Amending Your Soil for a Better Next Year

Have you ever wondered why some gardeners seem to have endless success with the things they plant, but others do not and yet they get their seeds from the same place? Have you ever wondered why despite watering and careful attention your harvest just isn’t what you expected? Well, the key could be soil amendments! I’ll be honest, this is not a cure, but this is an important piece to the puzzle in everyone’s garden journey.

One of my favorite books that I began to read many years ago, taught me a lot about crop rotation, and soil amendments, especially for small gardeners. This is something small/medium gardeners sometimes do not think about, or maybe do not think it is as important as it is. But, I assure you, it is a key piece to your yearly garden success.

So where do you begin with garden soil amendments?

You begin simple. Compost and manure are going to be the easiest, quickest, and pretty effective amendment to add to your soil. You can get real fancy and add bone meal, or fish meal, or blood meal, you can act at shells you can add ash from your fire pit, you can add crumpled up leaves. You can add all of the above. But my biggest recommendation to you is to use what you have available. If you’ve got crumpled up leaves and ash and some form of animal manure, use that. If you don’t have anything available to you, I might suggest considering a soil test and adding specific items to your garden soil based on your test results.

What do I amend my soil with each year?

I do my best to pay attention to the crop rotations that I am focusing on. If I just planted a bunch of beans and peas, and something that adds nitrogen to the soil, when I’m done, I’m not going to add an amendment to have extra nitrogen in it. Instead, I’ll ensure that other things into the soil to ensure a proper ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. One thing that all areas of my garden space will get is rabbit poop. We raised meat rabbits on our little homestead and let me tell you, these guys generate a lot of poop. The thing I really love about rabbit poop, is that it is not hot, meaning that it can go directly onto my soil at any time and it does not need to sit for six months to cool down. Chicken, manure, cow, manure, etc. all need time to cool off. Which is great if you think . For someone like me that is constantly amending my soil and planting in the spring, the summer, and in the fall, I find rabbit poop to be the best addition to our space.

Here I have just amended the back half of my in ground garden space in preparation for spring planting of potatoes. I added my version of compost and some ash from the fire. You can see my lovely Mammoth Dill in the back drying seeds, it is one of my preferred Dills for our family, as well as for our rabbits. If you’re curious where I get my seeds, check them out here.

What is compost? And how do you get it?

Compost is essentially a mix of things such as grass, leaves, food waste, any kind of animal poop, chicken feathers that has sat for an extended period of time, but a minimum of six months in order to breakdown appropriately. This compost then can then be added to your garden beds in ground, your raised beds, or wherever else you are in need of a soil replenishment. To make life simple, I use our chicken coop as a compost bin. Daily we’re tossing in food scraps, there’s chicken poop, weekly. We’re throwing in grass, clippings and leaves and the chickens do a wonderful job of scratching and breaking things down. At the end of the year, I take my pitchfork and I dig out as many wheelbarrels of stuff that I need and to toss it into the garden space that needs amending, as long as it’s gonna have six months of time to sit. In some cases, I’ll take a wheelbarrow full of this “compost “ and popping in a bucket or on a tarp and set it aside so that I can sit for six months to cool down and compost. I’ll be doing this to replenish the soil where my fall garlic will be planted. My fall garlic will go in in a couple of weeks here, and will be pulled in July 2026 or thereabouts. I will then need something to amend the soil before I can plant some fall crops. I’ll have a bucket of amendments ready to go as soon as the garlic is cleared and curing.

You can also purchase compost from a local garden center or from somewhere like Lowe’s or Home Depot. You can also create your own official composting bin. Where you have some spaces that are able to hold all of your composted items and can sit for an extended period of time with some good rotating turning and turning. Weade not really have the space to create a compost set up officially so I work with what I have, and it has been quite successful for the last few years.

If this sounds complicated to you, just a reminder that you really can keep it simple. If it’s your first share, and you don’t know how to start with making your own compost. Buy what you can afford and utilize that to amend your garden space. After you get a good garden hall, perhaps you can then start to focus on creating your own compost. Regardless of what you do, choose something that’s going to give back to your soil, so that the soil will give back to you through a lovely garden production.