Soil is a delicate balance of minerals, organic matter, soil life, air, and water. Knowing how to prepare soil for planting is a basic skill that every gardener should master when gearing up to start a garden.
How To Prepare Soil for Planting
There are a few things you need to know about your soil before you start amending. First, the type of soil, and second, is it nutrient deficient. Only then will you know how to prepare your soil bed.
What Type of Soil Do You Have?
The first thing you want to determine is the type of soil you have. If you are planting in-ground, you will need to spend a little more time figuring this out. In the event you are planting in a raised bed, you will probably have something closer to loamy soil. Whichever soil you have, I’m going to share with you the super simple way to fix it.
Sandy Soil
Sandy soil, when you squeeze a clump of it, will fall apart when you open your hand. While sandy soil would be a better type of soil for allowing roots to spread out and grow, it is not the best kind of soil for growing most plants because it doesn’t hold water long enough for the roots to be able to benefit from it. Precious nutrients leach out of sandy soil much quicker than other soils. This soil needs an amendments such as peat moss, compost or other organic matter that will help it to hold water for longer. A mixture of all three is even better. The more organic matter your soil has, the longer it will hold water.
Clay Soil
Around here, we have granite and clay soil. It’s very fine minerals seem to bind together and make drainage a real problem. In order to be able to plant anything into the ground, we have to amend the soil with plenty of organic matter. Still, in the case of trees, they don’t survive very well because it’s difficult to dig holes large enough to accommodate the root system of a tree.
If you have clay soil like we do, you will be able to squeeze a wet clump of it, and it will remain in a clump. Because it is made mostly of tiny particles, this type of soil needs more of an airy structure or it will compact and prevent your roots’ natural inclination to spread out deep and wide to look for water.
As I mentioned before (in the case of trees around here), clay soil doesn’t drain as well as sandy or loamy soil does. Often the hole you dig for your plant will act as a bowl, and when you water the water remains in the bowl. This keeps roots too wet and causes root rot to occur.
Adding organic matter like bark, sawdust, manure, leaf mold, and compost will help to give your clay soil more of an airy structure, as well as create a more nutritious environment for your plants.
Loamy Soil
Loam is the soil that is most desirable, because of it’s loose, crumbly structure that allows roots to stretch out and grow. It holds water, while still draining well. Loamy soil also has plenty of nutrients and organic matter in it which makes it the best choice for growing your plants.
Even if you have loamy soil, however, you did need to replenish the nutrients after each season. You should add fertilizer, compost, and other nutrients to your soil between plantings if you have a year-round growing season. If your soil gets a rest between growing seasons, add nutrients after your last harvest so it can continue to compost, especially if you are adding “hot” manures to it. (If I’m not using a garden bed, I often will do a little garden bed composting myself.)
Is Your Soil Nutrient Deficient?
It may feel like a really tedious part of garden soil preparation, but let me encourage you to take the time to figure out what your soil needs. The best way to do this is to test the soil where you will be planting your new plants.
You can do this with a chemical soil test kit to determine where your soil is deficient. These kits are very inexpensive, but rely on your ability to eyeball the colors and make a distinction based on the guide they include in the kit. It’s relatively easy, but when I did my soil testing, I wasn’t exactly sure I was right, so I went with “close enough”.
Also available is a digital soil test kit that will measure the color for you, perhaps giving you a more accurate reading on your soil’s nutrient levels. It does cost quite a bit more, but may give you a better return for your money. I have never used one before, so I can’t speak to how well it works.
If you’d like to keep an eye on pH levels without having to do a water test every time, you can use a soil test meter to do that pretty quickly. This comes in handy when you want to plant pH-sensitive plants in a specific part of your garden.
Why Is All That Even Important?
There are many nutrients that plants need to grow and thrive, but the main three are found indicated with three numbers separated by dashes (for example, “10-5-4” as in the photo above) on the boxes of plant food and fertilizers that you buy at your local big box store. These numbers stand for (in this order) nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (potash), and are considered the most important nutrients for our garden.
Nitrogen
Nitrogen’s job is to make your plants nice and green. It also helps your plant’s stems and leaves grow rapidly. You might be able to tell if your plants are nitrogen deficient if their older leaves are turning yellow and falling off, or if your plant has smaller leaves and seems stunted. Plants use nitrogen in huge amounts and very rapidly, and what they don’t use leeches off during rainy weather, or even just with frequent watering.
Phosphorus
This nutrient helps your plants in forming its roots, flowers, and fruit. If your plants have taken on a dull green/purplish tint, are stunted in growth, or are producing flowers and fruit poorly, they may be deficient in phosphorus.
Potassium
A regulator of photosynthesis, potassium helps move vital nutrients from place to place in a plant. It promotes root growth and seed production. Your plants are deficient in potassium if they are growing slowly, appear weak and spindly, attract more pests and disease than usual, and/or have mottled yellow tips and edges (older leaves can look scorched).
Try your hand at making your own liquid or dry potassium fertilizer from banana peels!
Preparing the Soil
Now that you know what kind of soil you have and what it needs, it’s time to put all of those things together and make a plan for your garden soil preparation.
Gather Your Items
When it’s time for me to gather up the items I need to enrich the soil in my garden beds, I usually head over to my local garden center or nursery. The local garden center will have plenty of options for balancing your soil’s nutrients. You can also purchase bags of compost, manure, or potting soil to lend even more nutrients, as well as structure to your soil.
Quick Steps to Amending Your Soil
- Turn your soil – you can do this by hand if you have a small garden, or use a shovel or tiller if your garden is larger.
- Add your soil amendments, at least a ½” thick to improve the structure of your soil, as well as the fertility level.
- Turn the soil so that all of the amendments mix into the first 6-12” of your soil.
- Rake your bed to level it out.
- You are ready to plant!
It would be lovely to think that we could skip these instructions on how to prepare soil for planting, but it’s not realistic. It is more realistic to know that each year there will some work to be done before the planting season.
The investment of a few extra hours before you plant will bring you closer to the results you are looking for, save you valuable time, and the bounty you hope to reap at the end of the season.
I made a big mistake in not looking at a load of soil before it was delivered. It’s sandy clay. Horrible stuff. I’m stuck with it in the raised beds in the high tunnel. Last fall we had 45 yards of bark mulch delivered. As soon as it starts thawing in the spring I’ll be mixing it into this mess to improve drainage. Never too much organic matter!
Great advice, the better prepared your garden is the better your harvest will be!
Yes! Thanks for stopping by, Nancy!
Ours is sandy in some places so we have had to make it healthier over the years. Know what kind of soil you have to work with is the beginning.
Exactly. The basics are so boring, but necessary!
We have a mixiture of different types of soil around our place, some of it is red clay, my main flower garden is properly the best soil seems to be very rich and we try to keep it well fertilizer by using mulch leaves and natural ways. Where we have clay soil is on a pretty steep slope so that helps with drainage a lot. Very useful tips. Thanks for sharing them.
YES–clay soil is great for allowing water to run off. That’s definitely one thing our property does well, lol. Leaves are great to work into soil, they add so much nutrition and structure!
I was very lucky, my farm soil is river loam, it was already lovely and certain area’s have had a lot of compost on it.. the farm is over a hundred years old now and that is a lot of good things for the soil and a lot of bad.. no one thought anything about just putting things in the ground, no one worried about spills and so forth in the same way we do now..
I know, it’s really a shame what has happened with land. It sounds like your land is lovely, and it must bring such peace to you to have less to worry about when growing your food.
I’ve been working on improving my clay soil for the last 8 years…it’s a slow process! Thanks for the tips 🙂
Right? We garden in raised beds, but we still have trees that really struggle in this soil. We’ve lost quite a few, but our citrus does amazing.
Thank you Kristie. This a great article! Enjoyed reading it and love that is it very simple, precise and easy to read. I agree totally with the soil test, I do one annually though I’ve read in many places every-other-year is enough. They are so cheap, I just see it as an great insurance for the new garden season.
For sure. It’s not really that much time if you consider once every year or two!
Great post, Kristi! You gave so much information on getting your soil to where we need it for a productive garden. We have clay soil so it needs a lot of amending!
Hey Shawna! Yeah, that’s pretty much why we use raised bed gardens for our veggies. It’s so hard for anything to put roots down in this soil!
Great information! Amending and preparing your soil is so important. I’m loving cover crops in the fall to help amend some of the nitrogen. All gardeners should know these things!!
Yes, they should! I haven’t done any cover crops before, I’ll have to read more about it and how people in my area do it!
This is excellent! Ours is pretty good sandy loam, but we add to it every year. I’d like to try growing cover crops, but I admit I’m scared about not digging them under properly and then just having a big mess on my hands 😛
Same here, Lacey. Plus I feel like it would be so much work for me to do. I think I need to read up on that a little more!
Thanks for raising awareness about the importance of soils for gardening. Plants need good soil to grow! I would add to your discussion of soil test kits that people should look to their local state university Extension service (in the US) and/or professional labs to get a soil test. The cost is a bit higher (about $20-$30 per test), but it is well worth it for any garden that you want to be productive. The professional soil analyses come with fertilizer recommendations that tell you exactly what nutrients and amendments are needed, so that you don’t over-apply fertilizers (which can be bad for plants and the environment). Highly recommended!
What great timing!
We are preparing to bring in a load of loam for our new raised beds this spring- Your post is surely helpful!
That’s great, WT, I’m so glad you were able to get something out of it! Don’t forget to download my “Top 7 Quick Soil Fixes” cheat sheet foryour garden notebook!
I can’t find the password for Top 7 Quick Soil Fixes Cheat Sheet
Can you email it to me? Luvtb04@gmail.com
Sure, Denna! Coming your way. 🙂
I live on the east coast, Maryland. I sent a soil sample to the university of Delaware for a soil analysis ($17) and it showed I needed nitrogen in my soil. I amended with chicken manure last year I was surprised to see just how much nitrogen tomatoes and peppers use. I’m trying blood meal this year,as the rest of the nutrients are good. enough about me, I was wondering if you think it is a good idea to turn the mulch into the soil?