Soil Maintenance Tips for Beautiful Landscaping

Owning a luscious green landscape is every home owner’s dream. But is your soil healthy and strong enough? If your turf looks scraggly and thin or if your plants show hardly any growth, it is time to check your soil’s health. The tips below will help nurture your soil back to its original state and make it strong enough to grow healthy plants.

• Test your soil: Check what type of soil you have to determine its organic components, its average pH levels, and how well it preserves moisture. Knowing your soil better will help you in its proper maintenance.

Never invest on a fertilizer or soil amendment for your lawn without first checking with the results of a soil test.

• Aerate the soil: When the soil of your landscape is heavily compacted or if it has high clay content, it will absorb moisture very poorly. Compacted soils have very little drainage making it hard for plants to grow deep roots. Aeration improves air circulation and moisture absorption.

Remember to rake up the soil plugs to stop them from refilling the aeration holes.

• Try seeding: If the reasons for the bald spots in your lawn are not fungi, grubs or bugs, seeding might help. Your seeds will grow once the temperature warms up to about fifty two degrees. When seeding, let the ground to dry out as much as possible. Avail the benefit of a multistage soil rake. It will give you the right depth for planting and the appropriate distance between rows.

Don’t forget to cover the seeds with straw to trap in moisture and protect them from birds.

• Fertilize your soil: Fertilizing your soil is important as the nutrients from the soil gets washed away and are absorbed by the plants. Thus, you need to replenish it. Consider buying a soil analyzing kit to help you apply the best fertilizer for your soil.

Remember, fertilizers can hurt your plants if not used correctly.

• Add compost to your soil: A mixture of dead plants, roots, and leaves makes good compost. Supplementing your soil with compost will boost soil nitrogen. In case your soil is heavy clay, the compost will aid the soil drain water. If you have a sandy soil, the compost will help your soil retain more water.
• Adding compost to soil can also attract earthworms and other organisms that will aid your plant grow healthily.

Having a good soil can help your plants grow healthily. Remember the soil maintenance tips to have a beautiful landscape year round.