Tips for improving your garden's soil

Follow these directions for homemade products that will improve the quality of your garden's soil so you can enjoy a more lush garden.

• Compost is the best all-natural soil amendment you can use.
• It contains valuable plant nutrients and plant disease-fighting organisms, and it also makes soil moisture-retentive and easier to till.
• Best of all, compost is free when you make your own.
• You can make compost in a bin approximately one square metre (three square feet) in size or simply pile the ingredients on the ground.
• If you turn the pile periodically, it will break down faster, but even if you pile it and leave it for a year, it will break down.

• 6 parts dried (brown) plant material (dry leaves, straw, sawdust, paper)
• 1 part fresh (green) plant material (grass clippings, vegetable scraps, coffee grounds and horse, cow or chicken manure)

1. Put a layer of brown material directly on the ground, then add a layer of green material. Continue to layer brown and green material to a height of one metre (three feet). Water with a hose as needed to keep the pile as moist as a wrung-out sponge.

2. To speed up decomposition, use a haying fork to puncture and turn the pile to allow air into its centre. In rainy weather cover the pile with a tarp to prevent saturating it.

3. If the pile becomes smelly, it is too wet — mix in more brown ingredients. When the pile looks like rich, crumbly black soil and has a sweet, earthy fragrance, it is ready to use in the garden or as mulch.

Often called green manures, these annual crops thrive in cool weather, protecting garden soil from erosion and weeds.

1. After clearing vegetables or annual flowers from a bed in fall, sow hairy vetch or winter rye seeds in cleared beds according to package directions.

2. In early spring, three to four weeks before planting time, dig the green manure right into the soil. As it decomposes, it adds humus to the soil and acts as fertilizer for the coming season's crop.

• Seaweed is actually higher in nitrogen and potassium than most animal manures, and is also a rich source of trace elements.
• Many municipalities with beaches are glad to have you haul it away.

Seaweed

1. To cleanse seaweed of salt, pile it where runoff will be directed to a storm drain, such as on your driveway. Allow several rains to rinse away the sea salt, then add the seaweed to your compost pile or dig it into garden beds in the fall.

2. To make seaweed tea, steep an old pillowcase filled with seaweed in a bucket of water for a week. Remove and discard the bag, dilute the liquid to the colour of weak tea and water plants with it.