How to make the soil loose - my tips and reviews of methods. How to make the soil loose, fertile, is there any benefit from green manure, interesting links How to break up lumps of earth in the garden

Happy owners of dacha acres know well that it is impossible to obtain rich land on a plot without effort. This requires a lot of work. But before you begin the transformation, it is important to determine its initial state. This determines which additives to use and in what quantities. How to make the soil loose and fertile will be discussed in our article.

How to make the soil loose and fertile

Ideally, the natural soil from the site can be taken to an agricultural laboratory, where a full analysis will be done. Its results will show exactly how to optimize the soil in your garden. Unfortunately, such testing is not available to most owners. No problem! Some characteristics can be determined independently, for example, mechanical composition. It is responsible for air and moisture content. You can recognize it yourself if you moisten a small amount of earth with water and form a ball out of it. As a result:

• the figurine crumbles, which means the soil is sandy;
• the ball can be rolled into a cord and formed into a ring - the soil is considered clayey.

In the first case, additives are needed to retain moisture. You can loosen heavy soil using coarse sand or bottom peat. Any type of soil will need nutritional supplements; the best ones are organic fertilizers.

Fertilization with manure

Animal waste products contain a full range of substances necessary for plants. This is why adding organic fertilizers makes the soil fertile. Any type of manure – cow, pig or horse – is applied to garden and garden crops. Attention! It is important to follow these rules:

1. Fresh fertilizers can only be applied in the fall to empty areas, where there are no plantings, for example, in a vegetable garden. Manure in this form is an aggressive substance that is dangerous for plants. Therefore, it must be added to the soil in advance, 5–6 months before planting. During this time, it will be converted to a safe state, and nutrients will become available to plants. The additive not only serves as a top dressing, but also acts as a leavening agent for the garden soil.
2. Rotted fertilizers can be used in the spring, during planting.

• horse – 5–6 kg;
• cow - 4–5 kg.

The amount of rotted manure is reduced by half. Pig manure is not recommended to be applied fresh, even in the fall, due to the high content of aggressive nitrogen in ammonia form. The fertilizer must be kept for at least a year until it completely rots. It is better to mix it with horse or cow milk or put it in compost.

Mulching with grass clippings

Can be used from early spring to late autumn. This type of soil fertilization is classified as MDU - slow-acting fertilizers. The use of mulch allows you to:

1. Make the soil loose and soft in the garden and garden.
2. Retain moisture by reducing evaporation.
3. Provide constant feeding thanks to the gradual decomposition of the mulch.

Grass clippings are an effective loosening agent for heavy clay soils.

Planting plants with long roots

Proponents of organic farming recommend improving soil quality with the help of green manure. Plants are sown whose roots contain nodule bacteria that capture and fix nitrogen from the air. Thus, a natural, environmentally friendly fertilizer is obtained. Thanks to the powerful root system, green manure makes the soil crumbly and aerates it. This is especially important for heavy or peaty soils. To improve the structure and fertility of the soil, leguminous plants are most often used, for example, lupine, peas, alfalfa, vetch or beans. Even if your site has fertile soil, it needs to be improved periodically. To make the chernozem loose, it is also sown with green manure. This is more environmentally friendly than adding bulk additives and digging.

Green manure

Improving the soil is not a one-time event. You need to maintain optimal condition regularly. To do this, it is not necessary to purchase expensive fertilizers. You can use plant material that is available at each site:

• mowed lawn grass;
• weeded weeds;
• clipped shoots;
• wilted flowers, etc.

It's essentially garden waste, but can be turned into an effective fertilizer. Experienced gardeners offer useful tips on preparing green fertilizers. Here is one of them:

• a large capacity container, for example a barrel, is filled two-thirds with crushed plant residues;
• fill with water to the top;
• leave for a week and a half, stirring daily.

Before feeding, the resulting concentrated solution is filtered and diluted in a ratio of 1:10.

other methods

To improve the structure of heavy soil, the easiest way is to use coarse-grained washed river sand. To make light soil from medium loam, you will need 21 kg/m2. This is about one and a half buckets with a volume of 10 liters. The sand is evenly distributed over the surface and dug to a depth of 20–25 cm, to the full bayonet of a shovel. When preparing a plant mixture for seedlings, sand is almost always used. It is mixed with peat and compost to obtain a light nutrient substrate. Fertilizers that contain calcium are good leavening agents:

• slaked lime;
• dolomite flour;
• ash.

They are added to acidic soils to neutralize the pH level. Sometimes soil optimization on a site is a lengthy and costly process. It’s easier to take fertile soil from manufacturers who mix all the necessary components in advance.

Whether to improve the soil on the site yourself or add a ready-made mixture is up to everyone to decide for themselves. It depends on your financial capabilities and the amount of work.

We look up to nature

What to do? Of course, to grow, groom, cherish the inhabitants of the soil, and loosen, just loosen the soil so as not to harm them! Instead of a shovel, you will use a Fokin flat cutter. It has a pointed end, so you will use it to make furrows, first along, then across, deepening it into the soil by about 5 cm. Then, with the flat part of the flat cutter, lightly dig up this layer.

If necessary, you can rake it out. By the way, a rake can also be used to loosen the top layer of soil. The best choice for such surface cultivation of the soil is a manual cultivator, which, in addition to wheels loosening the soil, also has a cutting plate.

You can do this work with a sharpened hoe, a Strizh weeder and other devices. There are quite a few of them on sale now. The only requirement for such tools is that they must be very well sharpened. And don't believe in self-sharpening. The tool must be sharpened before each use, then the work will go smoothly. These tools should not be buried deeper than 5 cm into the soil, and they should not mix the layers. You can dig with a regular shovel, but only superficially.

Don't worry about the roots, they will find their way into the deeper layers, penetrating into the microchannels left by the root system of the previous occupants (if you didn't destroy them by digging). So the roots do not need deep digging.

Why is humus needed? Humus is the most valuable component of any soil. It is created by earthworms and soil microorganisms. Therefore, a completely reliable indicator of soil fertility is the number of earthworms living in it. The more there are, the more fertile the soil. The more humus, the darker the color of the soil.

Humus- complex organo-mineral formation. Its main part is humic acids and fulvates.

Humic acids“glue”, like synthetic glue, the smallest lumps of soil into aggregates that do not stick together. Thus, a soil structure is created in which between these units water and air easily penetrate into the soil thickness.

Fulvates carry a negative electrostatic charge on their surface and attract positively charged ions of chemical elements found in the soil solution, in particular nitrogen. That is, they help saturate the soil with minerals.

One square meter of soil 25 cm thick (topsoil) weighs about 250 kg. If there is about 4% humus in the soil, then these 250 kg contain only 10 kg. During the season, plant roots destroy about 200 g of humus from each square meter of arable layer. To restore it, you will need to annually add a bucket (5 kg) of humus per meter of soil surface. If, instead of humus, you add a green mass of green manure, weeds, grass, leaves or other unrotted organic matter, then their amount should be increased three times.

Sometimes the question is asked: Where is it better to add organic matter - to the top layer of soil or to the bottom? It is more economically feasible to apply it to the lower layer of soil. That is, to build up the fertile layer of soil from below. At the depth of the shovel bayonet, 6 times more humus is formed than in the upper layer with the same amount of added organic matter. But digging is only permissible in a layer of 5 cm. What to do?

If your soil is very poor(gray color indicates that the soil contains only 2% humus), the first digging should be done as follows. Mark the bed. To avoid trampling the soil, place a board across the bed, moving it away from the edge to the width of a spade bayonet. Standing on the board, remove the soil and pile it near the end of the bed. Use a pitchfork to loosen the bottom layer. Fill the dug trench with a green mass of weeds or grass clippings and move the board further. Now, without turning over, place the soil removed from the next trench onto the green mass. Loosen the bottom layer in the second trench with a fork, put the green mass into it, move the board even further, and so continue until the end of the bed. When the last trench is filled with green mass, transfer to it the soil that was removed from the very first trench and piled near the end of the bed. The most important thing in such digging is not to turn the soil over. In all subsequent years, you will add green mass of weeds or sawdust, leaves and other organic matter to the surface of the bed. Then it will need to be lightly sprinkled with earth or dug up together with the top layer of soil to a depth of no more than 5 cm. This work is best done in late summer or early autumn, so that by spring most of the organic matter has time to rot.

But what if you have solid clay or heavy loam on your site? Moreover, don’t dig. Books often recommend adding sand and organic matter to clay soils. But anyone who has done this knows that after a season the sand goes deeper, and clay comes to the surface again. You will need to annually add a bucket of sand and a bucket of organic matter to every square meter of soil surface for 12-15 years, until finally the land becomes more or less suitable for a vegetable garden. Scientists' calculations show that to sand just one square meter of clay soils, you will need about 150 kg of sand! And this is only for one square meter! Why do you need such hard labor?

If you have very dense soil, build up the fertile layer on top. That is, put compost on the site of the future bed. So that you are not embarrassed by its unpresentable appearance, fence the beds with some slats, poles and sow peas, nasturtiums or climbing decorative beans in front of them, or plant beans, sunflowers, corn, and cosmos around the perimeter. Only leave a passage on the side you can't see to fill the pile.

So, without humus in agriculture, “neither here nor here.” It will have to be systematically increased, as nature does, by adding organic matter. Moreover, every year the plants themselves return more to the soil than they take out of it.

The easiest way to grow humus is through a compost heap. To speed up the process of humus formation, you should use live bacteria, which are contained in the preparations "Vozrozhdenie" and "Baikal EM-1". This should be done in mid-summer.

Why does the land become impoverished? This is a frequently observed phenomenon. The soil stops "working". She is “on strike” and her harvests are falling. And then we begin to increase the dose of mineral fertilizers, buy or store manure. But after a while everything “returns to normal.” What's the matter?

Nature does not sow green manure, does not apply manure in such quantities as we do, but from year to year it grows huge forests and meadows, and everything is in order. But the fact is that plants build up organic mass much more than what they remove from the soil by destroying humus. That is, they do not deplete, but on the contrary, increase the fertility of the land. How do they succeed, and why can’t we?

Have you seen nature raking and carrying away, and even burning fallen leaves and dead plants? What are we doing? Not only do we remove the nutrients stored in the fruits from the soil with the harvest. And we don’t return the loot. We also remove fallen leaves and plant debris, interfering with the normal process of humus restoration. Where does it come from if there is no source material? In addition, with endless digging we destroy the natural structure of the soil. And in such soil there are practically no inhabitants. Notice how barren soil looks like gray, lifeless dust.

Usually to improve soil fertility It is recommended to sow the field with green manure or leave it to “walk”, that is, not to sow anything on it. It, of course, will immediately be overgrown with weeds, which, like specially sown green manure, are recommended to be dug up after a year.

Beginning gardeners will ask: What are green manures? These are plants on the roots of which live bacteria that can take nitrogen from the air and accumulate it in the soil. The green above-ground mass, being dug up along with the soil, will introduce into it the organic matter necessary for the life of microorganisms.

Peas, alfalfa, vetch, clover, and lupine can be sown as green manure. It is also recommended to add bacterial preparations AMB, Azotobacterin, Phosphorobacterin, Nitragin. That is, we are invited to populate the field with bacteria. The “walking” field is by no means kept fallow, that is, “naked.” It is populated by plants, and, oddly enough, the tired, depleted soil does not tire further, but is perfectly restored.

Why does it get tired and exhausted in our country, but not in nature? Yes, because she doesn’t dig and doesn’t take anything away from her fields. Everything returns back to the ground, and with high interest. So let's follow nature, take less, give more. How to do it?

Do not remove weeded weeds from the beds, from under bushes and trees, but leave them lying between the rows and under the plantings. Don't worry, they will disappear in a couple of weeks because the worms will drag them down their tunnels into the ground. Until then, they will serve as a mulching material for some time, that is, they will cover open areas on the soil and prevent moisture from evaporating from the surface and preventing the soil structure from collapsing. Do not remove the roots and above-ground parts of plants after harvesting. Leave everything in the garden beds.

If you are afraid of pathogens on these plant residues, then treat the beds directly over them with the drug “Fitosporin”. The live predator bacterium contained in this preparation will “eat” the causative agents of any fungal and bacterial diseases during the fall. It, unlike the bacteria mentioned above, dies not at one degree of frost, but at minus 20 degrees. If the winter turns out to be warm, then it will safely overwinter in the soil and will continue to serve as a nurse in your beds. And if the winter does turn out to be harsh, there is usually a lot of snow, and under this coat she has a great chance of surviving.

Of course, pests that overwinter under plant debris cannot be destroyed in this way, but they can also be dealt with if you take good care of your pets.

So, the reason for the impoverishment of the soil lies in unreasonable land use. If all the time you only remove nutrients from the soil along with the harvest, then there will be nothing left in it. We have to return it someday.

G. Kizima, gardener

The presence of loose, fertile soil on a plot is one of the main conditions for obtaining a rich harvest. It is important to understand that “loose” soil is well-structured, porous soil. To have such qualities, you should not always rely on natural processes; it is better to use some fairly simple techniques from experienced gardeners. With these little tricks, the soil in the garden will always be loose.

Soil structure

Soil structure is its ability to break down into small pieces. Well-structured soil easily breaks down into small grains measuring 0.25-10 mm. The same definition applies to the concept of “loose soil”.

Soil structure includes 4 main components:

• mineral base (50−60%);
• organic matter (10%);
• air (15−25%);
• water (25−35%).

Loose soil is porous, it allows moisture and air to pass through well, so plants take root and develop better. Light loamy soils have almost ideal performance.

To check the condition of the soil in your area, it is enough to conduct a small test: take a small lump of dry earth in a shovel, toss it, catch it again with a shovel, and then examine the size of the parts into which the soil has crumbled. If they are more than 10-15 mm, then most likely the site has heavy, poorly structured clay soil, which requires some correction of the composition by the gardener.

Lineup changes

To transform clay soil into loose soil, you will need river sand, which must be evenly distributed over the surface. For 1 m² you will need 24 kg (about 15 l) of sand. After this, the soil should be dug up to a depth of 20–25 cm.

It would be useful to attract “helpers” to the site - earthworms, which in the course of their life activities loosen the soil well. In order for these invertebrates to settle on the site, it is enough to place a small compost heap on the territory or mulch the plants with organic materials (for example, rotted compost or dried mowed grass). You can also prepare a special infusion:

• place the roots, stems and leaves of dandelions with a total weight of 1 kg into a container;
• fill them with 10 liters of water;
• leave to infuse for 10-14 days;
• strain;
• dilute with water in a ratio of 1:10.

Apricot Alyosha

This infusion should be watered over the soil, avoiding beds with beets and cabbage.

Manure and humus are not only excellent fertilizers, but also soil loosening agents. Fresh manure should be applied 6 months before planting. For example, this can be done in the fall after digging, distributing fertilizers over empty areas. The rotted product can be applied in the spring.

Fertilizer rate per 1 m²:

• cow - fresh 4−5 kg, rotted 2−2.5 kg;
• horse - fresh 5−6 kg, rotted 2.5−3 kg.

Humus, consisting of peat and rotted manure, can be further enriched with nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers. This will significantly increase the effectiveness of humus both as a top dressing and as a leavening agent.

Humus needs to be distributed over the surface (20 kg will be needed per 1 m²). Then clay soil should be dug up, going 15-20 cm deep, and sandy soil, going 30 cm deep.

Another effective and at the same time safe method is mulching the soil with mowed grass. Mulching will retain moisture in the soil and protect it from the formation of compactions and crusts after watering and precipitation.

You should start mulching heavy clay soil in June, when it warms up well. The cut grass needs to be dried a little and then laid out in a layer of 7-8 cm. In the fall, the mulch should be dug up along with the soil, which will lead to the formation of humus.

You can also make fertilizer from grass clippings. Other plant material is also suitable for this purpose - leaves, flowers, weeds, tops. To prepare fertilizer, you need:

• fill 2/3 of the barrel with chopped plant material;
• fill with water (to the top of the barrel);
• cover the barrel with film, making several holes in it for gas exchange;
• leave to infuse for 7-10 days, stirring daily.

Pros and cons of high-yielding Khabarovsk apricot

The resulting mixture must be filtered and diluted with water in a ratio of 1:10. After this, you can water the beds. The solution will quickly be absorbed by plants, protect their roots from pests and diseases, and also reduce the acidity of the soil and make the soil softer.

Many people, including me, used to think that making the soil fertile and loose was as easy as adding mineral fertilizers and adding sand or clay if necessary. dug up - it resulted in fertility. I always didn't like it - that's all

It’s the same as buying vitamins at a pharmacy and starting to eat them - at best, they will go through transit, since they are not absorbed. They can also cause harm by introducing an imbalance in metabolism.

Fertility consists of more than just fertilizers. Fertile soil contains:

• all necessary nutrients in a form and ratio that is assimilated by the plant;
• air;
• moisture

How to make the soil exactly like this?

Let's look at the trees, shrubs of parks and forests. No one ever thought of sprinkling the ground around them with mineral water, and even burying it all. Leaf and coniferous litter cover the ground from year to year; the previous layer decomposes, fertilizing. replenishing wasted food. When this foliage, as well as coniferous litter, rots, and the grass cover (roots, stems) decomposes, humus is formed every year, which contains nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and microelements, and all this is absorbed by the plants.

How humus or humus is formed - bacteria work, in the upper layer they are aerobic, and worms also help - they will turn organic remains into food for the earthly inhabitants of parks and forests. Moreover, due to the enrichment of these residues, passages from worms, weed roots, other vegetation, insects, microorganisms, the soil will become loose. porous, accessible to air and water.

I wish we could stop using mineral fertilizers, try to protect our gardens from soil infertility, diseases, pests, simply by increasing the immunity of our wards. Then you won’t have to use chemical fertilizers, and this will improve our immunity and improve our health!

How then can we increase fertility, make the soil loose and alive?

Think. we need to try to do as nature does - bring plant remains into the surface layer, carefully embedding them to a depth of 5-7 centimeters with a hoe and similar tools, or simply leaving them on the surface. You don’t have to loosen anything - microorganisms and worms will do their job: we fed them - from these organic residues that they passed through themselves, they manage to make humus, the most fertile loose layer, it is very small, but effective for growing our pets.

At the same time, moisture absorption and breathability will increase.

There is one more very important thing: if we dig up our humus soil layer now, we will destroy its living inhabitants, the looseness will disappear, and the excess air entering at the same time will transform the humus into mineral salts, which will become unavailable for plant nutrition. That's it. That is, we ourselves destroy looseness and fertility with our own hands. Such soil is lifeless.

From all of the above, it is logical to assume: we do not dig the ground, but only embed superficial organic materials into it. If you water them with an infusion (five days old) of nettle and dandelion, the process of decomposition of organic matter will accelerate. It is advised to add EM preparations (effective microorganisms) there, but I have not tried this. I mulch all my plantings, that is, I cover the ground with weeded grass. Immunity increases - diseases are avoided!

I wrote this article and thought: man is somewhat akin to the rest of the animal world, he also processes food, turning it into organic residues. And when disasters and cataclysms happen on earth, doesn’t this happen in retaliation for the fact that a person organizes the same terrorist attacks on underground inhabitants. As it comes back, it will respond.

You can watch a video on how to make the soil fertile.