Improve Soil With Organic Matter

Reader Contribution by Anna Twitto

Some people are lucky enough to live in an area with ideal soil composition and enjoy lovely rich black earth in which practically anything will grow beautifully. Most people, however, don’t have perfect soil served to them on a silver platter and have to find ways of working around what they do have.

We have heavy soil with high clay content around here. When it rains, it’s sticky and slippery, and during the dry season it gets all rock-hard and cracked. Roots of plants hardly have any room to breathe. Pulling weeds is a real pain. I know what kind of soil I would like to have – looser, fluffier and more yielding – but this isn’t a goal to be achieved in a single day.

I’m no expert on soil, but I do know that practically any soil – whether it’s sandy, or has a high clay content, or is somewhere in between – can benefit from generous amounts of organic material being worked into it. Back when we used to keep goats, there was a place in our yard with plenty of brush that needed to be cleared and I often tethered the goats there. Apart from the brush it was pretty arid, but next year, beautiful tall lush grass sprung up there as if by magic. It was goat manure, left over winter to rot and decompose, that did the trick.

If you have the possibility to haul a big load of nice old manure – possibly with old straw or wood shavings, or other organic material – onto your property and work it into the soil, it’s wonderful. Look around you; some people might keep horses, goats or sheep. Friends of ours have recently sold their sheep, and have their old sheep-pen full of old straw mixed with droppings. We’re now working out a plan of getting this organic matter to our place. Free-range chickens also do good, fluffing up the soil where they dig, leaving their droppings here and there and turning the home compost pile.

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