Start with the Best Organic Garden Soil

Did you know that bad soil is the reason so many vegetable gardens struggle? It's true. Even if gardeners are planting, watering, and pruning at the right time, their soil could jeopardize all that hard work.

Don't worry. I'm going to walk you through the five biggest mistakes that I see many gardeners make when it comes to filling their gardens with soil. Once you know these mistakes, you can save yourself all the frustration and failure that comes with gardening in nutrient-depleted soil. You'll skip straight to the thriving vegetable garden part.

Bonus: Keep reading to the end to learn my favorite soil blend that makes all the vegetable gardens I set up grow like crazy!

Using Fresh Animal Manure in Your Vegetable Garden Soil

Manure has been used for centuries to enrich soil thanks to its steady release of nutrients that plants need to thrive. However, not all manure is created equal. The best options for home gardens are aged or composted manure from cows, horses, chickens, or rabbits.

What's wrong with fresh manure? It can, first of all, burn the roots of your plants due to high ammonia levels (not great). It may also contain various pathogens like E. coli and listeria that can contaminate the fruits and vegetables grown in that soil and then make you sick (really not great).

It’s best to let manure age for about a year or mix it into a compost pile before adding it to your garden. I recommend sourcing manure from a reliable, organic farm in your area. I say organic because a lot of farms give antibiotics to their animals and treat the ground with herbicides. These things can linger in manure and affect plant growth, and we certainly don't want that.

Using Peat in Your Soil Blend

Peat creates light, airy soil mixes that can hold water long enough for plants to use it. That's why it's a common additive in almost all garden soil mixes. In fact, some of my favorite garden authors are proponents of soil blends that include peat. But I urge you to stop using peat in your garden because it's not a sustainable resource.

Peat is harvested from peat bogs, which are mostly in Canada, and studies have shown that those peat bogs can't regenerate fast enough to meet our garden needs. When we use up peatlands, we release CO2 back into the atmosphere, which is real bad news for climate change.

There are lots of other ways that you can lighten up your soil mix without using such an unsustainable material. I'll tell you my favorite peat-free garden soil blend in a bit.

Filling Your Entire Raised Bed or Container with Straight Compost

This mistake might surprise you because it sounds like a really good idea at first. Compost is, after all, considered black gold for your vegetable garden. It holds loads of nutrients to support healthy plant growth. It absorbs an enormous amount of water but drains quickly. If adding a little bit of compost around a plant can boost its growth, what can an entire bed of compost do?

Well, there's a reason you don't want to grow in 100% compost. Compost lacks the structure that most vegetable roots require for good stability. In other words, it doesn't give your plants a good foundation to grow large and produce. This structure comes from something like clay found in topsoil. Small plants with shallow roots like lettuce and spinach can thrive in straight compost, but most vegetables will need a sturdier foundation underneath them.

So while compost makes a great component of garden soil, you do need to mix it with other materials.

Including Synthetic Fertilizer in Your Soil Blend

One of the main reasons for having your own vegetable garden is to know every single step that went into growing the nutrient-rich food you harvest from it. The last thing you want to do is add synthetic chemicals into your soil. Because if those chemicals are in your soil, guess what? They end up in your food.

There are so many other reasons not to use synthetic fertilizers in your soil. They disrupt your soil pH and lead to a buildup of salts and chemicals your plants can't use, for one. Over time, this depletes nutrients in your soil, meaning your soil is actually less fertile and capable of supporting strong plant growth. 

Not surprising: studies have found that foods grown with synthetic fertilizers actually contain fewer key nutrients. (These foods also don't support a healthy gut microbiome because all the soil microorganisms have been killed off by the fertilizers.)

And while you're growing food that's less good for you in your depleted soil, there's also a trickle-down effect. Chemicals you add to your soil move into our waterways and ultimately affect the entire ecosystem.

Learn more about the reasons you should avoid synthetic fertilizers.

Keeping Lots of Little Wood Chips in Your Soil Blend

This last one is the easiest mistake to make. I've ordered soil before without seeing the product first, and the soil arrived with all these wood chips mixed in. At first glance, it may not seem like that big of deal.

But all those wood chips are on their way to decomposing. They'll eventually break down and become nice, loose soil. Before that happens, they'll pull nitrogen from the surrounding soil area. That's nitrogen that your plants need to grow.

So every time you add wood to your soil, especially near the top, you'll have a battle between your vegetables and the wood chips for that nitrogen. That's why I go the extra step of searching for a soil blend that doesn't have any wood chips in it.

The Best Way to Avoid These Mistakes

You can avoid several of these mistakes by buying small first. When you're setting up your garden, buy a sample of soil (maybe 1 cubic foot) from the soil yard before ordering garden soil in bulk. Grab one bag of soil from the garden center instead of 20.

Bring the soil home and check the texture. Make sure the soil is not too hot. Test it by planting some seeds in it.

Do this first before you have cubic yards of soil dumped onto your driveway.

My Perfect Soil Blend for Vegetables: The 103

The 103 Soil Blend, featured in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, is my go-to recipe for great garden soil. I developed it after working in hundreds of clients' gardens and seeing firsthand what worked best time and time again. The 103 is essentially a sandy loam soil.

Here's the recipe:

• 1/3 topsoil
• 1/3 coarse sand
• 1/3 organic compost
• a little bit of earthworm castings or decomposed animal manure 

The topsoil provides structure for the roots of your plants. If the topsoil in your area has a lot of sand already in it, then you'll want to decrease the second component, which is the coarse sand.

Coarse sand acts as a soil loosener. It creates more air pockets in the topsoil, so there are more channels for roots to grow and water to drain.

The third part of this blend, compost, provides tons of nutrients. It also helps with water retention.

Together, the coarse sand and compost create that light, moisture-retaining soil blend without peat.

Each season, you refresh this soil blend by adding a little bit of fresh, finished compost and a sprinkle of worm castings to the soil surface before planting. These amendments release nutrients slowly and promote much more balanced growth than something like Miracle-Gro. They also act as a physical barrier to deter pests and reduce soil-borne diseases from splashing up onto the leaves of your plants.

This blend is all you need to grow a vegetable garden just like mine—one that's completely packed with flowers, herbs, root crops, leafy greens, and fruiting plants. One that provides all the nutrients plants need without synthetic fertilizers or non-renewable resources.

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The Success of Your Vegetable Garden Starts from the Ground Up

By avoiding these 5 mistakes when creating your soil blend, you can prevent about 90% of the problems most people face in the garden. Yes, really. That's because most of those issues stem from plants trying to grow in poor, depleted soil. If you focus on setting your garden up with great soil and then work to maintain that soil, the garden pretty much cares for itself. Healthy soil is quite literally the foundation of a successful, productive garden.

If you're ready to set your vegetable garden up the right way or bring your garden to the next level, you've got to check out my new course, Gardenary Soil School. In this course, I walk you through how to create this soil blend from scratch or from the existing native soil in your backyard. I teach you how to troubleshoot every kind of soil issue you may encounter.

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