Soil, Soil, Soil…

You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again — because it's true: the most important factor in growing healthy, vibrant flowers is your soil. It all begins there. Your soil is the foundation that supports your plants, providing the essential nutrients and structure they need to grow strong roots and produce beautiful blooms. Without healthy, well-balanced soil, even the best care and ideal conditions typically won't be enough to help your flowers thrive.

So how do you achieve healthy soil? The number one way is to add organic matter. If you’re growing flowers in a raised bed, that means adding compost to the top of your soil each season. If you’re setting up your raised bed for the first time, our favorite method for filling raised beds is the Hugelskulture Method (also known as lasagna gardening). This involves starting at the base with cardboard and then building layers on top of that with logs, branches, sticks, grass clippings, dead leaves, kitchen scraps, newspaper, mulch, etc, and then compost and top soil. Not only does this method cut down on costs of filling an entire bed with gardening soil, it creates a miniature biosphere. As all of the organic matter decomposes, it develops beneficial nutrients for your flowers and creates thriving, healthy soil.

While easiest to accomplish in raised beds, you can still amend your ground soil with this method. It starts out as a mound of materials that slowly breaks down over time, but can still grow perfectly healthy flowers. The best time to amend your ground soil is in the fall so that it has plenty of time to decompose over the winter, and any snow will keep it moist and covered.

Here in mid-Missouri, we have terrible clay soil (think the clay you used in ceramics class in highschool), so everything I grow is either in raised beds or in heavily amended soil that sits on top of the clay. I’ve certainly found success in growing my flowers from the ground, but the most healthy plants I’ve grown have been in my raised beds that were started with the Hugelskulture method, and every year, I add compost to the top of the bed at the end of the growing season.

We’d love to hear how these methods have worked for you or if you’ve found other alternatives and additives to help your soil in your growing zones in the comments!