Simple Tips for Better Garden Soil
(Page 2 of 4)
April/May 2009
By Barbara Pleasant
Each time you slather on some compost or mulch, you add starter colonies of these helpful fungi to your soil. After that, they basically want peace and quiet. Minimizing soil cultivation is the best way to host a robust mycorrhizal mob, because digging breaks up their hyphal networks. In the off-season, use of oats, rye and other grassy cover crops, on the other hand, turns your garden into mycorrhizal heaven. In nature, these beneficial fungi are always plentiful where deeply rooted grasses grow.
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But how do you not cultivate the soil between plantings? In a few situations, you can practice stubble cropping, which means planting into soil without pulling out or chopping up the remains of the previous crop. For example, you can cut off bygone peas at the soil line and replace them with cucumbers or squash, and fall leafy greens will often thrive when grown over sweet corn stubble.
In addition to finding opportunities for stubble planting, ease back on unnecessary bed renovations in fall, the season in which you are likely to do the most harm. Like plants, most soilborne fungi stop growing when it gets cold. They depend on the growth they made during the summer and fall to ensure their winter survival. When microscopic fungi are killed en masse through cultivation, their decomposition causes a quick wave of nutrient release in the soil (picture a below-ground cover crop). So, cultivating in October — when you have no plans to grow anything until April or May — may set back one of your finest soil resources and waste nutrients your tomatoes would have loved. This entire tragedy can be averted by mulching over your spent beds in fall, and saving your digging for spring.
Whatever the season, mulching is a key way to help your microherd thrive. When researchers from the Southern University Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Louisiana studied the effects of keeping 4 inches of hardwood mulch over the root zones of live oak seedlings, they found that the little trees grew significantly faster, for three likely reasons: The soil’s physical properties improved, its nutrient content increased, and most importantly, the tree roots quickly and efficiently formed beneficial partnerships with soilborne fungi with the help of the mulch. The same things happen in the food garden with lettuce, onions, tomatoes, squash, strawberries and many other garden crops. Compost kick-starts the process, mulch keeps it going, and reduced cultivation protects and prolongs it.
