Good Soil - Composting

Growing vegetables in a city can be challenging for different reasons one of them is having good soil.

For those of you who are on a farm in the countryside you might never ask yourself if your soil is good enough because you have splendid vegetables and all the plants you plant grow beautifully.

If some of your plants are not at their best maybe it could be resolved with understanding the plants needs and checking your soil.

We haven’t been able to grow blueberries, a disaster… Even if we tried to get the soil more acidic it died. I want to try again, next year I’ll take the time to understand what was going on. Any tips for blueberries ?

A couple years ago we had our soil tested we were a little nervous about possibly having lead in our yard. But the results showed no lead, we needed to add nutrients some compost but that was it. It wasn’t a big surprise to find out that our soil wasn’t fertilized enough as we are in a city !

Here is a good source of information if you want to have your soil tested you can do it for really cheap. You can ask the cooperative closer to you here or contact a private company as well.

To keep our soil fertile we use a lot of compost from our compost pile and of course the chickens are helping a lot as well.

In your compost pile you can add kitchen waste, grass clipping, weeds, coffee grounds, eggshells any organic material... 

Mulching with hay or leaves is good to keep the soil moist and it will break down quickly and give some nutrients to your soil.

Every fall we do collect leaves from trees and cover the backyard with it for the winter.