Gardening cannot be completed and accomplished if you don’t know how your garden soil is and even if it is healthy or not. Analyzing your garden soil’s health and capabilities is very important and highlighting because you can’t go on pretending anything is going to grow in the soil which is acidic or even gone in the bad conditions.

If you want to know if your garden soil is healthy, you should go for its soil structure and compositions. If you have seen it closely, there is a solid matter with pore space to which the minerals and atoms are bound together in a specific manner. The solid matter along with the pore space should take up about 50% of the soil structure and it shouldn’t be more than that. A good soil structure is needed to keep the roots of the plants within them in a specific manner; they allow these plants to penetrate as deep as possible. This perfect soil structure is necessary for the moisture, drainage and air retention for the plants and they are required for the plants to stay in a healthy shape. There are many tests through which you can get to know about the structure of the soil and improve it even.

You can check if your soil is healthy by testing it with proper drainage and water absorbance. You should dig a hole in the garden soil which is about 1 foot deep and sufficient enough in the diameter. Once it’s done, fill the hole with water and see the water absorb and drain out and fill the hole with water again. If the soil is draining quickly you should be able to know that it would retain the moisture and nutrients of your plants more than anything else would. If you think the drainage is not enough, you can change up the soil around with the addition of sands and other elements of nature.

Soil is a living material. If healthy it contains billions of micro-organisms which live off the organic content which mainly consists of decaying vegetation. Good soil must also contain moisture and oxygen, and usually carries a high proportion of mineral particles. When very fine, the soil resembles clay; when coarse, a sandy loam. On fen- and peatland the topsoil may be composed almost entirely of organic material, the result of millennia of sedges or mosses living and dying, gradually forming a thick layer of fibrous material.

Most gardeners need only know whether their soil is clay-like or sandy. Clay retains moisture, is difficult to work and sticky when wet, and sets very hard with surface cracks in a dry summer. It needs regular breaking up over winter with a soil conditionier (for example, mushroom compost), although it is often very fertile in its own right. Sandy soil is easy to work and dries out quickly, but needs plenty of well-rotted manure or compost to improve moisture retention. Alluvial silt in a flood plain is an exception to the sandy rule; it is easy to work, fertile, and though free-draining, excellent at retaining moisture.

Acidity and Alkalinity

Plants manufacture their own food by converting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into carbohydrates. Other essential ingredients come from mineral salts dissolved in the water that coats the soil particles. Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are needed in fairly large quantities, with minor but vital additions of magnesium, calcium, sulphur, oxygen, iron, manganese, boron, molybdenum, copper and zinc.

Plants differ in their ability to take up these mineral nutrients. Some are only efficient at absorbing iron, for example, in acid soil. Others can obtain everything they need even in the most alkaline conditions. That is why it is essential to know the character of your soil. If it is alkaline you will not be able to grow limehaters such as rhododendrons or camellias. In very acid soils limestone plants such as philadelphus, clematis and dianthus will flounder. You can easily buy cheap pH testing kits which you should apply to different parts of the garden since conditions will vary. (The pH refers to the negative decimal logarithm of hydrogen ion concentration expressed in moles per litre). A pH of 7 is neutral; anything higher, and the scale goes up to 14, is alkaline, and anything lower acid. Generally, most plants thrive at 6.4-7, vegetables preferring 7-7.5. To confirm your readings look around the neighbourhood to see what plants are growing well in other people’s gardens. If you want to increase soil alkalinity add lime. But note such a step tends to be irrevocable so think carefully before you act. It is not so easy to increase the acidity. The best way is to create raised beds, or special enclosures, filled with acid soil for ericaceous plants.