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Don't call it dirt!
233 Plays2 years ago
On this week's episode we will be discussing the importance of taking a 'soil first' approach in all of your home and production plant activities. Is soil just the cold dead substrate under your feet or something more? Just don't call it dirt! Listen in to hear more about this important topic.
University of Kentucky Soil Testing Services
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture. Hello, everybody. If you keep letting me do all the intros, everyone's going to sound like this is just my Alexis's podcast. But I'm actually here with Ray, Josh, and Brett, and we are, you know, just a bunch of plant peeps talking about cool plant stuff.
00:00:31
Speaker
Thank you for having me on your pod. This is our pod. I like to think of it as Alexis's show. It's never safe. You don't want me to. You never know what tangent I'll go off on. It's our hours.
00:00:51
Speaker
Yeah, this group as a whole, we never know which kite we're going to chase next. So we don't know where we're going. We may start at one place. We're going to end up at a very different place. That's pretty par for the course for this group.
Main Topic: Importance of Soils
00:01:04
Speaker
But today, what are we talking about guys? Yeah. So today's kite is just talking to kind of about soils and how they're the foundation for where your new farm that you may have or the farm you currently have or the farm you want to have. Yeah.
00:01:20
Speaker
And I know it's a really common question that we get both of you guys that are on here Josh and Brett that are on campus and Alexis and I that are in the field. We all get questions on this an extension it seems like because it is literally a foundation question when people really start to dive into whether they're new or more experienced.
00:01:40
Speaker
One of the most common questions is related to soils, whether it's soil testing or what about the structure of my soil, soil compaction, or is this soil suitable for this crop or that crop? Really common question.
00:01:54
Speaker
And a really important question because obviously they are kind of the foundation unless you're doing some hydroponic growing, which is a whole other ball game there. Uh, you know, we all need soil. Uh, it is, it is the life of our farms and of our plants. And so if you take care of nothing else, take care of your soil.
Understanding Soil vs. Dirt
00:02:12
Speaker
Uh, that's what
00:02:14
Speaker
Soils or dirt is the lifeless substrate beneath our feet, and we're going to treat it as such, are we not? Is that the case? Is it just a bag of minerals that's lifeless under our feet? But I guess we should start by talking about our definitions of soil, which
00:02:32
Speaker
is both simple and complex. Okay, mine, I will tell you. Sure, yours. Don't say dirt to me if we're talking about something to grow plants in. I knew that would get a reaction. I know. It's like fury just builds up in my face. But dirt is what you sweep under the rug, right? Dirt is lifeless. Dirt is not soil. Soil is not just the minerals and these rocks and these types of things. It's also biological. It's alive. And you want that. You want live soils. You don't want dirt.
00:03:02
Speaker
If you come to my house, you will find lots of dirt inside. So I will tell you that ahead of time. But soils is what we want. What about you, Ray? You know, you said something there. You said that it's alive. And I guess a good case in point that just now popped into my head like so many ideals, you know.
Soil as a Living Ecosystem
00:03:18
Speaker
But I was talking to someone the other day about raised bed gardens, and they had noticed something. They had taken natural mineral soil, and they'd put it in containers.
00:03:30
Speaker
five gallon buckets to be precise, drilled holes in the bottom for drainage, so that's good. But they noticed that the soil turned into something that was much akin to concrete. And it led to this really great discussion because they had a biology background, not necessarily soils, but a science background. And we had this discussion of how soil is living. It's more than just the parent weathered material. You take soil that's in its natural column,
00:03:59
Speaker
in its natural environment.
00:04:01
Speaker
and you take it out of that environment, you don't do anything else. You take a chunk of soil and take it out of its surroundings and put it in a micro environment, like a plastic bucket, and it turned into concrete. And they were absolutely fascinated by that. But it led to a great discussion of how soil works as a living system, that it's more than just a mineralized and weathered rock material and parent material. It's also bacteria and fungi and everything else. And all of this matters
00:04:30
Speaker
to new and experienced growers as they're making considerations of what to plant, where to plant, and how to nurture their soil, or maybe they're buying a new patch of land, but all of this matters. I don't know if any of you guys have had any other questions, but that was just a great discussion, and it made me think about things too. They just were fascinated that soil turned into concrete. They said, we didn't compact it. That wasn't it. I said, no, no, you just took it out of the soil column, and that's how it behaves. It's a living system. Fish out of water.
00:04:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it didn't have any root matter or anything in there, no organic matter much, or it did have some in there, but it became inert, essentially, when all the bacteria died because of the high temperatures in the plastic bucket and some other factors. So, yes, soil definitely is not dirt. That is correct, but a common question that you get. What about you, Josh and Brent? I mean, I guess class was pretty indoctrinated into me about how it's
00:05:25
Speaker
the foundation of all agriculture, but so much human activity too. I mean, first structures were all things built out of earthworks. Some of that stuff still goes on today, and it's a combination of all these different sized particles that create a texture. And then within that, you have all these living organisms that
00:05:45
Speaker
Maybe we can't always see with the naked eye, but determine a lot about what that soil can or can't do for us. So there isn't really a great... I don't have a great poetic definition. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. Yeah, that was lovely. The NRCS has actually one that's very close to what you just said.
00:06:06
Speaker
Josh, but I was kind of curious. Natural Resources Conservation Service, because that's one of their primary objectives, is working with soils and the protection of that. But their definition literally is the continued capacity of soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals and humans. That's literally the definition that they have on the federal website. But they sort of highlighted that vital living ecosystem. So yeah, yeah, going back to what you said there, Josh.
00:06:36
Speaker
It is sort of a living system and we're learning more about it every day. It's not like we know everything that we absolutely need to know about soil at this point in time because of that interaction with things like fungi and bacteria. I had a soul scientist there that I had.
00:06:52
Speaker
in my undergrad studies. And he said something one day that really hit me and stuck with me for many years. He said, if you take a nickel, put a gram or so of soil on that. He said, guess how many bacteria, single cell bacteria are in that on average. None of us had a clue. And he said, over one billion, you know, living organisms on that. And that kind of stayed with me. And a lot of the research is still ongoing and they're still finding out how that bacteria and fungi sort of interacts in soils.
00:07:22
Speaker
that that nickel thing sounds like the advanced version of, uh, guess how many jelly beans are in the jar. You know, and I kind of thought about that. I was like, where's this conversation? He, he pulled a nickel literally out of his pocket and I thought, what is this guy doing? But yeah, it was a great, it was a great demonstration, but yeah, exactly. Exactly. Something that comes to mind for me is that, so as the, the least
00:07:45
Speaker
soil inclined person of this group for sure. Nerdy. Yeah. So basically, I'm the coolest guy here. Yes, that's exactly what we're saying. With the economist, super cool.
Historical Impacts on Soil Health
00:08:00
Speaker
It makes me think of the parallels over the last couple of decades in our understanding of the microbiome in terms of human health, animal health, and the
00:08:09
Speaker
microflora and microfauna that we have and coexist with, and they don't just exist to serve us, but we have grown across time in this coexistential symbiotic relationship with these huge populations of living organisms, small and mighty living organisms.
00:08:29
Speaker
As far as the living things that are in the soil, we talk about trees sequestering carbon. Well, there's a whole lot of carbon sequestered in soils, and so when you are able to reduce tillage and things like that,
00:08:43
Speaker
You can actually help with carbon sequestration. There's all kinds of implications there, but it just makes me think of it as this. It's this thing that we have been doing this evolutionary dance with, we and a bunch of other species for thousands and thousands of years. And so that when we come in and disrupt or do something completely differently or we, as in the case of the Dust Bowl, we just until, until, until in places that don't have the structure that maybe
00:09:12
Speaker
they needed in order to sustain that type of intensive agriculture, we're changing that part of that evolutionary conversation and the way that things have been for a while. And so my mind goes to those types of things less so than the specifics of the structure. It is a little bit maybe more poetic, but it also makes me think about, so when I go and get a soil test,
00:09:36
Speaker
how do I understand those results? How do I think about that in terms of, okay, I'd like to dance with my soil partner a little bit more respectfully, a little more productively, and hopefully we can maybe even make some money and keep making money and sustain that across time. And so that's my entry point into all of this.
00:09:55
Speaker
That's kind of a good segue into the practical nature of soils, which we have to deal with on a daily basis within our system at the university. All of us do. And something we encounter most commonly are soil samples. We work with homeowners. It doesn't give the total picture by any means because the comments that you made, Brad, kind of alludes to that. This is a kind of a complex system that works together. But a soil sample is something that is available at every extension office that I know of.
Soil Testing and Management
00:10:26
Speaker
And it's a common way that we interface with home gardeners and commercial producers in learning one aspect about soils as far as what is currently there and available, both the big nutrients, the macro nutrients, and there's even tests where we can test for lesser nutrients that are very crop specific.
00:10:44
Speaker
That is a practical way that we sort of interface with soil. But it seems like most things within our system, when I'm speaking with especially commercial producers, I want to know the history of the land. I want to know what went on there because that's an aspect of soil that matters. What was the crop that was there the year before?
00:11:07
Speaker
because that'll give us some indication of what may have been drawn off as far as nutrients and removed or some crops, some crops just remove more nutrients than others and all of that matters. So you have, once again, you have to be a good investigator, even when someone comes in for something as simple to us. I know Alexis, we get this all the time.
00:11:24
Speaker
being field focused and field facing is, um, you know, we do have to ask questions to get the full, as full as picture as possible so that we can give the best results possible because it is just a snapshot of one aspect, uh, that we're going to work with that, that, that person, uh, that individual later on. Okay. So, so summarizing a little bit here. So if you are farming, growing anything, going to grow, whatever it is,
00:11:50
Speaker
There's a, there's a couple of things you need, you need to know, you're going to want to know about, about your soil. So one is going to be by doing a soil test. And I would recommend you don't do the little ones that you get at a big box store. You send this off to a lab. Uh, usually, you know, if they're not free, they're no more than 20 bucks. Uh, and you send this off to a lab. Now land grant universities all have soil testing labs that you should be able to send off a soil sample too. And like I said, they're usually all under 20 bucks if they're any cost at all.
00:12:20
Speaker
So you want to get a soil test. So here in Kentucky, our soil test from our land grant is going to give you your soil pH. It's also going to give you your macronutrients, your NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, but it's also going to give you things like calcium, magnesium, zinc, some of those micronutrients, lesser needs, but they're right in the middle. They're still very needed. It's good to know those levels to make sure that we're not
00:12:47
Speaker
really under because there are some crops that really need those and a lot more capacity. And then, you know, based on that, we can give you recommendations from a nutrient perspective, you know, telling us what kind of salts are in your soil that this is just kind of the lab work, right? The microscope of it all. But then you also want to know, and it's something that, you know, you necessarily don't need a lab for or even an expert for. You can do this on your own or of course you can, you know,
00:13:16
Speaker
If you know your extension agent or a local expert in soil, you can work with them, but you want to know your soil texture. So that's just essentially the percentages of sand, silt, and clay that you have in your soil. And here in Kentucky, we have higher clay soils. We have limestone base. We've got more clay. You can do this by doing what's called the ribbon test. It's very, very simple and it's fun. And if you've got kids, it's a good way to do it. So look up the ribbon test. You can do something like that.
00:13:46
Speaker
how sticky it is, all these different aspects, how gritty and sandy. You can also just put some soil in a mason jar with some water in it and let it sit for a few days and see how it settles out. The percentage, you'll see that sand, silt, and clay settle out and those percentages
00:14:04
Speaker
of the entire jar that each one of those are will tell you a lot about your soil. It tells you how much water holding capacity it has. It tells you how much nutrients your soil can actually hold onto. So we know you've got calcium from your soil test, but we can tell you how available it is based on your soil texture. So those are kind of two things. And then what Ray said, what was there before can be really helpful to know what's going to be available to you this year or next year or 10 years from now.
00:14:34
Speaker
That's kind of like a summary of something you always want to know and every year, if you're farming and you're doing this pretty actively, soil test every year and your soil structure or your soil texture probably won't change that much unless you're adding lots and
Amending and Understanding Soil Types
00:14:50
Speaker
lots of compost. That's one of those things you can't really...
00:14:52
Speaker
Yeah. To a point you can't change. Yeah. It's very hard to change. Which is why we don't raise beds, you know, you can adjust that in a season. I think Josh makes a good point when he scale matters here. On a small scale, you can make changes to things like organic matter, which has all sorts of awesome benefits. The addition of organic matter in soils, but it's very hard to do on large scales.
00:15:17
Speaker
On a large scale, we tend to handle that with things like cover crops, and that certainly does help. And you can make some just incredible gains from having things like something as simple as cover crops. And Brett mentioned something earlier, concepts like reduced tillage, it seems like in the U.S.
00:15:34
Speaker
You know, we went through this kind of cycle where we, you know, because of the times, neither bad nor good, no judgment call here, but because of the times, we used a lot of intensive tillage. And then we found out that that had some detrimental effects. So now we're going back even farther in our history and going back to things like cover crops and trying to minimize tillage. And all of that's very interesting to me. And no till was, it was born in Kentucky and Christian County, Kentucky, no till in the US and in the world.
00:16:03
Speaker
It was born in Kentucky, reduced tillage, no tillage came right here from within Kentucky. I hope I'm not upsetting any Western States here. Got them. Yeah. I passed a historical marker one day and I stopped. I was like, what is that? It was the middle of nowhere. It was in Christian County. And it said the birthplace of no-till agriculture. And it was fascinating, but we went through this entire cycle in soils of how we treat soil and where we're at today.
00:16:32
Speaker
But sort of leads in or kind of piggybacks onto some of the things Alexis was saying. I got a question. So you mentioned clay, sand or- Sand silken clay.
00:16:51
Speaker
Yeah, sand, silt, and clay. So can you just give me the things you would be excited about and things that would be a little bit challenging about a soil type that had one of those predominant? Like if I'm a clay boy, you know, I'm a clay boy out here in my backyard.
00:17:10
Speaker
Well, if you have heavy clay, Brett, you certainly, homeowners would get this. You just don't want to dump sand on it because sand plus clay equals concrete. Literally, like no, literally it's concrete. I get excited when I see on a sheet of a particle breakdown, one third, one third, one third, sand, silt, clay.
00:17:26
Speaker
which equals loan, which equals usually pretty good soil type. I get really excited about that when it said that's the rule of thirds, but yeah. Clay is one of those things that's, to me, an inherent soil property that the foundation clay type of an area cannot be changed.
00:17:45
Speaker
the type of clay, there's different types of clay that are present. That's an inherent soil quality. You can't change that, but you can modify it over time. And that's something I stress with producers, because I usually start with, what can you change and what can you not change? And when a person, I don't know, when you guys are working,
00:18:04
Speaker
with folks, but that's something we look at is NRCS soil maps, and you can gain access to all of those online, but look at those first to see how much sand, how much silt, and how much clay equals which soil type, because there's all these classifications or soil types that are out there that really do matter whether you're having tomatoes or an orchard or whatever.
00:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, just to interject there, that was something I was wanting to bring up as the resource of the USGS soil surveys, you know, a national map that shows
00:18:39
Speaker
soil types down to a very specific level, not just your sand silk clay and loam percentage, although I think that's one of the most valuable things that is in that resource. The place to start, yeah. It also shows what your slope is like in some other characteristics of the soil that can make certain areas what they call highly erodible, meaning
00:19:01
Speaker
Areas that you are that's recommended not to do a lot of cropping or tillage because you're gonna lose your soil but to kind of address Brett's question of sand silk clay the first thing in my mind when i think of. Finding out what my soil texture is for an area that i want to crop is how how water is gonna behave when it rains or irrigates.
00:19:24
Speaker
And sand, silt and clay, your percentage is kind of, they are the heavy influencer of that. So in a predominantly sandy soil, water does not stick around for very long and it's gone almost right away. So it's an area that unless you're getting routine and regular rainfall, you're probably going to need to irrigate. And whereas clay is at the opposite end where.
00:19:47
Speaker
It holds water for a long time, but it also can hold it so tight that it is not available for plants. Isn't there, Josh, a brief description of every soil top on that national resource? Yes. That map will tell you what is going on with your soil and whether or not it has a propensity to flood, which more clay soils tend to be like that.
00:20:12
Speaker
So another thing, because we have a lot of clay here and people tend to think about clay as a negative. I think there's this inherent negativity because when you think about clay, a lot of people who think about, you know, cracked, you know, you're walking around, it's really dry outside. You get these big cracks or clods that are hard like rocks.
00:20:31
Speaker
And people say that's clay. And while that's not wrong, that's poorly managed clay. I will tell you that. Clay also holds your nutrients. So just like from what Josh was saying, it holds the water, which means it holds the nutrients. And so your plants need those nutrients to be in that water to be able to access it. So by holding onto that water and having more particles to hang onto that water, you're holding onto more nutrients.
00:20:56
Speaker
So naturally your soils just are more nutrient dense and so soil is not a bad thing unless it's managed inappropriately.
00:21:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, it takes all three. And different people in different parts of the US have learned to manage that. I mean, if something is mostly sandy soil, we know it's going to be, for the most part, unless the water table's high. If you have a sandy soil, it can be managed. But the nutrient profile is going to be different. And how long nutrients stick around in the soil. But speaking of soil types and soils in general, I'll pose this question to you guys, because you guys are a panel of folks that know a lot about things such as this. But where do you guys start?
00:21:35
Speaker
When someone comes in or you're having a discussion with someone and says, you know, they've got pretty good soil. They've got reasonable depth of rock, which is also an inherent soil quality. If they have a shallow depth of rock, we know that we can't change that. So they need to know that up front. But let's say someone's got an average soil.
00:21:53
Speaker
and they come into you guys, where do you guys start? What's your logic model in your brain that starts clicking when someone talks to you about that, when they say, what can I do in three years, you know, for every single year to make improvements in
Long-term Soil Improvement Techniques
00:22:06
Speaker
my soil? What's some of your standard soil improvement recommendations for you guys? Well, we've talked about some of them kind of in part already.
00:22:16
Speaker
Well, we've talked about compost, right? I think compost is like the number one thing people think of and why it's because it's something that is it's kind of, I don't want to say it's easy. I mean, nothing changes in soil overnight. It was created over thousands and hundreds of thousands of years and millions of years to make one inch of soil. So adding in a couple inches of compost is not going to like.
00:22:39
Speaker
reinvent the wheel for you right but of course composting and there's multiple types right there's animal manure composting there's verma composting what you're doing with worms there's this thing that i'm highly fascinated with and josh has probably heard of but uh a new thing it's not new it's very old but new to me it's called bakashi which is essentially fermentation composting
00:23:01
Speaker
You know, there's lots of that, and that's great, uh, and can be really helpful in the first season, but it can also be expensive. And when you're doing something on a larger scale than like a raised bed, it can get costly. It also, depending on what type of compost, like animal compost, for an example, in our soils, we, most of us have very high natural phosphorus levels. So by adding in animal compost, that
00:23:26
Speaker
That compost is naturally high in phosphorus because animals and so you're just adding phosphorus and you can tie up a lot of other nutrients by having this overwhelming amount of phosphorus in your soils and so looking at other way types of compost can be beneficial but.
00:23:45
Speaker
Josh knows a lot more about livestock than I do. If I could just briefly interject even the step before that, when you take your soil tests, take them from a variety of places on the farm or in the location and keep those.
00:24:00
Speaker
And I would say think about what metrics, what are the points of measurement that you're looking to improve or that need improvement. And also don't confuse your soil with a RPG character. You don't have to maximize everything. Everything doesn't have to be 100% perfect. Improvement is the name of the game. So I would just say that when we moved in to our place, took a bunch of soil samples and we're able to track across time
00:24:26
Speaker
to see what those things are. It's very easy to accidentally, you know, you operate work on the work off of them that first year, add your whatever you're going to add and then forget about them. But keep them over time. You can see how things are improving. So even in your small area, Brett, you guys have a cover crop. I know that and you alluded to the Dust Bowl earlier and there's all sorts of pictures flying to my mind when we
00:24:47
Speaker
think about the dust bowl and all the things that came together to make that situation. But do you guys use a cover crop? Cover crops in your area? Yeah, we've done some cover cropping. Awesome. We've done some composting. We've brought in a lot of brown material and all that kind of stuff. But I didn't mean to steal. Josh, Alexis was kicking it over to you for some other ideas about improving stuff. I guess to kind of answer Ray's question of where do you start with people when they have questions about soil management?
00:25:16
Speaker
I definitely suffer from the problem of coming up under ecology where I want to answer every question with it depends or create another question. At some point people are going to need an answer. That's a great, great comment.
00:25:30
Speaker
What I generally try to start with is sort of try to get a handle on what sort of scale of management they're looking at because recommendations and answers to where they want to go are going to be very different. You know, they're talking about 10 acres versus like a quarter of an awesome market. Yes, absolutely. That's kind of clutch there and then.
00:25:51
Speaker
Yeah, that, that being the key one is what is their scale they want to work with and kind of, you know, sort of, what is your goal? What are you trying to get out of this soil? That, that should kind of lead where they want to go. Like, are they trying to just grow certain order cultural crops? Are they managing it for something else?
00:26:10
Speaker
And something else to kind of touch on when it comes to the question of kind of multiple soil samples and looking at soil surveys, the history question is really important, especially if you're, if you know on the property, there has been an area where, let's say like severe disturbances happened, like if there is a place where a structure was at one point,
00:26:35
Speaker
Its soil characteristics and everything are going to be wildly different than the soil survey. And so that's an area to kind of keep an eye on and to think of as a special case that it is not like what's around it.
Site-specific Soil Management
00:26:47
Speaker
A lot of times that'll be one of those situations where we go out on a farm and there's a lot of variation. So I go out and I'm like, what's going on here?
00:26:54
Speaker
maybe a loafing paddock where they had a bunch of horses and I'll take an extra tool like a penetrometer or something like that and you go and you see try to find the compaction layers and you find these areas where they have these incredible compaction layers and it's kind of just one of the investigations you do with the variations. Right, right. Yeah, I think that kind of leads back to the
00:27:18
Speaker
you know, having multiple areas that you take samples from. Um, so where I will start with somebody, if we're there together in person is kind of looking at their area of management on a map. I love maps, but you know, helping them think about ways to divide it up into different management units to pull samples from, you know, so that way you're not trying to think of a farm as just one site with one soil.
00:27:47
Speaker
but as like a cluster of different soil textures and places that you might have different goals for. Or maybe it's the same goal, but you're managing two different soil textures to try to get in there and to think of them differently. That's a good point because we had that sand discussion. So it's, uh, you may have different, uh, you know, micro soil sites on a farm, whether it's on the ridge or maybe some soils washed down and it's going to make a difference.
Feeding Soil and Nutrient Balance
00:28:14
Speaker
Topography plays a big kind of role in that. Yeah. And that's something we can't change. That's an inherent quality is slope of soils. We can't really change that.
00:28:24
Speaker
Another thing I'll ask you, I mean, this is kind of selfish. I'm asking you guys questions because I love the insight. But how about this concept of, and I heard this and it's another thing that stuck with me over time, that we're not really feeding the soil. When we put down fertilizers, I'm sorry, we're not feeding the plants, we're feeding the soil. And this concept of we should always try to feed the soil
00:28:48
Speaker
And if you guys ran into that concept or know anything more about that, rather, we're not fertilizing the plants. In other words, we should be thinking about it in terms of we're fertilizing the soil and the soil is feeding the plants. I do. I think a breakthrough for me on that when I was when I was working on growing vegetables for for research projects specifically about carbon and nitrogen cycling and the way that minerals and
00:29:10
Speaker
nutrients are moving in and around plants is this idea of so when you get that that's soil test, it's a snapshot. And the idea of like, that's what you have on hand today in the soil. And this is broader concept of what the fancy people call plant availability.
00:29:32
Speaker
whether the nutrients are available to the plants right now. You know, it's the dinner that's done, it's cooked, it's ready for you to eat. Whereas over time, you're trying to build up thinking of the longer term soil health and feeding the soil and all those, the microbe. I realized earlier when I was talking about dancing with the microbes in the soil, that that's like a dirty dancing kind of concept. There's some kind of bit there maybe. Don't put sandy particle in a corner. Yeah, exactly.
00:30:01
Speaker
but that you're needing to kind of think right now, you're needing to think six weeks from now, you're needing to think six months from now, and you're needing to think years and years down the road. And I don't have the knowledge that you all do about that, but that general idea of like immediately available or immediately mineralizable versus things that over time as the soil
00:30:24
Speaker
eats and poops and peas and does all of its fun stuff will become available over time and thinking of both that's a short game and a long game. I don't know if you all talk about it that way. A couple of you guys have touched on it. Just because it's there in the soil and it's on a soil test doesn't mean that it's available. I think Alexis, did you touch on that earlier? Just because we have soil availability of something like potassium
00:30:49
Speaker
It doesn't mean that the plant's going to be able to take that up. That's another interaction of the soil that has to do with this factor of pH and alkalinity and some other things. And I've ran into producers, particularly like orchard growers, when we're looking at these long-term perennial crops, aka apple trees in this case, they had the nutrients in the soil.
00:31:12
Speaker
They were there, but they were still showing a lot of deficiencies in those plants. And then we get into more advanced testing like tissue testing with those producers. And yes, it did show a deficiency and then we'd investigated farther and it turned out to be a pH problem where maybe the pH was
00:31:32
Speaker
Wrong on one end or the other and iron was being released in the soil and that in turn bound something else So it's it goes back to speaking to the fact that soil is a system
00:31:43
Speaker
So sometimes it does depend, Josh. That's not a bad answer, but it's not one that pleases people. They don't like that. We need answers here, people. We need answers. Yeah. I think with soil, it goes back to that same kind of soil ecologist thought process. And one of the ones that I know says, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And in soil, it's all about there's so many different things. We've hit on chemical structure.
00:32:11
Speaker
just all of these different biological things in the soil and don't get overwhelmed by wanting them to be correct. I think when someone comes to me and says, where do I go from here? What do they want to grow? We've talked about what's the history there. We look at the soil test, but then what do they want to grow? And then looking at what the soil at the moment has the ability to do.
00:32:36
Speaker
Then how like Brett said, think of it like meal prepping. Prepare it now and you're going to eat it on Friday, but in this case, you might be eating it in a year or longer. We see that a lot with our organic amendments. They're not readily available to the plant. Those microbes take time. We feed the microbes and then the microbe can feed the plant.
00:33:00
Speaker
And that's the interactions we're still learning about is the interaction with all those microbes. What are they doing in the soil? And it's just fascinating. Some bacteria, you feed certain bacteria and that actually acts as a soil binder. I mean, there's all these little neat interactions. It's pretty cool. When we talk about feeding the soil, Alexis, like what kinds of things are we feeding it? Like as far as actual materials?
00:33:22
Speaker
Yeah, so you get that very natural breakdown. So the easiest way to think about it is what's in a natural system. So you can think of it as a prairie, or I like to think of it as a forest because I like trees, right? In a natural system, your leaves fall down, they're breaking down, the worms are breaking them down first, and then it goes through this cycle and gets smaller and smaller until you're on that bacteria, fungi level, and you're feeding them these organic substances. And in other cases,
00:33:50
Speaker
In farming, it could be something like compost, but it could also be something like roots, which is what we talk about with cover cropping, where we're essentially either tilling under those cover crops or somehow incorporating them back into the soil, but they're also feeding on root exudates. The fungi are feeding on the plants that are then feeding
00:34:10
Speaker
the microbes, you know, it's a big web, right? The soil food web, as we call it. And by feeding. It's a great term and lots of lots of fun reading on that. So remember that term, folks. If you're into nerdy things, soil food web is a great topic. A world wide web, but not the soil food web. If you really like good puns, there's a book, a teaming.
00:34:28
Speaker
with microbes, T-E-A-N, but you know. Nice, nice. Of course there's a book on that. Of course Josh would know about there being a book on that. Soil biology, it's just cool. We're just letting things eat what they would be eating in normal decomposition. Right, right, yeah. In a typical more natural or less human impact. And one thing. That seems to be the recurring theme of this discussion. We keep talking about like natural ecosystems and so we're trying to mimic what the diversity, the chemical and biological diversity that's inherent in nature
00:34:57
Speaker
And I guess that's the current theory of where we are in soils and soil science, isn't it? Isn't that kind of where we're at? We're trying to more closely mimic that. Yeah. See those, because, you know, soil essentially formed before we were here doing stuff. And what we're trying to do is understand it to the point that we can help it along in its processes. But, but.
00:35:24
Speaker
We still have people out there who are trying to grow stuff this season, right? Their soil's not ready to roll. And so correct me if I'm wrong, when we think about fertilizer recommendations or we think about applying fertilizer that's, I'm talking about chemicals, synthetic fertilizers, or maybe an organically derived like a chicken litter or something like that.
00:35:43
Speaker
That stuff that we're talking about is on the menu for the plant to use this spring, this year, right? Sure, sure. That's like a factor of where the plant's at, getting it kind of the right nutrient at the right time and the right location. That's kind of the triumvirate of as far as managing immediate nutrients. Yeah, yeah. And we get that question a lot from home gardeners. And one of the most common things that I refer people to is we have a home gardening manual here in Kentucky.
00:36:10
Speaker
And I constantly refer people to a little chart that says when to apply this amount of nutrients to this specific crop at this specific time. Because all of these things are weather dependent, temperature dependent.
00:36:25
Speaker
But we have to get the nutrients in the soil with all of those factors in mind. We have to get it when the plant basically when the plant needs it, it needs to be available there as much as possible. It needs to be there and it needs to have enough moisture to be able to take it up. So I say this looking at you blossom and rot people. So if you have blossom and rot, most likely you went to the store and they said, Oh, here you get a calcium spray and you spray it on the plant.
Preventing Soil Compaction
00:36:51
Speaker
Take it back. Don't spend your money on that.
00:36:55
Speaker
It's not ideal, so your plant is actually not really gonna take up that calcium through its leaves. It needs to take that calcium up through its roots.
00:37:03
Speaker
and it takes it up in that water solution. Remember I talked about that earlier, but it takes it up in that water solution. So your soil tests will tell you if you have enough available calcium in Kentucky, 90% of the time we have enough available calcium, but what we don't have is enough water to be moved at, at a regular intervals to be consistently feeding the plant calcium. And so you get blossom and raw and people see it after periods of drought because
00:37:30
Speaker
There's not enough consistent moisture. It doesn't have to be a bunch. It just has to be consistent. Right. Yeah, I think that brings up a good point about water availability is that, you know, plants accessing these resources is contingent on water moving up through the plant column and pulling that through. And so, you know, it's one of those things where you got to kind of get it all right. And where, you know, the initial question of how do you kind of maintain your soil
00:37:59
Speaker
I think a lot of it is just kind of, you know, making sure you don't do something really wrong first and then allowing the system to kind of work for you. Like for instance, you know, when it's, when it's really wet out, don't till, don't compact your soil. Cause that's going to really, it's going to really harm your water availability, water movement, all kinds of stuff. Stuff isn't going to grow there. You can see that on fields where this is the part we drive on and you notice stuff doesn't really grow.
00:38:27
Speaker
It's not because they're waiting. Is it easy to get that bad, that soul structure back, Josh, once it's lost? At scale, absolutely not. No. It can be a real struggle. I mean, yeah, you're talking about deep
00:38:42
Speaker
Double digging is what people would do by hand. And anyway, it's not a fun time. So a moment's bad decision can create a lot of expensive labor down the road. We see that a lot with home gardeners. And I'll pick on the home garden tillage equipment some, that if someone's tempted in the springtime of the year to go out with a typical garden tiller. And I'll go out with some gizmo to test compaction layers.
00:39:08
Speaker
and go out and use that, you can almost always find a compaction layer right at the depth where the tiller can till. So it's just like jackhammering at a certain level, year after year.
00:39:19
Speaker
And if they've done no subsoiling or no deep tillage to break that up every four or five years, super common problem. And we see these roots that literally tap rooted plants that go down and then make a 90 degree angle. And they say, why does this look weird? Notice this. Well, it hits a compaction layer and it's like trying to grow into concrete. So, yeah, they've lost.
00:39:38
Speaker
their soil structure and it's going to take years to scale. If it's a large area, they may never get that back exactly the same. If it's a small scale area, they can obviously do some things more quickly. Right. Yeah. That's a good point and that kind of generation of like a hard pan can be something that's invisible to you unless you're bringing some kind of tool there to check for that sudden change in compaction. Absolutely. All right.
00:40:08
Speaker
We wondered far straight because we all know it's summarized. Yeah. We're, we get excited. We want to talk about soil. I get the sense. This isn't going to be the last time we talk about 20 part series about horticulture is just you nerds talking about soil soil. Okay. Anyways,
Soil Management Summary and Conclusion
00:40:28
Speaker
let me, let me summarize this for people. And you know, uh, you can, you can,
00:40:33
Speaker
skip, don't skip the episode, but if you needed a short suite to the point, let's get there. So add on if anybody thinks of anything else.
00:40:42
Speaker
One, learn your soil texture. You can do that through a ribbon test. You can do something. Figure out kind of how your sand, silt, and clay. You can look it up on NRCS. You can find it. Find your soil texture. Know a little bit about it. Understand what good and bad things about it. Know your soil nutrients. You can get this through a soil test from a lab. And so one thing
00:41:05
Speaker
You know, with the extension, what we do with those lab numbers is we give you a recommendation. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, like you're not going to get just a bunch of numbers thrown at you and you go like, Oh, what do I do? I, do I go put 10, 10, 10 down? Do I, can I use poultry litter? You know, if you're not sure what you want to do, whether you're organic or not in extension, we will give you that recommendation and help you help you walk through those steps. When, where all that jazz. No.
00:41:34
Speaker
Always want to increase your soil organic matter, whatever way you're going to do that. Think about, are you wanting to do compost? Are you wanting to cover crop? With that thought in mind, always keeping your soil covered. We didn't exactly say that, but we flirted around that idea of
00:41:51
Speaker
keeping your soil covered. So keep your soil covered with either a root of some kind, a living root. You could even tarp it like using something like a silage tarp or putting something like mulch down, just something that it is not getting beat down with rain. So in some way your soil should be covered.
00:42:08
Speaker
And then think about what you're going to grow and know what that plant needs to thrive. And that can come back to that soil test. If you say, hey, Ray, I want to grow blueberries. Well, blueberries are going to need something very different than asparagus or geraniums or something along those lines. And so we can help you with those more specifics that way. But yeah, know your nutrients, know your soil texture, cover your soil.
00:42:33
Speaker
Anything else? Kind of like those big, big things. One more, Alexis. What is it? Don't call it dirt. Soil is not dirt. Don't call it dirt. Don't call it dirt. Dirt is inside the house. Soil is outside. Yes, I like it. Perfect. Dirt's under the rug. Thinking about soil health, like thinking about a lot of things involves both considering the short term and the long term. Yes, perfect. And balancing those and understanding the impacts that each of those has
00:43:02
Speaker
on each other. And you don't have to be perfect. You just have to not till your soil when it's wet. Just be good. Exactly. Just like be decent. Awesome. Well, I think that's it, you guys. Thank you for joining us for Hort Culture and we hope that you will join us for future episodes. Everybody have a great day.