SO THE SUN shines and look what happens! I can’t believe it, yet indeed it happened — someone asked me about planting tomatoes in big containers now.
We laughed, and I scolded my friend. If you can’t resist tomatoes, by all means get those tomatoes (or dahlias, zinnias, geraniums, impatiens pots, and hanging baskets) started now in a nice warm (64 to 68 degrees nights) inside window. This works even better if you have a greenhouse. But don’t take them outside.
The earlier you start, the better to realize double or more tomatoes, peppers, cut flowers and blooms on many plants. But please resist those trays of sensitive annuals, and instead plant roses, hardy fuchsia, peony trees, even grass, rhododendrons and berries.
These are all perfect to plant now, but first make sure they are conditioned.
I understand the urge to jump ahead in your gardening plans. When spring comes, there is an overwhelming urge in gardeners to go out and make big strides in the yard. But restrain yourself to prevent gardening misery later.
Curb that urge by joining me during the next few weeks in soil preparation. This is the most singularly crucial exercise in ensuring a beautiful summer garden.
No matter how perfect a plant it is — picked for all the sun and moisture conditions, ordered especially for its disease-resistance, pruned ever so carefully and planted by some wonderful professional landscaper — if your soil is not right, you might as well just send your money to me.
For this discussion, let’s focus on soil for flower beds, baskets, containers, planters and windows boxes, and go back to basics.
1. You first must fully comprehend that 90 percent or more of all nutrients and moisture come via the root system.
Minerals, fertilizers and nutrients first must break down and dissolve into water. Then, through the process of diffusion, this flurry of nutrient-rich water enters the microscopic hair roots, and up the main roots and into the plant. The nutrients and water travel to the very tips and leaves, disbursing throughout the plant.
This means the soil must be able to hold water for a period of time and then be easily drainable.
Water needs to be able to move through soil because it only can dissolve so much particulate and then it stops. Then the next watering is trapped in the pore space, dissolves even more nutrient, is absorbed into the plant, soil drains out and the process repeats. Pore space is the name of the game! It’s what makes all this gardening stuff work.
Poor space translates to fluffy loose soil. But just because soil is fluffy doesn’t mean it won’t compact right away. Soil compaction occurs naturally by watering and gravity, and is greatly sped up when soil is too much of the same particle size.
Compaction is the enemy. Compaction simply crushes in pore space, which diminishes the water-holding capacity of the soil, and thus available nutrients.
Don’t forget that the roots are the entrance point for nutrients and essential water for the plant. You must have a well-developed system to get a well-developed plant.
Roots grow poorly in compacted soil. If there are few gaps between the soil particles, where are the small frail, delicate root hairs supposed to expand into? That is why the grass still is yellow-green from when a truck drove over the lawn two years ago, and no fertilizer is going to help it. The only solution is aeration — loosen that soil up.
2. Compacted soils don’t allow for roots to grow, nutrients to be gathered and water to be absorbed. If you find yourself planting flowers with a trowel, shovel, jackhammer or crowbar, then your soil is compacted.
Ideal flower bed, perennial or container soil is loose and light enough to drive your hand down at least to your wrist pit. You should only be using tools because it is more productive or less messy — not because the poor, heavy soil allows no other option. How do you achieve such soils?
3. Soil prep is an ongoing, biannual (at minimum) process. You always should be adding different particle sizes to the soil, along with rich, organic material.
The more particle sizes the better. Great additives for the soil are peat moss, compost, coarse perlite, old manure, course vermiculite, leaf mold, coarse sand, old decayed bark, lawn clippings or sawdust. Even just adding a 3-inch layer of topsoil is perfect in most cases.
Add two or more of these items per year, and go through the whole list over 10 years if possible for bonus points. For flowers, add lime at 50- to 60-lb per 1,000- square-feet along with a good fertilizer and cultivate in deeply — preferably 8- to 12-inches deep.
Do this process during the next few weeks, and I guarantee a very noticeable difference. You also must add no less than an inch of decomposed organic matter or 2 inches of peat moss — and do it again next year, too.
Finally, with this fluffy high mound of soil, make sure to sculpt it. This is one of my best soil tricks. Remember it.
A flat bed is noticeable only a short distance away, but a bed which is ground level at one end and mounded (shaped) 14-inches high to the center is visible down the next block.
Absolutely shape your beds. This is even better than buying more plants.
And absolutely — stay well all!
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Andrew May is a freelance writer and ornamental horticulturist who dreams of having Clallam and Jefferson counties nationally recognized as “Flower Peninsula USA.” Send him questions c/o Peninsula Daily News, P.O. Box 1330, Port Angeles, WA 98362, or email news@peninsuladailynews.com (subject line: Andrew May)
