Part 4: The Dirt on Dirt

I can't express how important soil is to a vegetable garden.  I've said before, you can't fertilize bad soil into good soil.  You've got to start out with a healthy base, and now is the time to do it!

Here in the Bay Area valleys, where we rarely get more than a light frost, we can amend our beds just about any time between seasons.  My favorite is January or February, and right before a good rain storm.  Ideally, you want to let your soil "meld" for a month or more before you plant, and I like the help from Mother Nature to get it soaked in and wet.

But what exactly do I mean when I say "soil"?

I'm a big proponent of composting, but I know not everyone has the means to make their own dirt.  In fact, for the first few years I had my current garden, I bought all my soil, and experimented with a lot.  Here's what I learned:

    The worst place to get vegetable garden soil is at the big box stores.  You absolutely will NOT find anything of quality at Home Depot, Lowes, and certainly not Walmart.  The only thing I buy at Lowes is steer and chicken manure, which I mostly use as an additive to my compost pile.

    I'm also not a fan of the MiracleGro brand (and stay miles away from Kellogg.  It's nothing but barely ground-up wood chips, IMO).  I also don't like soil that has added fertilizer in it, like MiracleGro touts.  That may be nice if you've got a large pot and just want to plant one tomato, but for larger-scale gardens, it's my preference to stay as organic as possible.

    Your soil should look like this:  Moist, rich, dark, almost black, with no chunky pieces of wood or bark.  If it's light, dry and woody, you'll only end up trying to throw good money after bad when it's mid-summer and your tomatoes are fighting blight.

   

    The photo above is of my homemade compost, but you can buy an equivalent.  If you need a lot I recommend going to a landscape supply store such as Sonomarin Landscape Supply in Petaluma, or Wheeler Zamaroni in Santa Rosa.  My personal go-to was the Wheeler Zamaroni "Veggie Mix".

    If you don't need that much, you can buy bagged, and the wonderful thing about Sonoma County is there's no shortage of places to buy quality soil.  My favorites here on the southern end are Harmony Farms Supply (now also in Petaluma!), Cottage Gardens, Friedman Brothers, and Wheeler Zamaroni offers their Veggie Mix in bags as well.  All of these stores have quality soil and amendments that range in price from super expensive (over $30 a cu ft!) to reasonable, about $6-7 a cu ft.  Friedman Brothers has a brand called SuperSoil which I've used often.  It's very adequate as the base to my personal recipe for a soil cocktail:

• 2 Parts SuperSoil, WZ Veggie Mix, or other good quality raised bed soil mix.
• 1 Part Steer or Chicken Manure
• 1 Part Worm Castings

    Even if you go with a higher quality soil mix like you'll find at Harmony Farms or Cottage Gardens, I still like to add worm castings and some steer manure, as I think you have a better chance making sure your soil has all the trace minerals vegetables need when you mix a few things together.  

And lastly:  To Dig Or Not To Dig, That Is The Question!

    For the first several years I was gardning, I used to shovel amendments into my beds every spring then go through the arduous and back-breaking task of turning it all in to the existing soil.  I've since learned that not only is it a waste of time, it's actually better if you don't!  

    Here's a good blog post that talks about the 7 reasons why you don't want to turn over your soil:  7 Reasons Not To Till but the short of it is, soil builds its own ecosystem, and digging it all up and turning it over only messes with nature.  It's best to simply top your beds with a good couple inches of your compost cocktail, water it down good, and let mother nature do the rest.