Spadework: The Essential Soil (Vegetable Gardening)

Soil is the thin blanket that exists between sterile rock and the sky. Soil supports all life and is itself, in some measure, the product of living things. For all that, we often treat the soil like, literally, the dirt under our feet. We’ve developed this careless attitude partly because for generations soil has been dirt cheap. There was never any problem about having enough of it. This is no longer true; good soil is getting harder to find. You can no longer take it for granted that you’ll find good garden soil lying around in your backyard. If you live in a residential or industrial area, you can be pretty sure that after the developers left, not much good soil remained. It was probably removed and sold before the construction began, or buried under the excavation for the foundation of the new buildings.
Unless you’re a farmer or a commercial grower, chances are you simply lay out your garden in the most convenient spot and make the best of whatever soil happens to be there. But even if what happens to be there is less than ideal, there’s a lot you can do to turn it into a healthy, productive garden. Understanding soil and how plants grow in it will help you make the most of what you’ve got right there in your own yard.