, they won't make any money and they wouldn't grow any crop. And that's coming from someone who their brand is on no-dig. No. Low-till. But they still utilize it. On the organic side of things, large-scale farming, no-till is not a thing. Tillage is very common in organic farming systems. So every time you buy organic flour, you can guarantee they tilled it. Because it is one of the only ways to increase microbe activity, which ultimately increases nutrient release, which increases free fertilizer from your soil. And we'll get into that why that is here in a little bit. But the other reason is because it helps with weed management. And there's weeds out there that organically, the only way to destroy them is to till. So don't shoot the messenger. I'm just relaying what industry already does. And why this tool on your little tiny garden is not going to affect Mother Nature or the world negatively. Trust me. Especially if you just do it once or twice. Tillage. What you want to do is you want to add in the organics on the top. You want to add in the opposite soil granular that you believe you need to use on the top. And then you're going to rototill it. And you want to rototill the soil when it is dry, dry, dry, dry, not wet. So in the spring, no, that's not a good time. Wait until things dry out a little bit, just before you begin to transplant and put your seeds in. After you're done tilling, do not walk, do not step, do not anything on that soil unless it's on a plank or a board, something to distribute your weight accordingly. So you don't have like these little spots where you've compacted it you just opened up all that pore space. This is going to do a few things. It's going to first off incorporate those materials that you needed to incorporate to reclaim your soil for all intents and purposes. You're reclaiming your soil to make it so that it can grow plants where it normally didn't grow anything other than grass. And that on its own will increase the biomass. And that increase in biomass will increase the uptake of CO2 for that space. And that will release more oxygen. So overall, you're making that ground from one active tillage session, you're making that soil more valuable to the world around it. That's a bonus. Secondly, after that's completed, you're going to increase microbe activity. Now the increase in microbe activity doesn't have anything to do with the compost or the peat or the change in the texture. What it does have to do with is the fact that it's an influx of oxygen. So soil porosity is a whole science on its own. But essentially what it is, is there's macropores, there's micropores. And in macro and micropores, there are spaces. And in these spaces, there is air and there is water and there is nutrients. Now these three kind of sit in there, not very rarely in harmony. It's usually one or the other, you know, 50-50. It's not uniform by any stretch of the imagination. However, the goal is always to have all three in each pore. And if your soil is compacted, because it's the wrong texture, it's never been tilled, it's only been walked on for years, and you haven't done anything to it, it's not going to have oxygen. That lack of oxygen means no microbe activity. And an increase in oxygen means more microbe activity, more even macro activity, such as worms and beetles and centipedes. Those macro decomposers, they actually move into a space when there's tilled soil. Now that increase in oxygen, that increase in microbes means an increase in nutrients. Now you combine roots that get a lot of air with roots that are getting a ton of nutrients now. And in particular, nutrients that's soil-borne, designed for plants, not, you know, organics or synthetics that need to be further broken down. We're talking pure shot of goodness. You get really explosive growth. You get a very, very happy, healthy garden. Now do you think, I think you should do this all the time? No. Do I think during a drought year in particular, if your soil was tilled last year, if you should till again? Absolutely not. Try to avoid tillage in a scenario like this, what we're going into, if you've tilled in the past. However, if this is a new garden for you, you've never done it before, or you are like, I'm struggling horrifically with this, go put the tillage machine to it. Just go around to get it done. You'll make me later. Just blame it on me. Blame it on me. If someone's like, oh, why'd you till? You're horrible. Just be like, some redhead on the internet told me to do it. And I'll back you up. And if you're watching this video because someone said this redhead told me to do it, hi, hello, my name's Ashley. I will talk to you guys next time. Like, subscribe, comment down below. Comment section is always smarter than I am. And there are people down there that will tell you probably a totally different solution than what I have. And it's probably very valid because I give you theory, they give you practice. Practice sometimes is much more valuable than theory. And the answer is very likely somewhere in the middle. I will talk to you guys next time. Bye!