Vegetable garden soil: how your vegetable garden soil works in 5 parts

This article is about perhaps the most important part of your vegetable garden: the garden soil. We explain how this soil works in 5 parts. Tom explains in a simple way how vegetable garden soil works. At Plukkers, we try to convince everyone to start a vegetable garden. This way, we contribute a little to nature, and it’s simply great fun to 'make' food. This article is written in easy-to-read text and builds up from the basics, becoming more complete as it goes. We want 'everyone' to have a vegetable garden. We are not scientists, but friends of the vegetable garden who want to share information. Tips or advice are welcome via the contact form on the website. At the bottom of this article, you can also share your thoughts. Here we go... To grow healthy vegetables, you need healthy soil. In healthy vegetable garden soil, your vegetables can eat and drink sufficiently and do not get sick. But what exactly is in good vegetable garden soil? Garden soil consists of 5 important components:

• PART 1: Very small stone particles or minerals
• PART 2: Organic matter and Humus
• PART 3: Water and air
• PART 4: Soil life
• PART 5: Nutrients for the plant

A large part of your vegetable garden soil consists of mineral soil particles. These were created from rock that has weathered over a very long time. The tiny stone particles come from stones and rocks. Breaking down rocks and stones into stone particles takes millions of years and happens through wind, rain, ice, snow, sun, mosses, fungi, and bacteria... The earth in your vegetable garden was once a stone or a rock... millions of years ago.

(from stone to particle)

These rocks and stones have therefore become smaller and are now boulders, pebbles, or even smaller stone particles. You can garden in these smaller particles or minerals; gardening in rocks or boulders is a bit more difficult, so we don't talk about that anymore.

• Large particles (0.05 – 2 millimeters) are called sand
• Smaller particles (0.002 – 0.05 millimeters) are called silt
• Smallest particles (smaller than 0.002 millimeters) are called clay

All three types of particles or minerals are found in your vegetable garden. Soil with a favorable ratio of sand, silt, and clay is called loam soil. Unfortunately, we don't all have loam soil. My vegetable garden, for instance, has far too many sand particles; this is called sandy soil. Another vegetable garden might have many clay particles and is called clay soil. Each type of soil has its pros and cons:

Sandy vegetable garden soil with traces of black humus

Pros: sandy soil is airy, your plants' roots can grow well, sand particles warm up quickly, and sandy soil is easy to work with. Just think of a sandcastle (easy to shape) or walking barefoot on sand when the sun is shining (hot, hot, hot).

Cons: sandy soil struggles to retain water and nutrients. Pour a bucket of water on sandy garden soil, and after half a minute, the puddle is gone.

• Top vegetables for sandy soil: beans, peas, carrots, and crops from Mediterranean countries.
• Flop vegetables for sandy soil: plants that need a lot of water.

Pros: clay soil does retain water and/or minerals. Think of modeling clay. It can also be very sticky.

Vegetable garden with clay soil is often difficult to work.

Cons: clay soil is not airy. It is difficult to work with, and plant roots struggle to penetrate deep into the ground in search of nutrients. Also, clay soil warms up much more slowly and stays wet for longer. Because clay soil can stay wet for a long time, plants sensitive to "wet feet" or winter conditions may struggle.

• Top vegetables for clay soil: root vegetables (beetroot and celeriac) and potatoes.
• Flop vegetables for clay soil: plants that dislike standing in water (onions), carrots, and plants that cannot tolerate frost.

But don't despair, sandy soil can be improved by adding clay particles/bentonite, and clay soil can be improved by adding plenty of organic matter and compost and disturbing the soil as little as possible. More on this later. With just sand, silt, and clay, we don't yet have vegetable garden soil that we can garden in. If your garden soil only contains soil particles or minerals, the smallest stone particles or minerals and nutrients wash away (soil erosion). See further.

Kitchen garden plants absorb food through their roots, among other things

Back to the rocks and stones. Every type of rock or stone can be broken down into sand, silt, or clay. Your type of soil particles or minerals actually depends on which stones and rocks were broken down millions of years ago. Now for something very important... Sand, silt, and clay can consist of different minerals. Plants cannot simply absorb these minerals as grains. Nutrients must first be released and dissolved in the soil water. Only then can the roots absorb them. The most common minerals in stone grains of sand, silt, or clay are: silicon, aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, sodium, and potassium. But obviously, plants cannot eat stone grains or large pieces of minerals. Vegetables eat through their roots, and those have 'tiny mouths' on them. We can't eat a whole white cabbage or a whole cow, can we? So, the minerals have to become very, very small before plants can absorb them. How do they get so small? Well, we previously mentioned factors like wind, rain, fungi, and bacteria.

It takes millions of years for rocks to be completely broken down by bacteria/fungi into tiny mineral particles. But in our vegetable garden, there are vegetables every year that need to grow quickly in a short time and therefore require a lot of food. Neither we nor our vegetables can wait millions of years for mineral particles to be 'released' from the stones. Fortunately, worms, bacteria, and fungi can break down organic matter such as leaves and plant residues. This makes nutrients available to plants again... in short, organic matter. And luckily, we don't have to wait a million years for that. Very soft material like leaves from comfrey are digested after just 6 weeks and thus have become plant food. Leaves from trees and small twigs take 1 to 2 years, and tree trunks take much longer. And we ourselves can also add mineral-rich material to the vegetable garden soil, which worms, bacteria, and fungi break down into small pieces until they are small enough to fit into the mouth of a plant root: grass, ...

(fungi, bacteria, and soil life)

We made 2 videos about comfrey in the vegetable garden:

Up to this point in the text, everything is very easy. Stones and rocks get smaller, become tiny grains of stone or minerals, and if they are small enough, plants can eat them. Easy, right? Not quite. There is a great danger. All the super tiny minerals that plants can eat wash away in the rain if there are only stone grains in our soil. We need a kind of glue that holds all the minerals, big and small, together. If we don't do that, all our edible minerals will wash away in our vegetable garden. But we can't pour glue into our garden, can we? No, that's right, that wouldn't be a good idea. What do we need, then? Exactly! Organic material that becomes humus. Organic material consists of branches, leaves, dead little animals in the vegetable garden soil, ... Just like the rocks and stones from just now, this organic material also breaks down. We start with organic material, then we talk about compost (partially decomposed), and finally humus (100% decomposed). Fortunately, we don't have to convert organic material into humus ourselves. The conversion is done by fungi, bacteria, and soil organisms (especially worms). Humus is the glue we need to hold our vegetable garden soil together and it also contains many other growth substances. More on this later in the following parts.

(a balanced vegetable garden soil) Read PART 1 as well

In PART 1 of this article, it was explained how rocks were broken down by wind and weather into tiny stone grains or minerals. This takes millions of years. If the minerals are small enough, plants can absorb them as food. In the vegetable garden, we have two problems. We don't have millions of years and we want to grow a lot in a small space. I can already hear you thinking: "We need extra minerals and nutrients..." So we need minerals that break down faster and don't take a million years to do so. Preferably only a few weeks or months. Every vegetable gardener already knows which direction we are heading. Indeed, what we need is 'organic material'. This means dead plants and dead animals. Obviously, you shouldn't put a dead chicken or steak in your soil. By dead animals, we mean insects, worms, snail shells, ... These are full of minerals, just like dead plants. From these dead plants and animals, a very precious fertilizer is created: humus or 'black gold'. Organic material that is partially decomposed is called compost; fully decomposed organic material is called humus. The softer the material, the faster it will become humus. Comfrey leaves are decomposed after just 6 weeks. A twig takes a few months and a tree trunk takes years. In our garden, we can throw organic material on the ground, which is called mulching. Another way is to let organic material decompose into compost or humus next to our vegetable garden. Let's look at the two methods:

With mulching, a layer of 5 to 15 cm of organic material is applied to the soil. This can be: grass, straw, wood chips, comfrey leaves, coffee grounds, ... The mulch layer is a coat for your vegetable garden. The soil life in your ground is crazy about organic material. Worms, for example, come from the vegetable garden soil to the surface, eat your organic material, and, as it were, 'poop' humus into your ground. In every garden with organic material, there are thousands of worms doing the work for you. They are the tillers and humus-makers in your vegetable garden. There are two more very important benefits of mulching for our bodies. The mulch layer stops weeds. Germinating weed seeds do not come through the mulch layer, so we don't have to bend or get down on our knees to weed.

Mulching with a mixture of wood chips and compost. A second benefit is that the mulch layer allows water in your vegetable garden soil to evaporate less quickly. So you have to bring less water to your vegetable garden. And that saves energy from your body and/or the electricity grid. Mulching also has disadvantages. Because of the insulating layer, your soil warms up a little less quickly in the spring, which means your plants get off to a slower start. Also, it is less convenient to sow; you have to move the mulch layer to sow. One more important remark: you should not work organic material that hasn't decomposed into the soil. If it decomposes in the soil, it takes nitrogen away from your soil. And nitrogen is an important substance for your vegetable garden (more on nitrogen later). Some people are afraid of snail damage when they mulch. As long as there is organic material available on and in your soil, snails will prefer that. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a 'snail guarantee'. Keep a close eye on young, vulnerable plants.

You can also place or work organic material that has already decomposed (compost or humus) onto your soil. Making compost in your garden is fairly easy. You can also buy ready-made compost in the store. One advantage of composting yourself is that you can determine the composition of your compost. I alternate in different layers of the following materials for a good balance: pruning waste up to 1 cm in diameter finely chopped, green waste from the vegetable garden and the kitchen, coffee grounds, eggshells, and fresh manure from my chickens and a friend's horse. And off it goes, decomposing; the decomposition takes 4 to 8 months, depending on the season and the material you are composting. With compost, you give your soil life a helping hand. The soil life gets ready-to-eat organic material that is immediately available. With mulching, the soil life has to wait for the decomposition process of your mulch layer. An additional advantage of compost or humus is that you can give your soil structure a boost. Pure sandy soil or hard clay soil will get good structure less quickly with mulching than with compost or humus. If you have a new vegetable garden and it's a sandbox or a lump of clay, consider compost or humus first. If you already have good, airy structure, choose mulching, but you can also combine both. The gifts of 'no weeds' and 'watering less' are of very great value when mulching.

Soil life in the vegetable garden is crucial for success

Finally. Humus is an important fertilizer for plants and fortunately also contains minerals. It doesn't take a million years to get these minerals into your vegetable garden. Soil organisms break down organic material. In doing so, nutrients are released that can become available to plants again. Part of the organic matter is converted into more stable organic matter: humus. Brilliant, right? And it gets even better: humus contains not only minerals. It is, as also told in PART 1, the glue of your vegetable garden soil. Humus helps hold nutrients and water in the soil, making them less likely to wash away, which we talked about in PART 1. Humus is a bit like a sticky sponge where minerals (and water too!) stick until the plants are hungry and eat them. Who or what breaks down these dead animals and plants (organic material)? We called it 'soil life' above, this will also come back later in this series of articles about vegetable garden soil. By this, we mean fungi in the soil, bacteria, worms, and other small creatures. They break down this organic material by eating it. The fun part is that fungi, bacteria, worms, and other creatures work together. Sometimes the soil organisms cannot eat something at first because it is too large or too hard, just think of a branch. In that case, soil fungi will do their work first until the branch pulverizes. Once the branch is small and soft enough, the soil organisms can eat it. During the decomposition, nutrients are released that plants can absorb. At the same time, stable organic matter is created that contributes to healthy soil structure: humus. This humus has therefore become a kind of fertilizer for your plants. And it is such a valuable fertilizer that it is also called 'black gold'. Fungi and bacteria are the chefs, the creatures eat it with pleasure, and the waste product is 'worm poop' (and from other creatures too). It feels crumbly to us and smells delicious like forest soil!

A healthy, humus-rich vegetable garden soil. So in summary, humus is...

Also read PART 1 and 2

We already know that a large part of our soil consists of mineral soil particles: sand, silt, and clay. Nutrients can be released from the soil and from organic material. These dissolve in the soil water and can thus be absorbed by plant roots.

We also know that humus is very important. Humus helps to retain water and nutrients in the soil, so that they remain available for our plants.

So: soil contains stone granules and humus. That's still not quite enough to have fertile soil. What's missing? Air and water!

Water ensures that the plants have something to drink. Water also transports the dissolved nutrients (minerals) through the soil. This way, minerals flow to the plant, which, thanks to the water, drinks a healthy mineral beverage. However, if the water flows too violently (during heavy rain), it may happen that the minerals wash away too quickly and only plain water is left for the plant. If you have a good layer of humus in your vegetable garden soil at such moments, there is no problem because the minerals will stick in the safety net.

Water is not only for the plants but also for the small soil animals that create the humus! When it rains or you water, some of the spaces in the soil fill with water and air is temporarily displaced. When the excess water drains away, air enters those spaces again. This way, the air in a well-structured soil is constantly refreshed. Below you can read why that is so important. So, in summary: water...

Do plants need air underground as well? Absolutely! Not only soil life, but plant roots also need oxygen. Roots breathe too, after all. In soil that is completely saturated with water or highly compacted, there is not enough oxygen reaching the roots. Many beneficial soil animals, fungi, and microorganisms also need oxygen. That is why airy soil is so important. The soil animals that create the humus and even protect your plant roots from bad guys will die if there is not enough oxygen underground. Without oxygen, the good soil animals die, and bad soil animals that can live without oxygen take their place, a bit like 'zombies'. It is therefore important that there is always enough oxygen in the soil.

Air also ensures that there is space between the stone granules, for example, room for water, but also room for small animals. In summary, air...

How do you ensure that there is enough air and water in your vegetable garden soil? Fortunately, you don't have to pour air over your soil with a watering can.

The secret lies primarily in good soil structure. Between soil crumbs are larger and smaller pores. The larger pores allow excess water to drain and then refill with air. Smaller pores hold onto water for your plants.

Organic matter, humus, plant roots, fungi, and worms help to create such a beautiful crumbly soil structure.

And who helps to a large extent to create all those beautiful soil crumbs and passages? Exactly: soil life.

Also read PART 1, 2 and 3

A quick recap. A healthy vegetable garden soil consists of:

1. mineral soil particles such as sand, silt, and clay;
2. organic matter and humus;
3. water and air;
4. a gigantic amount of life.

We will now take a closer look at that last component.

We already talked about soil life in the previous parts. But what is it, soil life? Soil life is the collective name for everything that lives in and on your soil: earthworms, insects, mites, springtails, nematodes, fungi, bacteria, and countless other small organisms. All these organisms play a role in the soil ecosystem in their own way. Many of them help with breaking down and converting organic material.

Large soil animals make leaves and plant remains smaller. Fungi and bacteria break down the material further. Other soil organisms in turn eat fungi, bacteria, or each other. This creates a gigantic underground food web in which nutrients are constantly released and captured again.

Soil life does a lot of work and performs many miracles. If we as humans wanted to replicate that, it would cost us a lot of time, energy, and money. Below you can see what miracles your soil life performs:

Dead leaves, plant remains, and other organic material are broken down step by step. This releases nutrients, and part of the material ultimately contributes to the formation of humus. So you don't have to clean it up yourself. Leave it as mulch, and the soil life will turn it into humus/fertilizer.

Even trees or tree branches can be cleaned up! Soil fungi create fungal threads in dead wood. Once the fungus has grown well in the wood, mushrooms sometimes appear. These mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the fungus, a bit like an apple is a fruit of the apple tree. The fungus feeds on the dead wood, and after a while, the wood becomes soft and rotten, so soft that it falls apart. The soft mass you have then is not yet humus, but it is a step closer to humus. Other small animals can eat this mass. When they excrete it, we are another step closer to humus.

The minerals contained within a creature's belly cannot wash away! As a result, minerals remain safely stored until the creature excretes them.

And when the creature excretes this, the mineral gets stuck in the, uh, manure, so it doesn't wash away either and remains available to the plants. So, they fertilize your soil with their waste. We call this the nutrient cycle.

Note: THEY fertilize, not just YOU. If your soil life is healthy and receives enough organic material, nutrients are constantly being recycled. That doesn't mean you never have to replenish anything — after all, you also harvest nutrients from your vegetable garden. We will return to this in PART 5.

Earthworms mix organic material with mineral soil. Their waste is often rich in readily available nutrients and also helps in the formation of stable soil crumbs.

They provide the right form of nitrogen for your plants. We’ve all heard of nitrogen as a fertilizer. Animal manure contains nitrogen and chemical fertilizers contain nitrogen. (The N in NPK stands for nitrogen.) There is also nitrogen in the air. For a plant, it’s not all the same which form they get the nitrogen in. (Compare it a bit to picky people and potatoes: some prefer them boiled.)

We're almost there. We started this article with rocks and pebbles, added organic material, poured in water, let air in between, and then got to know a gigantic underground world full of worms, fungi, bacteria, and other small creatures.

But ultimately, we naturally want one thing: healthy vegetable plants that produce tasty vegetables.

Your plants need nutrients for that.

Just as we cannot live on water alone, a plant needs more than just water and sunlight.

Plants use sunlight, water, and CO₂ to produce their own sugars. But to build roots, leaves, flowers, and fruits, they also need various nutrients.

They mainly obtain these nutrients from the soil water through their roots.

You can therefore think of your vegetable garden soil a bit like a restaurant. Water is the waiter who brings the food to the table. The nutrients are the food, and your plant roots are the customers.

Only those customers can't just order anything.

A plant root cannot eat a piece of compost, a granule of fertilizer, or a piece of rock. The nutrients must first enter the soil water in an absorbable form.

And who helps with that?

Exactly: the soil life we talked about in PART 4.

Plants need quite a few different nutrients. Some are needed in relatively large quantities. Others only in tiny amounts.

The three most famous are:

• nitrogen (N)
• phosphorus (P)
• potassium (K)

You may have seen the letters N-P-K on a bag of fertilizer before.

But what do they actually do?

Nitrogen is very important for the growth of leaves and stems.

Leafy vegetables like lettuce, spinach, and cabbage, for example, need quite a bit of nitrogen during their growth.

Too little nitrogen can cause plants to grow poorly and leaves to turn lighter or yellow.

But more is not always better.

Too much nitrogen can cause your plants to produce an enormous amount of green foliage, while flowers, fruits, or sturdy roots lag behind. A two-meter-tall tomato plant with beautiful dark green leaves but almost no tomatoes is not really our goal.

Phosphorus plays an important role in all kinds of processes in the plant, including energy management, root development, flowering, and seed formation.

Plants certainly need phosphorus.

That just doesn't mean you should automatically add extra phosphorus. Many vegetable garden soils already have sufficient phosphorus. Adding too much is useless and can eventually end up in the environment.

Potassium helps plants with their water management, among other things, and with all kinds of processes needed to grow healthy and strong.

Fruiting crops like tomatoes, for example, need potassium, but again: enough is good, more is not automatically better.

N, P, and K get a lot of attention because plants need relatively large amounts of them.

But a plant needs many more nutrients.

Think, for example, of calcium, magnesium, and sulfur. In addition, there are trace elements such as iron, manganese, boron, zinc, copper, molybdenum, chlorine, and nickel.

A plant only needs a tiny bit of some of these.

But needing just a little bit doesn't mean they aren't important.

Just think of salt in your food. You don't need a plate full of salt, but if there's no salt in it at all, you'll definitely notice.

Now for an important bit.

Suppose a soil analysis shows that there is a lot of a certain nutrient in your soil. That doesn't automatically mean that your plant can also absorb that nutrient.

The nutrient must, after all, be available to the plant.

We have seen in the previous parts that nutrients can be found in mineral soil particles, organic material, and living organisms.

Soil life helps to release and recycle some of these nutrients.

That is why a living soil is so important.

You don't just want a soil that contains nutrients.

You want a soil in which nutrients are constantly in circulation.

You can test your soil yourself with this soil analysis kit:

Imagine you lay a leaf on your vegetable garden soil.

A worm pulls on it. Small soil animals make it smaller. Fungi and bacteria break it down further.

The nutrients from that leaf don't just disappear.

Some are released in forms that plants can absorb. Another part is temporarily taken up by bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. When those organisms are eaten, excrete waste, or die, nutrients enter the cycle again.

Your soil life is therefore not just an army of waste cleaners.

It is also a gigantic pantry full of nutrients.

And that pantry is constantly being opened, refilled, and reorganized.

At the end of PART 4, we already talked about nitrogen.

There is an enormous amount of nitrogen all around us. Even the air consists largely of nitrogen gas.

Yet most vegetable plants cannot get that nitrogen directly from the air.

They are picky eaters.

Plants take up nitrogen mainly through their roots in certain dissolved forms, such as nitrate and ammonium.

And here is where our soil life comes into play again.

Bacteria and other micro-organisms are constantly converting nitrogen compounds from one form to another. Also, when organic material is broken down, nitrogen can eventually become available to plants.

You can compare it to potatoes.

We can eat potatoes in different ways: boiled, fried, as mashed potatoes, or as French fries. But a raw potato straight from the ground is not exactly the favorite dish for most people.

It's a bit the same with nitrogen.

There may be enough nitrogen present, but it must be in a form that your plant can use.

By the way, there is a very clever collaboration in the vegetable garden.

Peas, beans, clover, and other legumes can work together with certain bacteria that live in nodules on their roots.

Those bacteria can convert nitrogen gas from the air into nitrogen compounds that can be used in the biological system.

In exchange, the plant provides sugars to the bacteria.

You get nitrogen. I get sugar. Deal?

These types of collaborations happen everywhere beneath our feet without us noticing anything.

Your vegetable garden is much busier underground than it appears above ground.

There is something else that determines how easily plants can absorb nutrients: the pH of your soil.

The pH tells you how acidic or alkaline your soil is.

Why is that important?

Because the availability of nutrients changes with the pH. At a very low or very high pH, certain nutrients can be harder to access, while others can become available in undesirably large quantities.

For many vegetable crops, a slightly acidic to roughly neutral soil works well.

But not every plant has the exact same preference.

That is why it is important not to blindly sprinkle lime just because someone says that "a vegetable garden needs lime."

Measure first. Act later.

If your pH is already fine, extra lime can do more harm than good.

And now we come to the question that many vegetable gardeners eventually face:

Do I need to use fertilizers?

The answer is not a simple yes or no.

When you harvest vegetables, you are literally removing material from your vegetable garden.

A head of lettuce, a pumpkin, a zucchini, or a kilo of tomatoes does not consist of nothing. Those vegetables contain nutrients that once came from your soil and the entire soil system.

When you harvest and eat those vegetables, a portion of those nutrients leaves your garden.

Therefore, something must eventually be returned.

This can be done through compost, plant debris, mulch, and, when necessary, appropriate fertilization.

The goal is not:

"I must feed my plants as much as possible."

The goal is:

"I want to keep the nutrients my vegetable garden needs in a cycle in a sensible way and supplement deficiencies in a targeted manner."

That is a completely different way of thinking.

With much conventional fertilization, the focus is on:

What does my plant need today?

With a healthy vegetable garden soil, we prefer to look a bit broader:

What does my entire soil system need to be able to feed my plants today and later?

That is why we have devoted so much attention to organic matter, compost, humus, and soil life in this article.

You are not just feeding your zucchini.

You are feeding an entire ecosystem that subsequently helps take care of your zucchini.

That does not mean that fertilizers are always bad.

Sometimes there is indeed a deficiency and supplementing is wise. Moreover, some crops demand more from the soil than others.

But simply spreading fertilizer because it's spring, without knowing what your soil needs, is not the best strategy.

Looking at your plants can provide clues.

Are they growing well? Are the leaves healthy? Are roots, flowers, and fruits developing normally?

But just looking at a yellow leaf and then searching Google for "which fertilizer for yellow leaves" can also lead you astray.

A yellow leaf can have multiple causes.

Too little of a nutrient, too much water, too little water, damaged roots, an incorrect pH, or another problem can sometimes cause similar symptoms.

If you really want to know what is happening in your soil, a soil analysis can be very useful.

This way, you better know what is present, what might be missing, and whether, for example, the pH needs to be adjusted.

Measuring is better than random spreading.

We started this article with a rock.

Through weathering, mineral soil particles were formed. We added organic matter. Soil life got to work on it. A soil with structure and organic matter was created.

Spaces for water and air formed between the soil crumbs.

Roots grew through that soil.

Worms created tunnels. Fungi grew between plant debris and roots. Bacteria converted substances. Nutrients were released, fixed again, and entered the cycle over and over.

And somewhere in the middle of that gigantic underground system, your little root stands ready with its tiny mouth to absorb the dissolved nutrients it needs.

That is your vegetable garden soil.

Not just a pile of brown dirt in which you happen to put a plant.

But a living system.

After five parts, we can luckily make it very simple again.

You don't need to know every bacterium by name. You don't need to sit next to your cabbages with a microscope. And you don't need to spread something new over your soil every week.

A few principles will take you a long way:

And perhaps the most important one:

Don't try to constantly rescue your plants. Build a soil in which your plants can rescue themselves much better.

Because ultimately, a healthy vegetable garden does not just grow above the ground.

A healthy vegetable garden begins beneath your feet.