Keeping it green: How to make organic soil for your home garden
11/21/2020 / By Rose Lidell / Comments
Keeping it green: How to make organic soil for your home garden

Just like you need nutritious food to stay healthy, your crops can grow healthy and strong if you plant seeds in organic soil. Following the simple recipe detailed below ensures that your plants will grow in soil with the necessary ingredients that can nourish your plants and help them retain moisture.

The recipe below is tweaked from a recipe found in Mel Bartholomew’s book “All New Square Foot Gardening.”

Compost, peat moss and vermiculite

By using high-quality soil for your garden, you can help your plants thrive. To cultivate a healthy garden, start by figuring out how much garden soil you need for your raised bed.

Use this link to calculate your soil needs with a soil calculator. Change the settings if you’re working on a raised bed or a pot or elevated planter.

This simple recipe only requires three ingredients:

  • Compost – Compost contains essential nutrients that your plants need to grow. Note that compost is expensive by the bag, so buy in bulk when filling a large bed. Always buy compost from a trusted local source.
  • Peat moss – Peat moss makes soil water retentive. Compost is very dense, but by adding peat moss, you lighten up the density. This helps the root systems of the plants grow more evenly throughout the soil.
  • Vermiculite – Vermiculite contains mica rocks mined out of the ground and heated until it explodes into very tiny pieces. These little rocks have nooks and crannies that can absorb water. Vermiculite also allows the soil to drain properly. If you don’t have vermiculite, use perlitea form of amorphous volcanic glass sometimes called “volcanic popcorn.”

The recipe components are measured in cubic feet or cubic yards. For example, a four-by-four (or 48-inch by 48-inch) raised bed that is 6 inches deep will require eight cubic feet of soil.

The sample measurements suit larger beds and for buying soil for bulk delivery.

Making organic soil for your home garden

Using the sample measurements above, you will need:

  • 1/3 peat moss, measured by cubic feet or cubic yard
  • 1/3 coarse vermiculite, measured by cubic feet or cubic yard
  • 1/3 compost, measured by cubic feet or cubic yard

Next, divide eight cubic feet by three. This means you need 2.66 cubic feet of each component.

Follow the three easy steps below to make DIY organic garden soil for raised beds. If you can’t take exact measurements, eyeball each ingredient.

  1. Place the compost, peat moss and vermiculite into a tarp, then mix them well using a rake or shovel. Wear a mask because the vermiculite and peat moss can be dusty. After everything is well mixed, shovel the mixture into your raised bed.
  2. Next, water the DIY organic garden soil. The liquid will help eliminate the dust and weigh the soil down a bit.
  3. Finally, let the soil settle for two weeks. Note that the soil will settle about one to two inches below where you originally piled the soil. Add more of the components to compensate for settling.

If you don’t have the means to measure the components exactly, measure your formula this way:

  • 3 Parts compost
  • 1 Part peat moss
  • 1 Part vermiculite

You’ll need more compost because this component is very heavy and weighs differently in volume. Try to follow the recipe by cubic feet or cubic yards.

If you can’t, follow this alternative method:

  1. Use a large bucket and fill it up three times with compost.
  2. Pour the compost into a raised bed, then add a large bucket of peat moss and one large bucket of vermiculite.

Use compost, peat moss and vermiculite to make DIY organic garden soil so you can grow healthy plants right in your backyard!

Sources:

WholeLifestyleNutrition.com

Gardeners.com

EpicGardening.com

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