Loosen up the ground: This is how it works

Gardening is no fun in compacted soil. Plants do not grow properly, take care and can die quickly. Luckily, there are different methods to loosen compacted soil.

Loosening up your garden soil involves a lot of work. Therefore, the question quickly arises as to how useful it is to loosen the soil and why it is done. Basically, plants thrive better in loose soil, air and water can circulate better and soil life stays healthy. In this article we present which soils should be loosened, which devices are available for loosening soils and other ways of loosening hard soils.

Why should you loosen the soil?

Soil is basically made up of soil particles such as clay minerals and humus, with cavities between them. These are filled with water or air, depending on the pore size and the amount of precipitation, for example. In compacted soils, the proportion of cavities is very small and existing pores are only very small. So there is neither enough space for water nor for air. However, both are vital for plant roots and most soil organisms. Plants grow better in a loose garden soil for 4 main reasons:

1. Better ventilation: Soil organisms and plant roots get enough oxygen thanks to more and larger pores. If not, roots would begin to rot. In addition, many important soil animals and microorganisms would die.
2. Avoiding waterlogging: In compacted soils, water can only drain slowly and poorly into deeper soil layers. If it reaches this, there will be more than enough water, but no air can reach the roots.
3. More root space: Plant roots grow mainly in coarse pores. To a certain extent, the following applies: the more coarse pores, the better the root penetration. The proportion of pores is very low in loose, dense soils. This means that plants have no opportunity to develop a large, well-branched root system that supplies them with nutrients and water.
4. Better water availability: As far as plant-available water is concerned, the soil should be neither too loose nor too dense. In very loose soil, most of the water simply flows through and the soil dries out quickly. In dense soil, many pores are filled with water. However, since there are almost only very fine pores, it is held so tightly by capillary forces that plant roots cannot absorb the water. It is then also referred to as dead water.

Good floors therefore have a balanced ratio of coarse, medium and fine pores. So there is enough space for roots, water and air.

Which soils should be loosened?

Soil particles can be divided into 3 classes based on size:

• Sand: The largest particles up to 2 mm
• silt
• Clay: The smallest particles

Loamy soils with a relatively balanced ratio of all 3 grain sizes are ideal for the growth of many plants.

If your garden soil is compacted, this can have two reasons:

• It contains too many clay particles, so it automatically clumps together.
• It was so compressed by frequent overflows or traffic that the proportion of coarse and medium pores is too small. For this reason, vegetable beds should be loosened once a year, for example.

Depending on what is causing the compaction, different measures are used to loosen the soil. These are described in more detail in the next section.

Tip: The grain size composition and soil type you can roughly estimate by finger testing. If you roll and rub a slightly damp sample of soil in your palms and between your fingers, the different grain sizes show different characteristics:

• Clay: Easily malleable; greasy; smooth, shiny smears
• Silt: Not cohesive; mealy; little malleable; sticking in finger grooves; rough sliding surfaces; Tearing when crushed
• Sand: Grainy; not malleable; not binding; not polluting; too "big" for finger grooves

How to loosen the soil?

There are basically 3 ways to loosen the soil. On the one hand, you can use devices that break up and loosen the soil structure, or you can influence the granulation of the soil by adding sand to it. Nature itself also knows ways and means of loosening soil. Soil organisms and the roots of plants are primarily responsible for this.

Loosen soil with equipment

Using equipment makes sense above all if the soil has been compacted due to being driven over or frequently walked over. The selection of garden tools for loosening up the soil is large, so that there is something suitable for almost every situation.

Tip: Of course, it is best if densifications do not occur in the first place. For example, you should step on wet floors as little as possible in winter or after rain.

spade

It used to be common practice to dig up your garden with a spade in the fall. The intention was to loosen the soil in the bed, bury weed seeds and promote frost fermentation, which causes heavy soil to crumble into loose crumbs. In the meantime, however, this practice has been abandoned, because digging up literally turns the entire soil life upside down and accelerates the decomposition of humus. Most of the time, the spade is therefore only found at the New planting of vegetable beds Use. With its help, the lawn soil is loosened and the original vegetation is buried by turning, so that new plants can be planted in the exposed soil.
It makes sense to use the spade as a tool to loosen the soil, even on heavy, wet clay soil. It can be used to improve ventilation and clogged clods of earth are crumbled. In addition, clay soils, which otherwise often remain cold for a long time, warm up faster thanks to digging.

Tip: thanks to the No-dig method it is even possible to create vegetable beds without digging.

Digging fork, boar tooth, cultivator, hoe and garden claw

All of these garden tools for loosening the soil differ from the spade in that they loosen the soil without turning it. They are therefore suitable for loosening soil without digging. In this way, the original layering of the subsoil, which only builds up slowly over the years, is preserved. Soil creatures remain in the zone that suits them and humus remains better protected.

Which device you use to loosen the soil depends primarily on your preferences. With the digging fork, large areas can be loosened relatively quickly and with little energy. A sow tooth is also usually pulled through the soil without much effort and loosens it relatively deeply. These two devices are usually used at most once a year, for example in the spring before the beds are planted.

Cultivators, garden claws and hoes usually do not penetrate quite so deeply and only loosen the upper layer of soil. In well-kept, humus-rich soils, thanks to them, deep tillage can be dispensed with entirely. But you can also use them during the gardening season, for example when replanting a bed.

Tip: It is often possible to rent motorized equipment such as cultivators or tillers for larger areas on a daily basis. However, you should only work with such devices when the floor is dry. Due to their weight, they can also have a condensing effect. In addition, they should not be used too often, as larger soil animals are quickly killed by the tines.

Loosen the soil with sand

If you have done the finger test and found that your soil is very clayey, soil loosening equipment and machines cannot help to improve the soil structure in the long term. Instead, such very clayey-loamy soils can be loosened up with sand.

But which sand is suitable for loosening the soil? Thoroughly washed, pure quartz sand with a grain size of 0.6 to 2 mm is best. Play sand, for example, is less suitable for loosening soil, because clay is often added to it so that children's sand cakes stick together. We recommend our for loosening loamy soils and soils with a high clay content Plantura lawn sand. It consists of 100% pure quartz sand and has a rather fine grain size, which is suitable both for loosening compacted soil under lawns and for loosening the soil in beds.

Tip: It is not possible to loosen the soil under the lawn with equipment, as this would destroy all the vegetation. Nevertheless, there are various methods of loosening up lawn soil and improving water retention and oxygen supply. These include, among other things lawn aeration and the sanding of lawn. Sand is spread on the lawn. Irrigated and rained, it is stored in the upper soil layers without digging up and loosens the soil under the lawn in the long term and without serious intervention.

Loosen the soil with soil activator

A soil activator does not directly create a loose soil, but it encourages animals that build up a loose soil structure. This includes earthworms. They dig tunnels that provide better soil aeration and water supply and produce humus in the process. Earthworms and other soil creatures are therefore essential for a healthy, fertile and loosened soil. However, these animals require food, which they obtain in the form of organic plant debris or rotting roots, among other things.

On conventionally cultivated fields and in many garden beds, however, the organic content in the soil is continuously decreasing. This is mainly due to the fact that a large part of the soil is not overgrown, is mainly fertilized with minerals and most plant remains are removed after harvest. In addition to various working methods that Humus build-up in the garden promote, also supplies a soil activator important nutrients and organic structural material for many soil organisms.

There are a few things to consider when choosing the soil activator. Many soil activators contain waste from the animal industry such as blood or horn meal. If you want to do without it, you can go with ours Plantura organic soil activator well advised. It is 100% animal-free and also contains live mycorrhizal fungi, which are important partners in the soil for numerous plants.

Soil loosening with plants

Many plants reach a considerable root mass even in a short time and penetrate deep into the soil layers with their roots. A growth with plants, for example in the form of a green manure not only causes the garden soil to be loosened, but also nutrients are prevented from being washed out and are shifted upwards from deeper layers of the soil. The soil surface is also protected from erosion.

The choice of plants is also important. First, the plant families should be in the crop rotation fit in the garden. You should also decide whether to use hardy or freezing species. It is often advisable to sow seed mixtures. This is because different plants root in certain layers of soil and mobilize different nutrients.

Deep-rooted plants that are good for loosening compacted soil are lupins (lupinus), oil radish (Raphanus sativus var. oleiformis), white Mustard (Sinapis alba) and red clover (Trifolium pratense). Grasses such as winter rye (Secale cereale) ensure finely crumbly, loosened topsoil in spring thanks to their good, intensive rooting.

In a separate article we have summarized further tips on how to improve soil be able.