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The right kind of soil

Garden plants grow in soil. What exactly is it? Soil includes rock that has been worn down into mineral particles of various sizes. Imagine your garden as a pile of boulders. Now imagine wind and water wearing away at those boulders over a very, very long time.... until, eventually, they become the soil in which your plants are growing today.

Turn over a shovelful of garden soil.  If you see earthworms, your soil is healthy and "alive."  Living creatures add humus to the soil, make nutrients available to plant roots, and help control harmful fungi.

Though soil may have started out as solid rock, it's usually easy to work by the time we put a shovel to it. That's because a shovelful of soil is only about half mineral particles; the other half is almost equally divided between air and water. Only a very small amount is organic matter or humus (decaying plant material, for example).

Besides minerals, air, and water, your garden soil comes complete with living creatures. The most visible one is the familiar earthworm, but besides a few hundred of these, the top 5cm of a square metre of soil may include a million mites and mitelike creatures and over 10 million nematodes and protozoans! These creatures all help keep the soil healthy. They process minerals to make them available to plant roots; they keep harmful fungi under control. Their waste products (and later on, their dead bodies) form humus, a soft, blackish brown material that improves the structure of any soil.

If you are growing plants in pots, you should not use ordinary garden soil. Special mixes can be bought from nurseries for starting seeds, or for pot plants. These let water drain through more freely, and often contain special nutrients to help the plants grow.

Here, seeds are being planted in small pots, so that each plant can develop a healthy root system.

Later on, when the plant has started forming mature leaves, and it has a healthy root system that nearly fills the little pot, it can either be transplanted to the garden, or it can be "potted up". Potted up means that the plant is moved to a slightly bigger pot, so that the roots have more room to develop. It is important not to make too big a jump in sizes when potting up a small seedling.

Your garden is a lot more effective at growing plants if it is built up with humus or compost, which is plant material that has rotted down. When plants die, their remains help to make the soil better at growing other plants.

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